Hacker News: guidovranken

New comment by guidovranken in "Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC"

guidovranken — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 21:20:38 +0000

> On several occasions between late March and early May 2020, before Twilio’s public earnings announcement, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam used internal chat channels to discuss in Telugu whether Twilio might exceed market expectations in its quarterly report of earnings, due in May 2020. They concluded that Twilio’s stock price would “rise for sure” after the quarterly results were announced publicly.

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-5...

I assume "internal chat channels" means the company Slack so this wasn't well planned at all. I wonder if they were even aware they were committing a felony at that stage.

New comment by guidovranken in "Tell HN: Google removes Russian news from results"

guidovranken — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 08:51:46 +0000

Read the books they want to ban. Thanks for the heads up.

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: What apps would you install if there was an extended internet outage?"

guidovranken — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 08:28:18 +0000

>HTTrack for any wiki I found useful.

On the Internet Archive you can also find many .warc files which are website backups that can be used for offline viewing.

New comment by guidovranken in "EU to Ban RT and Sputnik"

guidovranken — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 20:43:34 +0000

I agree and I don't care if it's RT or ISIS or China or the Westboro Baptist Church. But the past two years have made it clear that all those lofty, lapidary ideals upon which our so-called free societies are supposedly grounded can be disposed of without the slightest reluctance, so this is no surprise, certainly not from the EU, always busy banning, mandating, regulating and fining everything in its path.

Newly published 9/11 footage [video]

guidovranken — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 09:46:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6t31R4tI10

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30476396

Points: 257

# Comments: 103

New comment by guidovranken in "Tracker Music Documentary: Back to the BBS Episode 7"

guidovranken — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 20:12:56 +0000

Awesome, thanks for the heads up.

New comment by guidovranken in "[dead]"

guidovranken — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 08:31:56 +0000

HN employs algorithms to automatically downrank sensitive political topics (flamewar detector).

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: How big is your personal library?"

guidovranken — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 17:54:45 +0000

1000+ or so. I often visit thrift shops where books are extremely cheap and you find things you didn't know you were looking for. The nice thing about (older) books is that they comprise a whole world of information that's not available on the internet. By far not all books have been scanned, uploaded and indexed yet (if you spend a lot of time online, this is a little counter-intuitive) so in thrift shops and libraries you can make great serendipitous discoveries. I've run into amazing books of which there is barely even any online record, let alone a PDF or audiobook. Occasionally you can also find valuable things, like a rare book I bought for 1 EUR which I found went for about 400 EUR in an auction (I still have my copy). Highly recommended if you like books.

https://imgur.com/a/9ql1Ayb

New comment by guidovranken in "Don't use text pixelation to redact sensitive information"

guidovranken — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:55:44 +0000

  The bottom line is that when you need to redact text, use black bars covering the whole text. Never use anything else.

That actually may not be enough if you're applying the black bar to compressed image data like JPEG because compression artifacts surrounding the black bar can be leaking information about the covert data.

New comment by guidovranken in "Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Confirms Removal of Joe Rogan Episodes"

guidovranken — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:20:47 +0000

The COVID interviews are with highly credentialed professionals, and are quite reasonable, honest and nuanced, far more so than the insane corporate media 24/7 propaganda machine that relies on repetition and histrionics to get everyone's opinions aligned.

I suggest everyone with an open mind to listen to them, they're on Rumble and elsewhere.

New comment by guidovranken in "A decent validator for subtitle files (SRT, VTT, SBV, etc.)"

guidovranken — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 17:54:43 +0000

I'm clueless as to what this is supposed to do.

New comment by guidovranken in "Harmful messaging offences added to online safety bill"

guidovranken — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 09:41:48 +0000

These restrictions on speech seem well-intentioned but are of course another step in locking down the narrative.

  The government said the bill would not prohibit "misinformation" as long as those spreading it were unaware that what they were saying was false.

Laws like this one extinguish journalism (or what is left of it). Back in the day you could still counter the government narrative and claim Iraq didn't have WMD without legal repercussions (though it could get you killed [1]). With this, they'll arrest you on grounds of spreading harmful deboonked conspiracy theories. It's not hard to see that this is how it's going to play out.

With "misinformation" laws getting implemented amidst a wider trend of sanitizing the narrative, investigative journalism has now not merely fallen out of fashion, it has become illegal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

New comment by guidovranken in "Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes"

guidovranken — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 04:26:42 +0000

https://boards.4chan.org/t/thread/1047940

New comment by guidovranken in "Announcing GPT-NeoX-20B"

guidovranken — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 18:13:43 +0000

  GPT-NeoX-20B will be publicly downloadable from The Eye on the 9th of February.

The Eye as in the-eye.eu? That site has been down for a long time.

New comment by guidovranken in "Mozilla Rally"

guidovranken — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 18:56:06 +0000

Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support, experiment with new revenue models and unlike Mitchell "we need more than deplatforming" Baker, Eich actually seems to have the visceral inclination for the things that Mozilla claims to stand for.

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: Why are we so at the mercy of Google and Mozilla for web browsers?"

guidovranken — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 19:13:59 +0000

Developing a modern feature-rich browser is a gargantuan task and you need many skilled (expensive) developers to work on it; easily millions of USD yearly in salaries alone. Some donations here and there won't cut it, you basically need FAANG money to do it. Additionally, at least the last time I checked, Mozilla has made it impossible to donate to Firefox development; donations go to their activism branch, not browser dev [1]. In 2020 they also fired 25% of their work force [2]. They'll probably sunset the product altogether within a few years and that leaves us with an ever-greater market share of Chrome and derivatives, and from here on out it's hard to conceive of a viable strategy to develop an independent browser. Maybe a government or EU could do it, but that comes with its own set of problems.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: What are the technologies that look like toys today but will be huge?"

guidovranken — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 23:52:44 +0000

QR codes.

New comment by guidovranken in "Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for unemployment benefits (Canada)"

guidovranken — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 14:58:56 +0000

In other festive COVID news from Canada:

>Canada's Justin Trudeau on the unvaccinated:

>“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"

https://twitter.com/KevinBardosh/status/1476838517007257600

My patience with COVID cultists is starting to run quite thin.

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: What are you predictions for 2022?"

guidovranken — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 14:36:46 +0000

The trifecta government-media-big business now have optimally aligned incentives to not relinquish this historical golden goose of power and money. Add to that the cultural component of ostracizing anyone who goes against the narrative and record investments in FAANG and pharma as a means to ease money devaluation caused by runaway printing, and you end up with a colossal gridlock of incentives that is not going to resolve itself, at the severe and permanent detriment of the middle classes and personal freedoms, with oligarchy emerging as the victor.

New comment by guidovranken in "Ask HN: What are you predictions for 2022?"

guidovranken — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 03:31:27 +0000

A lot of comments are optimistic about COVID-related measures relaxing, and I'm confidently predicting that in 2022 they will be proven wrong again.