A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".
I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.
It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..
I used BareMetal and Pure64 as a source of inspiration and knowledge while writing an OS as a student. It is simple and well written.
I miss the days of reading AMD64 manuals and directly interacting with my hardware through assembly, and I want to get back to it.
What would be a good entry-point to OS development nowadays?
I have the "FYSOS: The System Core" by Benjamin David Lunt. While I love the series, I wonder what other alternatives there are, perhaps supporting ARM?
I particularly like the mit 6.S081 operating systems course [1].
The course has you make useful extensions to a reimplementation of the XV6 kernel in RISC-V.
This course really helped me start to understand how an OS works and what the hardware software interface really is.
[1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2020/ — linking to the 2020 class because all of the lectures were uploaded to YouTube to accommodate remote work during the thick of Covid.
Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.
I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.
Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...
I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person.
Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.
At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.
"I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server."
This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you.
Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history.
On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.
Every user needing a server to run a caching daemon 24/7 is not even within the bounds of "solved" for me. I acknowledge it "works", and have used it myself for years, but it's like saying "of course the local newspaper has archives! We all just hire our own PAs to buy and store a copy every day!"
It's a solved problem in the sense of how to change the oil in your car is a solved problem. You can learn how to do it and do it yourself with equipment that already exists. You don't need to design or build anything yourself, but use existing components.
Now, most people might not have any interest in learning how to change the oil in their cars, and don't want to bother even if they have the knowledge. They prefer to hire someone else to do it for them.
So it is with Discord, where you "pay" for the service by giving Discord your data and handing over control over your communities to them.
There used to be a great android app called Irssi-Connectbot (which was a slightly modified Connectbot app, which was an SSH client. You could set it up for automatic running of commands upon connection (ie, "screen -d -r"), and it featured the ability to use gestures to do some basic things to avoid typing out commands, like swipe left or right to move between windows.
It does appear to be discontinued at this point, but I do believe I've seen other ssh clients that do support the swipe at this point. I must confess though my use of IRC on the phone has always been relatively limited -- chatting in general on a phone is tiresome. Even SMS I do more in a browser these days on my desktop.
I have been writing a journal for about 6 years now. I usually write 3 entries a week spanning from a few sentences to hundreds of words.
Personally, I feel there are many benefits to it, mainly:
1. It gives me time to think, to process my thoughts, explore ideas, and handle emotions. I often learn a lot about myself, what I did well, and how I can improve.
2. It is a great way to preserve memories. Only after I started writing my journal did I realize how much I forget about my past. I've always taken photos throughout my life, but those only capture a very small part of my life. My worries, the music I listened to, the TV-series I raved about, my dreams, my thoughts on the books I've read, the deep talks with my friends, are all preserved in my journal. It is easy to remember your vacations to exotic locations, but do you remember your everyday life from years back?
3. It can be meditative. It feels great to be able to sit for up to an hour and write without any barriers. I don't have to stress about my writing style, the words I use, embarrassing stuff about myself. I truly feel I can express myself to the fullest.
I'm really happy that I decided to write my journal in Markdown. This format can be opened pretty much everywhere, even on my phone or my moms computer. Furthermore, it enables me to do some crude formatting for code, create headings, and even attach images. And since it is digital, I can search in it pretty easily.
Could you elaborate on where exactly you save or store your entries to make them universally accessible? For instance, do you use a specific application or cloud storage service?
I use Nextcloud hosted on Hetzner. It is pretty cheap and supports almost all systems I can think of. It feels a bit sluggish at times (slow sync, apps can be buggy), but I'm pretty happy with it.
Oh and the mobile app has a decent editor for text / markdown files :)
I am incredibly annoyed by slow websites. I noticed that I have started using my browser in a very asynchronous way where I open multiple tabs, do a single action, and move to the next one. When I get to my last tab, the first is hopefully ready.
For instance, on GCP, I:
0. Open 2 tabs for a 2 google cloud instance
1. For each tab, I click on the action I want. E.g Logs, deployment, and networking.
2. Then, for each tab again, I click on the nested action I want
3. Repeat step 2
It might sound like a lot, but each click easily takes 5-10 seconds, which is an excruciatingly long time if you spend a lot of day on that site -- and yes, it takes just as long doing it sequentially. Furthermore, I usually use fairly capable machines, so performance should not be an issue IMHO.
It does not happen on all sites, and I know GCP is a very complex site, but it happens often enough that it has become a habbit to me.
I love sites like Wikipedia or HN where everything is snappy.
If this really lets me block certain websites for good, then I'm sold.
I absolutely hate those sites that scrape other well-known sites (like StackOverflow, Quora, Reddit) and add ads and SEO spam. They are increasingly better at being on the top of the search results, and I cannot get rid of them.
I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun.
I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct.
I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.
> I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.
I have this style dream as well. It’s not always a nightmare but it’s trying to type something on a phone and it just never working, like wanting to show someone a video in YT and just not being able to get it right.
I have actually been able to use this as a cue to start lucid dreaming i.e. when it starts happening I know I am dreaming and can start taking control of the dream world.
Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order.
I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...
A few times I found it was easier to cancel a card than to cancel a subscription.
I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment they like, there is even no durable record of them having these details.
You hand that info to the merchant because your credit card company can issue chargebacks against them and that costs them a pretty penny with their payment processor, especially if it happens often. Credit card disputes almost always slant in favor of the customer.
Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.
I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and offered cash.
He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.
I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.
I believe this doesn't work with debit cards, which are the norm in Europe.
Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice).
> Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it
A peeve of mine is that the trust-until-a-screwup system is used in far more critical places than with a credit card. For instance, "DOT certification" of tires has no paper trail until people die.
If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). This usually only happens if the police are reporting on a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that this option exists nor how to report it. If enough reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the testing done and pay some fines.
Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business (read: have changed business names) far before this critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that any reports were filed at all.
Living in the US, with some of the worst banking infrastructure in the world, my debit card has an app that allows me to instantly lock/unlock the card, set spending limits, category limits, and even to deny a transaction if my phone isn't geolocated close to the transaction point.
I get a nearly instant alert, sometimes before the payment terminal has displayed "accepted", that there's been a charge on my card.
Also, at least in the US, debit cards have similar fraud rules to credit cards (ie you can chargeback) but the time period is much, much smaller. A week, I think.
I strongly urge you to not use your debit card and use a credit card wherever possible. Aside from better protection, any fraud or mistakes are not involving real money, but credit.
Disputes are enforced by Visa and Mastercard rules and apply to debit & credit cards equally. Some countries may have some extra legal protections for credit cards, but for clear examples of merchant bad faith the card network's dispute resolution process should be enough.
I also wouldn't call debit cards "the norm". They are in majority (1 to 5?), true, maybe also because many are issued for free by the bank where you have the account (which doesn't mean they are also used). But still not really "the norm".
I had to resort to cancelling a card once too, but it didn’t fix the problem. My Credit Card Provider (Barclaycard) implemented the Visa Account Updater service with no way to turn it off so my new card details went straight to the merchant.
Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.
Typically you can call your bank and ask them to block transactions from a particular merchant that you have an issue with, I have done that before, once on credit card and once on a current account.
I once had a paper/digital subscription, and at some point I had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and attempted to send this to collections.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.
Those are not universal terms, and are actually defined in the contract which you seem to have not read. Grace periods, minimum commitments, subscription lengths, and/or post-paid terms are all common.
Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.
I'm not sure why is this outrageous. You had a contract with NYT so they deliver you the newspaper for a payment, contract which you didn't even try to cancel. This is how contracts work.
That's better, agreed. But can I e.g. limit payment amounts on these?
On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it irks me.
In a way, it's even better than credit card: You can not set a limit - except contractually, but you can enforce it. You can do the charge-back yourself (via the Bank's website) within like 6 or 9 months of the transaction.
This will cost the vendor a lot (relatively speaking) money and is pretty easy to do. However, if there is any doubt about who is right, an action like that will lead them to invoice you all associated costs, send it to collections and then a legal fight begins.
Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other payment processors. You login with your bank account and then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the money. Then, no chargebacks are possible.
I haven't seen an option to set a payment limit, but all banks give you the ability to cancel a direct debit authorisation at any time. For that reason alone I'd say it's always better to use direct debit than give a merchant your credit/debit card for subscription services.
In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months that her gym was still charging her even after she'd cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim back all the extra payments!
>I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).
That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.
Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.
This isn't "Europe", it's Germany. Germany is still well known for using fax for government and corporate communication, and there was heavy criticism for how the Covid pandemic was initially handled because faxing records was so common which meant they could not be easily digitized, collected and searched.
In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a physical paper with your signature on it (I've heard this happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which is digital.[1]
I had this same issue with a number of French companies. Couldn't figure out why they weren't cancelling my contract despite repeated letters until someone told me you have to send the letter with proof of receipt otherwise they just ignore it.
This is not all of Europe, though Germany is known for this shenanigans (but on the other hand this gives you a confirmation of when you cancelled it if you send it Advice of Receipt)
That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via the same means as you signed up. So if you can signup online then you must be able to cancel online.
It probably depends on which country is handling your subscription. With a German address, they don't have to consider any request in any language other than German.
A recently passed German law requires (among other changes) an online cancel button, however companies don't have to implement it until July 2022 unfortunately.
It sure as hell doesn't work like this for the newspaper Le Monde (in France). Sure you can sign/resign with Apple/Google but if you sign with e-mail, you have to mail a physical letter to resign (8Euros one with proof of delivery and all)
Here is the Dutch implementation, because it's the first I could find in English: https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal-subscri... As is says there "Consumers must be able to cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they signed up for them."
There are 3 ways to cancel an O2 contract - (1) Online intimation + phone call, (2) Letter or (3) Fax [0]. Most routers (like Fritzbox) come with a fax function which you send an online fax [1]. O2 charges a maximum of 0.14 cents per fax page or free based on your DSL plan. Alternatively, you can also send a physical letter online (0.70 cents) [2].
Your comment below says that there is no receipt for confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states that "o2 should send you a written confirmation of cancellation". It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that happened to you!
Don't get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there has been a change in law that forces providers to extend contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years.
Faxes aren't that big either. I never liked them, never owned one, and I remember sending two faxes in my life. Maybe a few I don't remember. The last one was... to cancel a mobile phone contract.
You shouldn't say this to people like it's some obvious truth. There are many cases in which this action will land you in trouble due to it not being a legally valid termination of the contract (which of course may be different by country -- it's very common that cancelling requires an actual message to the other party).
One specific example is if your contract has a termination period, which is pretty common, at least in my part of Europe. If you simply stop paying, you are denying the other party N months of revenue (your cancellation period) that you are contractually obliged to pay. You are now defaulting on your payments and will likely pay additional fees.
This makes sense if the contract indeed has a minimum commitment that hasn't been reached.
But if the contract has no minimum term (or it has since passed) and you've made a reasonable effort to attempt to cancel with no success, it'll now be on them to recover the money through legal means which would require them to explain to the court why your cancellation attempt was ignored, demonstrating their bad faith in the process. That's not something they want to do.
The point of my comment was "this is not good general advice". The point of your comment seems to be "it can be good advice in some cases", which makes no sense to me. Obviously it can be good advice in that exact case where it makes sense, but it's not good general advice.
I'd argue it's good enough general advice and would apply to most online subscriptions as they typically have no minimum commitment. The ones with a minimum commitment would be the outliers and would require special treatment.
I agree with your point that you could get into trouble for violating your contract terms. I perhaps should have mentioned specifically about NYTimes which seem to have designed around people blocking the payments to cancel their subscription.
I had to do exactly that with o2 Germany. They continued to charge me after the contract expired. And they even tried to charge for the router that I actually sent back.
This was the whole issue though. I closed my bank account and moved country, and they delayed cancelling it and then chased me up on one month's payments for years - when I had no easy way of making payments in Germany.
In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros!
In The Netherlands there are companies that will fill in, print, and send cancellation letters for you as a service. They rank very high in Google search.
Cancellation by mail is always fine, no company can opt out of it in a legal way. You don't even need to get the address right, you can mail it to any subsidiary of the company - it is the companys responsibility to correctly route it internally. You can even directly address it to the CEO and at "persönlich" to it. My favorite.
In theory yes, in practice I had multiple disputes over contract termination and in 100% of those cases the counterparty with happy with the photo. And also compare it to any "phone calls" where you basically have nothing as a proof (dunno about your jurisdiction, but in Germany it is illegal to record phone calls without prior consent and also would require technical means to do so).
Also, if you ever worked in a large corporation, they have a lot of means to track incoming mail ("Posteingangsbuch") and for an enterprise to try to pretend not to have received a letter would require maldoing by a lot of employees (who usually are not commited to giving false statements in court for their employer).
This is true for traditional "contracts", e.g. phone, apartments, gyms, etc, but these generally also involve paperwork when signing up (though in some of these cases you can sign up online and then have the confirmation mailed to you).
This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I'm pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn't amuse German consumer protection agencies.
There are third party services that handle cancellation (e.g. Aboalarm) that are more reliable, and don't require any more time. I honestly just have an online fax account where I can upload a PDF to send a fax for like 20 cents, and that almost always works. It's still a dark pattern though.
I used online chat to do it. It took several attempts to get connected. They offered me a really good deal to stay but I declined on principle because I don't want to support such practices.
There are currently two ways to sign up for the New York times online, one is via the website and the other is via a subscription from the various app stores(an in-app-purchase).
To unsubscribe from the website-based subscription requires a call to NYT’s customer service based in New York which have limited operating hours- here they’ll try their best to convince you not to unsubscribe after waiting in a phone queue.
However if you chose to subscribe through an IAP then you simply browse to your active subscriptions and press a button - far simpler and on par with how easy it was to sign up.
Making subscriptions difficult to cancel is not new in any industry, NYT’s behaviour here isn’t unique, or even the worst example. I use it as a demonstration that even reputable companies use these tactics.
This is one of the reasons why certain businesses loathe IAPs, (regardless of the cost). When providing your details to a business there is a lot of added potential for lock in, follow-on marketing, increasing the cost at irregular intervals and selling your information to 3rd parties.
I say "regardless of the cost" because many types of digital goods have minimal costs to provide them. For example a 15% or 30% cut of such purchases is negligible when selling an in-game currency because there is no genuine cost for providing that currency. Even if the app store charged 0% instead of the 15% or 30%, the business would still be missing out on using your personal details for all of the other valuable ways they can extract money from you/your data.
To use Amazon as an example - I receive extreme levels of spam for the custom email address that I use with Amazon, many vendors I have purchased from have immediately on sold my contact information.
Thanks, it hadn't occurred to me that the app stores would enforce easy cancellation. I'll remember to prefer in-app sign up over website for any new subscriptions in future.
It’s best to check both options before proceeding, as some businesses do offer a cheaper subscription service when working directly - however as mentioned that may come with strings attached.
I feel the success of small developers relies on IAP, it means I can purchase from them without needing to trust them - the app stores do a good job of reviewing the app for malware and if the app doesn’t live up to expectations it is trivial to get a refund from the various app stores.
Had a similar issue with a US publication recently. They emailed to say "Your subscription of $120 has automatically been renewed, please check your card details or contact us to alter it."
Fortunately the card they have expired last December.
I had that exprience with the NYT - I had to time my call right to hit the office hours on the US east coast.
That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Tip: when you’re ready to cancel, change the physical address in your account to one in California. Magically, a cancel button appears (to comply with California law).
I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to something obscene.
I immediately instructed my bank to block the upcoming payments and on the renewal day the subscription was cancelled. This is pretty much a flow of their cancellation.
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Remote: Some days of the week
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, C/C++, C#, SQL, Django, Docker, Git, Linux, ML (Keras + TensorFlow)
Résumé/CV: https://nx2098.your-storageshare.de/s/sYF85cyaixR9Bb9
Email: jan~at~meznik.dk
Graduated with a MSc in computer science back in 2019. I have a passion for the scientific part of software engineering, I like to learn new programming languages and technologies, and I am very interested in low-level programming.
I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.
It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..