Hacker News Reader

BenjiWiebeon The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)

Sometime when you don't need it, pick up a box of whichever kind of sudafed you need to have a stock of both extended/regular.

BenjiWiebeon Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

Yep. If I take someone's credit card, I can use it all I want, until either 1) they notice and cancel the card, or 2) I trip the fraud protection with unusual spending patterns.

BenjiWiebeon Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

In our case, we're a small business, and we don't do email marketing. So I'd say that anything of ours that gets dropped by Outlook isn't trash. The only non-hand-typed email we send are transactional - actually transactional as in "here's your invoice" or "here's you're tracking number".

You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!

BenjiWiebeon I hate soldering

Yes I've only used the one that came with my Hakko soldering iron, and I just got a replacement from Hakko since my old one is getting pretty full of solder bits.

The tip on my soldering iron is perfectly fine though.

BenjiWiebeon I hate soldering

Why not use brass wool? I've used it for a long time and not noticed any problems. My soldering iron tip looks and works great.

BenjiWiebeon I hate soldering

Don't know - we also don't pronounce plenty of other letters too. Plumbing is plumming not plum-bing.

Also apparently the word solder comes from Middle English 'soudure' which doesn't even have an L in it.

BenjiWiebeon I hate soldering

Did you know that "real" Parmesan cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano) is made in copper vats?

And copper plumbing is super common for potable water?

And plenty of spirits are distilled in copper stills?

I mean, encouraging handwashing is fine but copper isn't what you need to worry about.

BenjiWiebeon Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

Maybe they could announce a pricing increase for a somewhat distant future date.

Maybe $1/month starting in 2 years, then increasing to $2/month for the next year, $3/month for the next, on until they feel they're covering costs.

That way it gives people time to look for alternative free providers, or time to get used to the idea of paying for email.

BenjiWiebeon Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

Exactly. Outlook is the main source of deliverability headaches.

BenjiWiebeon My first in-prod corrupted hard drive problem

Next time you have a disk where you need to do repeated dd runs over different ranges, or suspect that you might need to, use ddrescue. It tracks which sectors have been recovered (and has lots of useful options).

You can also get 'partclone' to generate a list (in ddrescue format) of sectors containing data, so you don't need to try to read unused areas of the disk. For the partclone trick to work, the FS does need to be at least somewhat readable.

BenjiWiebeon Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

And by the way - I did finally order a Klein bottle shortly after reading this post.

BenjiWiebeon Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

I'd argue that age isn't even relevant. I'd say that there's a significant overlap between readers of "The Cuckoo's Egg" and HN folk, whether young or old.

I read it in my early teens.

BenjiWiebeon Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

It likely will. Those of us who want a Klein bottle but haven't yet ordered one are reminded of mortality, procrastination, and missed chances.

BenjiWiebeon SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format

At least with SQLite, it is really stable so if development did cease, you'd probably be fine indefinitely.

BenjiWiebeon SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format

We use a cheap invoicing program. It works fine except it gets very slow when dealing with large numbers if invoices. Turns out each invoice (or payment record, or customer record, or whatever) is a separate text file with form-urlencoded data. No indices.

BenjiWiebeon Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/openclaw/openlcaw/g' {} +

Fine.

BenjiWiebeon Facebook Has a Health Scam Problem

Obviously not, because big oil and the government would do away with the inventor and prevent the press from publishing about it.

BenjiWiebeon Waymo in Portland

The version I've heard: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa; not like Grandma, who died screaming "Look out for that car!"

BenjiWiebeon Can You Find the Comet?

What? The atmosphere gets in the way. Ever heard of an (amateur/)astronomer talking about 'good seeing'? That's when the atmosphere is hindering you less than usual.

The limiting factor of passive optical telescopes on earth is the atmosphere.

BenjiWiebeon New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

Well with the move to SSD's, it added two syllables.

Maybe external solid state drive is just too long and it finally had to be sortened somehow.

BenjiWiebeon Your hex editor should color-code bytes

If it's a CSPRNG, and decent encryption, they'll be indistinguishable from random noise.

BenjiWiebeon Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed

Is there proof that the positive effects are still there after you're hooked? Or are the "positive effects" at that point just a cessation of the negative effects of withdrawal?

BenjiWiebeon Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed

It impacts first responders. Not only is it bad to respond to an accident with a fatality, it's worse if you can see the would've likely been fine had they worn a seat belt.

BenjiWiebeon All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027

*charge port flap

BenjiWiebeon Reminder: Enable ZRAM on your Linux system to optimize RAM usage

'Swapping' to ZRAM is far less painful than actual disk-backed swap. Sometimes I start wondering why the computer is a bit sluggish, and find that I've got several GB in ZRAM.

BenjiWiebeon NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

Why do you need to wait for it to stabilize? You can keep changing the voltage at one end of the connection even if you have megabits of data currently in transit, without waiting for it to stabilize. Yes, you'll need to do impedance matching. Yes, that's a solved problem. Transmission lines.

BenjiWiebeon FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

Microsoft is the worst. I think our emails usually go through to them now, but they've been blocking our emails when no one else was.

BenjiWiebeon FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

The from address can be faked, but then due to SPF/DKIM it will likely be flagged as spam or not delivered.

BenjiWiebeon Claude Opus 4.7

You can take a mattress up an elevator though (1). Some couches might fit in some elevators.

1: source: me...

BenjiWiebeon What Is in Road Flares?

Red rocket engine flame looks really neat.