professorsnep's comments

professorsnep | 1 year ago | on: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

I run a Mediawiki instance for an online community on a fairly cheap box (not a ton of traffic) but had a few instances of AI bots like Amazon's crawling a lot of expensive API pages thousands of times an hour (despite robots.txt preventing those). Turned on Cloudflare's bot blocking and 50% of total traffic instantly went away. Even now, blocked bot requests make up 25% of total requests to the site. Without blocking I would have needed to upgrade quite a bit or play a tiring game of whack a mole blocking any new IP ranges for the dozens of bots.

professorsnep | 2 years ago | on: HTML First

For personal projects I usually use Astro[1] solely because 90% of the stuff I am making doesn't require anything more than basic HTML/CSS and maybe a couple static components, but I also have the flexibility to add SSR rendering or even more dynamic components like Svelte without making an entirely new project.

[1]: https://docs.astro.build/

professorsnep | 2 years ago | on: NY Senate introduces bill to mandate open API access for social media platforms

Discord has one of the better APIs out there for social media, and is definitely free of charge.

professorsnep | 2 years ago | on: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

If you click on the three-dot menu, there's a small caret button you have to click to show more of the pill buttons at the top, and one of them is "Cached". It feels like every time I need to use that button it's moved somewhere new.

professorsnep | 2 years ago | on: GCP automatically lowered our quota, caused an incident, and refused to upgrade

GCE allows one e2.micro instance in their free tier

professorsnep | 2 years ago | on: Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature

On the contrary, I'm a user of social media for exactly that purpose. When I use Twitter or Instagram, I'm specifically using it for the natural discoverability it offers. Almost half of the people I follow on Twitter are people I never would have known existed if I didn't see them pop up in my feed one day.

It's why I can never get into stuff like Mastodon or Misskey with how they are today, it's extremely difficult to just naturally find people to follow.

professorsnep | 3 years ago | on: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion

I tend to use the argument, "if we stopped developing technology because it threatened some people's livelihoods, a 'calculator' would still refer to a person."

professorsnep | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Non-violent video games with great stories?

Bit late but:

To The Moon (and the subsequent A Bird Story, Finding Paradise, and Imposter Factory): Wonderful series of games that focuses on narrative. Amazing soundtrack and good recurring cast of characters.

Firewatch: Beautiful game set in the wilderness with pretty much your only interactions being over the radio with your boss who you never meet face to face. Focuses on the relationship with your boss and the theme of escapism.

Heaven's Vault: Great game that focuses on exploration and discovery. It shines with the small, focused stories you'll run into on different planets while piecing together an ancient language and the mysteries of the universe.

professorsnep | 3 years ago | on: Unix command line conventions over time

ffmpeg too! Been doing a lot with it lately and I barely even feel like I have scratched the service of the ffmpeg argument science.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Let's Settle This

I really don't like any argument for how to pronounce ".gif", so I pronounce it in as many ways as possible to try to annoy people.

Here's a wonderful video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

Also in the US, and decided to try out UberEats one day because my friend had a pretty good referral code deal. Opened the website, set up my order, but the checkout button was just greyed out with no error message. Figuring it was a browser issue as I run Firefox and many companies don't give a shit, I tried it on Edge, but it still didn't work. I ended up needing to download their stupid app just to place the order, and uninstalled it right after.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password

I've been doing the catch-all signup for over a decade myself and haven't had any issues. What service checks stuff like that?

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Finger counting gives away your nationality

I assume holding index and middle fingers up. With the German way of counting, usually the thumb would be up as well, meaning 3, so it's easily mistaken as a 3 despite only having two fingers up.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: App store payments will have increased competition

Enemy diversity is just part of another big issue for me: General gameplay diversity. Most of the stuff the game has you do outside of story content is just fighting the same enemies or boss types. There's no unique dungeons or bosses, the "domains" you need to farm for gear are all just waves of enemies, daily quests are just killing enemies, etc. There's rarely any unique mechanics or novel ideas that actually change the way you play, which makes the game get stale fast.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

I use toggle mute a lot in Discord, especially on devices where I don't use a mic with a hardware mute, but Teams does not, as far as I have checked, have a customizable keybind for toggle mute that doesn't require you to have the application focused. Which is really annoying, especially when in a meeting and getting asked a question while in another window.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

Absolutely - And we already have this in the form of e.g. TV commercials, and, more recently, youtube sponsored segments. I vastly prefer getting ads relevant to what I'm currently looking at to something entirely different based on what The Algorithms decided I wanted to see.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: What's in email tracking links and pixels?

I just had to deal with an annoying tracking link to unsubscribe from an unsolicited mailing list. uBlock even blocked the link click, I had to temporarily allow the tracker to unsubscribe.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Any amount of alcohol consumption harmful to the brain, finds study

> The study, which is still to be peer-reviewed, suggests...

I'd take this with a grain of salt for now

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: Show HN: CS Weapons – Counter-Strike weapon data comparison app

Really well done! Playing around with it a little, the only thing I noticed was it was difficult to see which color meant "better" when comparing values. Maybe add a little checkmark or something if one stat is higher?

Other than that, I love how you don't just compare raw values, but have the ability to select armor/range/etc. That's something I see missing in a lot of similar "comparison" applications.

professorsnep | 4 years ago | on: MH370 pilot made many turns and speed changes, new report reveals

From what I understand, the theory is that the route was specifically designed so that nobody would have known where it went. No evidence, no crime. By just nose-diving, it makes it easier to find that evidence (like the black boxes).

At the time, not a lot of pilots knew about the feature of the satellite communication unit that would allow investigators to estimate a track over the southern Indian Ocean. Without that, nobody would have known where the plane went after it left military radar range.