higerordermap (u/higerordermap)

higerordermap commented on Ask HN: What'd you do while HN was down? · Posted by u/quicksnap

A while back I changed my search engine's crawl data to be ZSTD compressed JSON. It's a bit finnicky to work with, but I'm beginning to realize just how powerful this is.

Could literally just do

  find -name \*.zstd -exec zstdcat {} \; |
    jq 'first(select(.doc|select(.!=null)|.[].headers|select(.!=null)|test("[xX]-[aA]dblock-[kK]ey")))'

and it spewed out samples of domains with a header like X-Adblock-Key. (I'm not great with JQ, so there's probably a better way of doing this, but this unga bunga approach works too)

Specifically, today I did some research on a few tags and headers supposedly associated with "Acceptable Ads" (a standard for showing ads through complicit adblockers), and ended up with a fairly reliable fingerprint for a network of domain squatters that have been a nuisance in my search engine database. Turns out they're basically the only ones that use the headers and tags I was looking at, so now I'm onto their IP-ranges as well.

higerordermap · 4 years ago

I don't have much context about your technical requirements but can I ask why JSON instead of a more indexable format?

higerordermap commented on Lessons learned from migrating a native iOS app to Flutter betterprogramming.pub/flu... · Posted by u/PanMan

zerr · 4 years ago

As a side note, for some reason, cross-platform frameworks such as Flutter are quite popular in developing countries.

higerordermap · 4 years ago

I am from India and pretty sure the reason here is it's much easier to make UIs in flutter than in Android native. Nothing specific to India being a developing country.

It's natural to see students using easier stuff as well. Most of student projects you come across is using react, flutter, firebase, MongoDB, as opposed to Angular/Vue, Android native/Jetpack, postgresql etc.. which have much higher barrier to entry.

But this may have to do with developing countries having more recent developers, and less established developers.

higerordermap commented on Ask HN: What's your ideal city in a 100% remote world? · Posted by u/alecbcs

crossroadsguy · 4 years ago

Same place where I am - Bangalore.

Weather is the best - warm but not hot, cool but not cold. No extremes.

People from every state of India. So great food. Culturally very diverse and really a melting pot. Good sports/fitness scene and culture. Safe.

Locals are mostly fine with outsiders. In fact that’s the economy here other than IT. English (more) and Hindi (less) are the connecting tongues. Local language is not forced other than some isolated incidents.

Decent amount of open space. Very easy and quick access to the hills. And in a way to the sea too, but drive is longer. Easy connectivity to everywhere by train, road, and air.

Decently open and alive dating scene, though it gets way too hard in 30s.

I had played with the idea of moving to a small town or a rural area or a quaint hill station but due to overall poor infrastructure in India those places easily get ruled out as candidates of a sustained working place.

You don’t want to have total lack of social life, patchy Internet, and very absence of even half decent medical facilities where you live for long. So you got to stick to major cities in India.

Other cities in India simply don’t have most of what Bangalore offers (except traffic is really bad here; and metro is designed to be useless; and political atmosphere is rapidly sliding to the extreme right but that’s the entire country). I tried living abroad, didn’t work for me. So Bangalore it is.

higerordermap · 4 years ago

Which areas in Bangalore are good from this perspective? (Cleanliness, environment, less populated, good infra)?

higerordermap commented on A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic lesswrong.com/posts/6miu9... · Posted by u/higerordermap

lowdose · 5 years ago

> It's lack of exercise”, they yell. But making people exercise doesn't seem to produce significant weight loss, and obesity is still spreading despite lots of money and effort being put into exercise.

Could this be explained by the weight gain in muscle?

higerordermap · 5 years ago

I guess first half can be while second half not.

higerordermap commented on A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressre... · Posted by u/hhs

JumpCrisscross · 5 years ago

Honest question: how do we fix this? The obvious solution, prosecuting academics, has an awful precedence attached to it.

higerordermap · 5 years ago

This is a recent HN thread and Post you might find interesting.

https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787745

Due to career and other reasons, there is a publish or perish crisis today.

Maybe we can do better by accepting not everyone can publish ground breaking results, and it's okay.

There are lots of incompetent people in academia, who later go to upper positions and decide your promotions by citation counts and how much papers you published. I have no realistic ideas how to counter this.

higerordermap commented on Google employees demand Palestine support in letter to CEO mashable.com/article/goog... · Posted by u/billyharris

trhway · 5 years ago

250 people risking their cushy jobs in a matter of people half-way across the globe - i think it is worthy of attention. And anyway, the extremes like visible activism is usually just a tip of the iceberg.

I don't envy Google leadership here, though they may have to partially blame themselves:

"This new internal political divide at Google sheds a spotlight on a long-standing diversity effort: designated employee resource groups (ERG) intended to celebrate employees with marginalized identities. But in today's climate, these groups may be sparking more political controversy than Google ever expected. "

I mean you start organize people around their ethnic/etc. identities, and as a result you may deepen the divides and raise the tensions. Reminds the situation of Indian caste system which was really formalized and strengthened by the British.

higerordermap · 5 years ago

British one was different. They recognized some castes as martial races etc.. but didn't do identity politics on them.

Whatever caste system is today there in India, it was before arrival of Europeans as well, but little more flexible compared to the strict categorisation they did.

higerordermap commented on Half a million lines of Go blog.khanacademy.org/half... · Posted by u/nickcw

zozbot234 · 5 years ago

Yup, Go is certainly easier to read than Python.

higerordermap · 5 years ago

It's mostly due to Go being statically typed and having good editor tooling IMO. Doesn't excuse other atrocities in its design.