Hacker News: manicdee

New comment by manicdee in "Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough"

manicdee — Sat, 04 May 2024 13:36:52 +0000

I wonder if the actual issues with this rice are similar to the miracle rice programs of the '70s where western aid programs introduced commercial strains of rice to traditional farmers in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries. These strains promised higher yield but at the cost of buying in commercial fertilisers and herbicides. The side effect of higher rice yield was disappearance of fish and companion/accidental crops that would typically grow in the rice paddies, along with poisoning of rivers downstream due to excess nutrients from fertilised rice paddies.

New comment by manicdee in "Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation"

manicdee — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 02:26:06 +0000

- Patreon if what you're doing lends itself to regular updates - PayPal or other payment processor if your project could use donations - Subscription based Server As A Service for things that need data syncing between multiple platforms (eg: the public/client parts can be Free Software, the server part just exposes an API, and you make it clear what data is transmitted to the server remaining solely on the user's device) - Consultancy to assist with installation/training if your product is complex

New comment by manicdee in "Fragmented thinking is a bigger threat to flow state than interruptions"

manicdee — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 22:26:29 +0000

Ha ha yeah. Let me just remove all that childhood trauma and PTSD, then we'll get this train of thought right back on track. Why didn't I think of that sooner?

New comment by manicdee in "Passkeys: A shattered dream"

manicdee — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 01:17:38 +0000

The attacker could pretend to be the service the user is trying to authenticate to, issue a bogus challenge signed with the user's public key. That will allow intercepting the user's interactions but by this time the attacker has control over the target system so why not just take what is inside rather than go to the effort of interacting with the user?

New comment by manicdee in "Court upholds New York law that says ISPs must offer $15 broadband"

manicdee — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:01:20 +0000

There's no reason to believe that commercial entities would be any less likely to spy on you than a government entity. The government can just pass security regulations that require access to infrastructure with gag orders in place so the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to talk about government access requests or actions.

The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.

As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?

New comment by manicdee in "Open Letter from Security Researchers in Relation to the Online Safety Bill [pdf]"

manicdee — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 20:06:34 +0000

You asked about why they have that opinion. They provided a link which covers the reasons they have the opinion they have.

New comment by manicdee in "Major Louisiana DMV Hack"

manicdee — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 05:32:11 +0000

At least this wasn't the "who has registered with porn sites" database.

New comment by manicdee in "Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"

manicdee — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 04:56:30 +0000

A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It's dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -> person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -> inbox filled with more and more whining.

New comment by manicdee in "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources"

manicdee — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:40:28 +0000

> If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.

Not at all. The chances are that if it was a lab leak the people involved had no idea the leak happened at all. That's how lab leaks work: people make mistakes and inadvertently leak stuff from the lab. eg: Karen Wetterhahn vs lead

What you're talking about is a deliberate release from a lab, which would have eyewitnesses because they know what is happening and see it happening and can corroborate the reports of other witnesses. eg: Thomas Midgley Jr vs lead

New comment by manicdee in "The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends"

manicdee — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 06:13:34 +0000

Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.

New comment by manicdee in "Reddit.com appears to be having an outage"

manicdee — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 21:27:55 +0000

The context is discussion of social media platforms where the platform already owns all the content and has the tools to decide what gets published and what doesn't.

New comment by manicdee in "Reddit.com appears to be having an outage"

manicdee — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 21:22:13 +0000

It's a counter-protest by white male supremacists ("neo-nazis"/Proud Boys) who believe that diversity and equality diminish them. It's a parody of Pride Month.

New comment by manicdee in "Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout"

manicdee — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:54:12 +0000

Blame the user makes sense because they don't want to show how fragile Reddit is while they're trying to attract investors for the IPO.

New comment by manicdee in "The continuing tragedy of CSS"

manicdee — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:51:25 +0000

The more realistic explanation is that the toolbar takes up space and every pixel has value on smaller screens. Moving the toolbar out of the way when the user is not likely to be using tools makes sense when understanding the web from the perspective of someone reading articles.

This behaviour is hostile to developers, not users. A more cynical commenter might suggest that you're the one engaging in user-hostile behaviour with hovering elements and overlays.

New comment by manicdee in "Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed"

manicdee — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:42:52 +0000

Falsehoods like this spreading through populations that consider themselves technically literate is one reason the NIST standard requires absolute destruction.

There are methods available that will allow recovery of second, third or even fourth generation data to be recovered from magnetic disks. Writing /dev/zero "over" an SSD won't necessarily accomplish what you expect either.

New comment by manicdee in "GM to use Tesla charging network, joining Ford"

manicdee — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 09:44:40 +0000

But these are physically locked to the supercharger. The original comment was claiming a vendor lock-in for the Combo 1 to NACS adaptor that Ford and GM would be providing.

New comment by manicdee in "GM to use Tesla charging network, joining Ford"

manicdee — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 09:40:16 +0000

That's related to HDCP rather than HDMI. Though it does mean that any video you move to a non-HDCP monitor ends up being just a grey rectangle.

New comment by manicdee in "Notes on Vision Pro"

manicdee — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:10:41 +0000

More like "we're not really listening to music on our phones for free". These days everything is a subscription. Then games are released where every cosmetic change is paid for, so you can be max level with the best gear but you'll still look like a beginner character because you haven't paid for the cosmetic upgrades to go along with the extra gear you won along the way.

Change the wallpaper in your virtual apartment, huh? You'll absolutely be paying for that. Some people will save money by just coping with the walls being non-stop ads for anti-depressants and pills for erectile dysfunction. Perhaps they'll take their headset off and do everything through command lines. Pity if the headset eventually evolves into implants that pump images and sounds directly into your brain.

New comment by manicdee in "The Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw over Silicon Valley Bank"

manicdee — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:44:11 +0000

The obvious chain of events is payments not being processed, Thiel gets on the blower, receives inside information which causes him concern, removes his money while he still can.

To me as a low information armchair expert it seems bizarre that Thiel could move money out while SVB was having trouble moving money at all.

New comment by manicdee in "Homelessness is primarily a housing problem"

manicdee — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 14:34:37 +0000

You say “trailer parks” I say “affordable housing”. Affordable housing solutions like dorms and bedsit apartment blocks aren’t feasible in many places like the USA where it’s literally illegal to build anything other than high rise apartments or standalone homes.