Hacker News Reader

LawnGnomeon Discontinuation of third level domain registrations for the .name TLD [pdf]

Same. That would be an ugly transition for me, but I guess I should start thinking about it.

LawnGnomeon We Are Forking dotenvy into dotenv-ng

No, I also use direnv. It does everything I want, nothing I don't, and has been stable for me for years.

LawnGnomeon The Indo-European Family Tree

I think for the living languages it's speakers (on a log scale, presumably).

LawnGnomeon FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs

Interesting. Seems like this isn't very consistently enforced, then.

LawnGnomeon FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs

Has this changed recently? I thought I heard about this several years ago, but the last 2-3 times I've visited (in the last couple of years) I've been able to pick up a prepaid SIM from Colesworth without any ID check.

LawnGnomeon Chuwi Minibook X

My partner (who isn't in tech, and isn't generally interested in tech) would probably literally stand in line for an updated version of the 12" MacBook on day one.

LawnGnomeon Fragnesia Made Public as Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

I don't know, but the problem with blocking esp4 and esp6 is that IPsec stops working, as I understand it.

LawnGnomeon Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

That's my feeling on the endgame too, but it'll probably be a decade before we get anywhere near it.

LawnGnomeon Turn Dependabot off

I was actually working on this last week, funnily enough. I've been working on a capability analysis tool for Rust, and if you're already generating a call graph via static analysis, taking that and matching it against the function-level vulnerability data that exists in RustSec isn't that hard.

Hopefully I'll have something out next week.

LawnGnomeon Turn Dependabot off

Although, unfortunately, not all RustSec advisories include function-level vulnerability metadata in practice.

LawnGnomeon A collection of links that existed about Anguilla as of 2003

ai was also one of the ccTLDs that had an MX record for a long time, and I believe (although never had reason to confirm) actually used it. foo@ai tended to be a fun test case for e-mail validation.

LawnGnomeon Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

As a non-American, I think the thing I'm hung up on in what you said is that I don't understand why a developed country should allow anyone to be "uninsured".

LawnGnomeon KDE launches its own distribution

This sounds fairly close to SteamOS in terms of structure. (Which seems to work well for its own use case, so I can see the logic.)

LawnGnomeon RFC: PHP license update

Very pedantically, because PHP doesn't require copyright assignment, it would be (almost certainly) impossible to retroactively change the licence on older versions.

However, since the PHP and Zend licences both permit the user to use PHP under the terms of whatever licence version was applied to that PHP version or any later version, the point is essentially moot, since a user can choose to use the new version of the PHP/Zend licence once published, which will give them the same rights.

LawnGnomeon Understanding the PURL Specification (Package URL)

The standard supports a repository_url "qualifier" (query parameter)[0], which can be used to override whatever the default registry is (which, for Docker, is hub.docker.com[1]).

[0]: https://github.com/package-url/purl-spec/blob/main/PURL-SPEC...

[1]: https://github.com/package-url/purl-spec/blob/main/PURL-TYPE...

LawnGnomeon Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

The dog part is definitely key. We moved a few blocks — so within the same neighbourhood — shortly after getting our dog, and it was amazing how much more quickly we got to know our new neighbours with our (extremely extroverted) then-puppy compared to the previous place. (And, on the flip side, I'm on a first name basis with every dog on my block, which usually implies also being on a first name basis with at least one of their humans.)

LawnGnomeon The Future Is Niri

I could also say the same, including the Wayland origin story. I'm pretty new to Niri — I only started playing with it about a month ago — but it's just absolutely that little bit more than Sway I didn't know I needed.

LawnGnomeon Giving C++ std:regex a C makeover

Completely agreed. My Rust origin story wasn't about memory safety, fearless concurrency, a modern type system, or anything else like that. Not that I didn't care about those things — I did — but none of them were what convinced me to start learning Rust.

What did convince me was being able to prototype things for the C project I was working on while having access to a standard library that included basic data structures, synchronisation primitives, and I/O handling in a way that used best practices from recent decades. Everything else was just a bonus that I got to learn and use as I went.

LawnGnomeon Devzat – Chat over SSH, with some nice quality-of-life features

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

An old, old Internet protocol that was used to get information on a user, and could be used by users to post updates from their .plan files. Essentially plaintext social media for people with Internet connections in the 80s and (early-ish) 90s.

LawnGnomeon Daylight eInk Computer

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834

LawnGnomeon Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

Expensify was a pretty well known case of this several years ago — their marketing was all about their advanced scanning technology, and it turned out they were using Mechanical Turk in many cases with little concern for PII (or corporate security) concerns.

(I have no idea if this is still the case, for the record.)

LawnGnomeon Original Pirate Material

Yeah, I've always felt A Grand Don't Come For Free is actually the better album. Empty Cans literally made me cry the first time I heard it.

The later stuff, though, and particularly the material since the 2017 revival is... not great.

LawnGnomeon Samsung extends Android and security updates to 7 years

It's not a global toggle, but Asus definitely has options to make things more stock-Androidy — you can basically turn the Settings app back into something resembling the stock version, and a bunch of their other UI enhancements and changes are also optional.

A long time Android user wouldn't have mistaken my Zenfone 9 for a Pixel at any more than a cursory glance, but you can get it pretty close, particularly in terms of feel.

LawnGnomeon VW is putting buttons back in cars

Agreed! I have a 2021 CX-5, and it's not just the infotainment controls (which are great, and work really well with Android Auto), but also just having real buttons — some with indicator lights, even — for all the heating/cooling/demisting controls.

I've rented several other cars in the last couple of years that have been touchscreen only (or, at the very least, very heavily biased towards touchscreens), and the amount of extra time needed to orient where you're pressing is honestly kind of terrifying when you need to, say, demist a windscreen quickly.

LawnGnomeon Committing to Rust for Kernel Code

Same. I gradually learned Rust while I was working in a job where I wrote C on a day-to-day basis, and after a while I realised that Rust was making me a better C developer by forcing me to think more systematically about ownership and lifetimes than I really had to that point. It significantly changed how I designed and structured my code, even in other languages.

Not to say I couldn't have gotten the same education from another language, but something about Rust clicked for me that others didn't.

LawnGnomeon Rust without crates.io

Rust does have this: you can specify dependencies from other registries or Git repositories pretty easily. (See https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/specifying-depende... for the exact Cargo.toml syntax.)

LawnGnomeon LLama.cpp now has a web interface

I generally think it's fine to do this sort of thing for your own benefit and open a PR as long as you're really 100% fine with "no, I'm not interested in merging this" being the answer.

Where the problems tend to arise (in my experience, at least) is when people hack on something expecting that it will be merged, get invested in it, and then get upset when the maintainer(s) aren't interested.

Checking in before starting to work on something is important if your goal is to have it merged, not just to do the work. The problem is that a lot of people start in the first category, but then move into the second category as they get invested in their project.

LawnGnomeon Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests

It's going up to 100 req/m, but the new limit is indeed per key, not per user. (See https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... for more detail.)

LawnGnomeon Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

I've been to the Portugese Chapel of Bones in Évora. The two things that really struck me were the sheer size of it — I expected a tiny room, and instead it was a decently sized chapel — and how every skull essentially looked the same. A stark reminder of how similar we all are in the end.

LawnGnomeon Vancouver Special

My impression is that it's not amazing anywhere, but I've heard Burnaby (for example) is a bit more development friendly than Vancouver.

I'm interested to see what happens in the next couple of years — Ken Sim (Vancouver's new mayor) had significantly improving permitting speeds and decisions as a key plank in his platform. I'm curious to see how he and his party are planning to follow through on that.