Hacker News: sc11

New comment by sc11 in "Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach"

sc11 — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:45:09 +0000

In the context of age limits, that is wrong. The German eID has a zero knowledge method of proving that your age is above a certain number without revealing anything else. That method has been around for like 15 years and these days, thanks to smartphones with NFC readers, is quite user-friendly.

In practice it's basically not used anywhere except for cigarette vending machines because it's much simpler to hire some dubious third party "wave your ID in front of your camera" service

Edit: mandatory age verification is still an atrocious idea for a number of other reasons, just to be clear

New comment by sc11 in "Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year"

sc11 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 12:12:46 +0000

You're basically describing Volt Europa. They're having some success with that approach in Germany and the Netherlands, primarily at the municipality level

New comment by sc11 in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

sc11 — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:11:24 +0000

I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.

Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.

Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.

New comment by sc11 in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

sc11 — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:08:38 +0000

You can remove videos from your watch history and in my experience that does have an impact on the recommendations as it's not factored in anymore

New comment by sc11 in "German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph"

sc11 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:24:44 +0000

With the main difference being that you don't get an actually usable visual diff for free but instead have to buy those from third party vendors to make any use out of the manual diffs.

New comment by sc11 in "Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?"

sc11 — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:48:18 +0000

Matlab plays a sound on error by default (on some systems through the internal speaker, bypassing volume controls) and I always found it irritating.

The only use case I see for them is something running in the background that takes a while and might get interrupted.

New comment by sc11 in "We tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a 245k records data breach"

sc11 — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 14:42:49 +0000

Sure but assuming you're traveling from centre to centre, which is where population densities are highest, is a sound assumption. Otherwise you can always find spots where getting to the airport, train station, flixbus stop or whatever takes extremely long with one mode of transport over the other.

Doesn't distract from the point that long distances busses are very much not an alternative to rail (or planes for that matter) unless price is the deciding factor. And even the latter is questionable in many cases thanks to the 49€ ticket.

New comment by sc11 in "We tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a 245k records data breach"

sc11 — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 14:12:12 +0000

Even if you aren't at the airport that early, it still takes you an hour to get from the airport to the city centre in Berlin, and about half an hour to get to the airport from Cologne's city centre. That's by train, by car it takes even longer.

New comment by sc11 in "We tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a 245k records data breach"

sc11 — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 12:31:28 +0000

Let's see. Cologne to Berlin takes ~4:40 hours by train. Flixbus takes 9-10 hours, not counting the time it takes to get to their departure station which would involve a train journey as it's not actually in the city centre.

Flixbus is 50€ cheaper when traveling that route tomorrow but that's about all it has going for it.

New comment by sc11 in "The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer"

sc11 — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 22:36:09 +0000

It's used by lesbians just as often and giving vs receiving has nothing to do with fetishes. You can have the most vanilla sex imaginable and still have a top/bottom.

New comment by sc11 in "Emergency SOS via satellite is included for free with iPhone 14 Pro for 2 years"

sc11 — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 09:33:39 +0000

This isn't true everywhere. E.g. in the alps you might be billed for rescue, particularly if you're not injured or in a medical emergency. That said, SAR insurance is cheap. Many alpinist associations and the likes offer it as part of their membership, which is often less than 100€/yr. There's no reason not to have it if you're going out into the mountains.

New comment by sc11 in "Deutsche Bahn’s Meltdown and High-Speed Rail"

sc11 — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 09:33:40 +0000

> * An ICE every 30 Minutes (high frequency, not just high speed)

That's part of a long term infrastructure project dubbed "Deutschlandtakt": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandtakt

The current estimate is that the overall project will take until ~2040 (though I think we all know how that'll go) with ongoing improvements to frequency on individual lines.

New comment by sc11 in "New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cookie management providers"

sc11 — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:41:37 +0000

> In a sence it's also a move towards limiting user's freedom to chose where to store data, isn't it?

It's not, users can of course consent to data being stored elsewhere. The article explicitely points this out:

> Instead, the court took the approach that data could only be lawfully transferred to the U.S. via a mutual legal assistance treaty (Article 48 GDPR), or under Article 49 GDPR’s derogations, such as consent. It confined its lawfulness analysis to those grounds alone.

New comment by sc11 in "The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation"

sc11 — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:21:25 +0000

Do you mind sharing the Julia code? Seems odd that it's that far away from even Python.

New comment by sc11 in "Bank transfers as a payment method"

sc11 — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 13:16:25 +0000

True, that works as well.

Either way as a tenant it's best to do manual payments (even if they're automated on your end) each month so that lowering rent, if necessary, is straightforward.

New comment by sc11 in "Bank transfers as a payment method"

sc11 — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 12:30:54 +0000

> SEPA direct debit is a really really popular thing in Germany. Most utilities prefer (quite understandably) to pull from you instead of waiting for your transfer. Even landlords usually give you an agreement form to pull your rent out of your account.

Landlords benefit from it because it makes it harder for your to lower your rent in case there are issues with the place that warrant it. If they can withdraw the rent directly, you'd have to undo that payment, pay the lowered amount manually etc. which makes it more hassle for you and also increases the risk of screwing up.

New comment by sc11 in "New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance"

sc11 — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 12:01:31 +0000

It's on f-droid with reproducible builds.

Obviously there's a risk that the person scanning the QR code does shady things with it but it's rather unlikely the app itself will. It would be caught really quickly.

New comment by sc11 in "New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance"

sc11 — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 19:38:35 +0000

That's incorrect, the verification happens fully locally. The check app occasionally has to update trusted certificates but otherwise it runs locally. No personal data is sent to any kind of server.

New comment by sc11 in "The “Ultimate” ThinkPad (2020)"

sc11 — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 12:08:34 +0000

They originally put it there because it's easier to locate apparently:

> The Fn key was originally placed by the ThinkPad designers in the lower left hand corner to make the key easier to locate when using the keystroke combinations. There was a rationale. This is especially handy for turning on the ThinkLight in the dark. Aim for the two extreme corners.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111115202457/http://www.lenovo...

New comment by sc11 in "S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge from 'Squid Game'"

sc11 — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 11:23:31 +0000

On mobile it's very common to have data caps, so end users do pay for the bandwidth used by ads indirectly.