Hacker News Reader

DarkCrusader2on Earn-IT threatens encryption and therefore user freedom

Similar analogy would be, anything you say to anyone should be recorded, which can be subpoenaed.

EDIT: What happens when I send someone an email in a made-up language which only we both know?

DarkCrusader2on NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

Even more "radical" would be not giving the child a tablet at all.

DarkCrusader2on Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

> rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure.

Can someone please explain this to me or point me to some reading material. How does interest rates and investment in tech companies are related? How do we know that interest rates are going to rise soon?

DarkCrusader2on How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers

Can not recommend this series of videos from Welch Lab[1] enough on imaginary numbers. Deep dives into the history of how complex numbers were "invented" to enable mathematical representation which weren't possible by existing set of numbers. Also draws parallel to "invention" of negative numbers and zero to overcome the limitations of the then present number system (for eg. how to balance books without negative numbers).

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiaHhY2iBX9g6KIvZ_703G3KJ...

DarkCrusader2on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

What is the source for book data? I was recently looking for a TMDB equivalent for books but couldn't find a good one. There is OpenLibrary but they don't have covers and only do dumps once a month.

DarkCrusader2on Pytudes: Python programs for perfecting particular programming skills

Same, and it made me feel less guilty about myself for abandoning AoC for a second year (after 17 days in 2019 and 19 days this year). It becomes just too time consuming after around 17-18 days since I am not a genius.

DarkCrusader2on My negative views on Rust

Agree with this. I wrote some non-trivial amount of code in Rust just to give is a proper try. After countless hours spent in understanding borrow checker, life times and waiting for compilation to finish, I still have to constantly fight borrow checker. When working with Rust, I am not "making thing X" but instead "writing Rust which happens to be X". The code is littered with either `unwrap` of `?` which is just exception management done manually with hardly any benefit.

On systems programming front, last time I checked there were two options to make system calls (apart from writing inline assembly), the `libc` or the `nix` crate. `libc` is just a wrapper so exposes `unsafe` C like API which doesn't make for idiomatic Rust code. `nix` was incomplete on lots of front, not sure if things have changed now since it has been a while I tried Rust. So much for a systems programming language.

DarkCrusader2on Nim 1.6.2

Not OP but will definitely recommend Nim if you are intimidated by C++. Nim first compiles to C and then that C code is compiled to binary. If you know python already, you will feel right at home and you get better performance and a great type system and metaprogramming. But the eco-system is definitely not as mature as Python or JS.

The documentation is good enough that I don't need to google most of the stuff while writing Nim, having types definitely help with that.

DarkCrusader2on Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

Is it just me or does the dark themes do not work for tables? For eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors

DarkCrusader2on Rust Moderation Team Resigns

From the rust subreddit, which apparently is an "unofficial space" does not want people to discuss any specifics either. Why is this discourse happening in public? They want to use public opinion to bring reforms to the Rust governance but not divulge any details?

Does Rust really have a community if noone but a few select member have access to the information regarding why things are changing and the community members can't even discuss the forbidden topics in "unofficial spaces" either. How do I decide if I an getting involved with a community or just an elite club.

Quoting from the stickied comment from r/rust moderator.

> In the interest of not hastily jumping to conclusions, we will be removing speculation that alleges that this is due to any particular individual(s). The moderation team appears to have gone to great lengths to avoid naming names, ostensibly in the service of focusing a spotlight on the core team as a whole rather than any of its members. If they had wanted to name names, they could have. I understand that it is difficult to discuss a topic without firm details, but please refrain from engaging in speculation. I have confirmation that the core team will be making a statement about this at some point, which will hopefully shed more light on the situation.

DarkCrusader2on Oil 0.9.4 – User Feedback

Agree with you there, except the tooling part. I still don't love the dependency management having gone through pip/venv, conda, pipenv, poetry, ?? over the years. Everything else is fantastic with excellent community.

I too am looking into nim more and more recently because I don't want to write code without static typing anymore and it has very nice syntax and native compilation.

DarkCrusader2on Oil 0.9.4 – User Feedback

I am not sure how this is a slander. My point is, if python does not meet your performance/size/distribution requirements, choose something else instead of using "custom tools". Unless, compilation to other languages is supported as a first class feature by the language itself (for eg. the way Scala supports javascript and native binary), these work around are duct tapes to make Python do something it is not meant to do.

Furthermore, there is no shortage of statically typed compiled languages to choose from. Go, Rust, Java(with GraalVM) or my recent favourite, Nim comes to mind.

DarkCrusader2on Oil 0.9.4 – User Feedback

From the readme:

> It's written in Python, so the code is short and easy to change. But we automatically translate it to C++ with custom tools, to make it fast and small. The deployed executable doesn't depend on Python.

Why Python developers will do absolutely anything to work around the limitations of python but not use a different language.

DarkCrusader2on The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

If I am understanding it correctly, Cloudfront can use Accelerator to find the nearest edge location to cache, right?

DarkCrusader2on A Critique of the Open Letter Calling for the Removal of RMS

> It surprises me that so many people are outraged by a Chrome extension that highlights names - and does nothing more as far as I know

Nothing more as of now but you should see the support for it on twitter. This rationale is similar to Nothing to hide argument[1]. Path to dystopian future is paved with good intentions. And maintaining a naughty list is definitely not in good intentions.

> and wanting to see everyone with progressive politics purged from free software entirely

Where are you getting this from? Absolutely no one suggested that.

> The hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance among Stallman's supporters

I am not a Stallman supporter, fwiw.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

DarkCrusader2on A Critique of the Open Letter Calling for the Removal of RMS

> A competing letter in support of RMS exists and has accumulated considerably more signatures than the letter condemning RMS.

> In response someone created a Chrome extension that marks repositories owned by a signatory of this support letter with red text on GitHub.

This is incredible worrying. This is basically maintaining a repository of people with "incorrect" opinions. How long before such repositories are integrated in HR systems, tied to you identity for subscriptions/memberships. [1] You have to carry a tag of being not progressive enough across the internet?

[1] https://twitter.com/kmlefranc/status/1221869659139366912

DarkCrusader2on Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies (2015)

Lists work really well for me. Some popular lists like this[1] is a great place to start. Also on each film's page at the bottom, you can find lists it is on. So if you like a movie particularly well, you can find similar one in those lists. Most of the lists are not generic genre/actor/director based so I find really good stuff there.

[1] https://letterboxd.com/dave/list/official-top-250-narrative-...

DarkCrusader2on Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies (2015)

Strongly agree here. Letterboxd is the best thing that has happened to me in recent past. It introduced me to almost endless list of absolutely fantastic movies I didn't knew existed especially non-english movies no one talks about. And I just logged my 700th movie yesterday.

DarkCrusader2on Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies (2015)

Criterion is the best place to get "important classic and contemporary films" if it is available in your region. I am also hearing a lot of good things about Mubi these days though I have not tried it personally.

I don't have Criterion available in my region nor can I find DVD/blurays anywhere so sailing the high seas is the only option for me.

DarkCrusader2on The S in IoT is for Security

One thing I haven't seen mention much with these "smart" devices is how inconvenient lack of physical buttons is. Instead of just reaching over and adjust the volume/brightness whatever, I now have to unlock the phone, find the app and do some gestures to achieve same results, all of which now requires some mental bandwidth for these banal tasks.

DarkCrusader2on Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation

I don't think the problem is with twitter here. Let people have opinions, even if you think they are useless. They are opinions after all. Your issue should be with the maintainers who will remove any content on the slightest objection to it in a bid to do the "right" thing by whatever group of people got offended by it.

DarkCrusader2on I Violated a Code of Conduct

> you have to pretend to otherwise people might think you're a sexist or a racist

Or quickly get you fired by shaming you employer. No one want to jeopardize their jobs.

DarkCrusader2on The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

I feel the same with Twitter re-design too. Everyone was hating the re-design when it was launched but my twitter use increased from once or twice a week to couple of times a day after the new design.

It is amazingly fast(on desktop at least), behaves in all the right ways you would expect, you never lose you position anywhere, using back button always works properly, gracefully handles connection loss, and again, it's so fast and pleasurable to use. Too bad can't say the same for the content on the site.

DarkCrusader2on Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

I love Letterboxd's approach to movie recommendation wherein they don't provide any. Users can create arbitrary lists for all kinds of stuff based anything like genre, themes, feel, mood, cast/crew etc. There is probable a high quality list for anything you can think of. I have found some of my favorite movies on the site this way, no algorithms involved.

I wish more site would do this instead of collecting every single details about my life and still recommend be garbage sponsored content (looking at you Youtube).

DarkCrusader2on Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

If the goal is to acquire and update to latest versions of your favorite software, I would definitely recommend you to check out nix package manager.

DarkCrusader2on Mozilla VPN

Just go to any popular torrent site and see the number of people in the swarm. A little harder for less popular stuff but nowhere near dying out.

DarkCrusader2on Sonic Pi is a code-based music creation and performance tool

After mucking around a bit, I found this doc[1] which worked pretty well for me on Ubuntu 19.10. There is also some effort underway to build an appimage on their forums[2].

[1] https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/INSTALL-LIN...

[2] https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net/t/sonic-pi-as-an-appimage/274...

DarkCrusader2on MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

I think vector[0] does what you are asking for.

[0] https://github.com/timberio/vector

DarkCrusader2on Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

https://postmarketos.org/

They are attempting to build a os for smartphones based on Alpine linux with the stated goal of supporting a 10 year life cycle. They have a limited list of devices they support but I have heard good things about them.

DarkCrusader2on The Shapes of Code

This post very nicely summarizes what I now realize I have been doing subconsciously all the time. Writing in paragraphs with headings, turning short else branches in guards, refactoring "sharp saw teeth" etc. Good to know that others also use these heuristics.