HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Pako

92 karma · joined September 5, 2018

Contact: - Email: paul.kosel at rub dot de - GitHub: MagnificentPako
submissionscomments
Pako··on Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc
Where's this AI accusation coming from?
Pako··on Goldboot: Immutable infrastructure for the desktop
Immutable systems like this are great in a lot of educational setups where a lot of different students work at potentially many different workstations while always needing access to the same tools and in general having a "unified" experience.
Pako··on Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays?
Thanks a lot for the reply!

I am not aware of any such consultation offerings but I will investigate if that is an option, thanks for pointing this out.

After consulting her fortunately that is most likely an option, we have a buffer on our shared account to pay rent for ~3 more months but I'd just be shifting the debt to a place that wants it back less urgently, I still have to figure out how to get the extra income to make it happen.

I am about halfway through the required modules to start my bachelor's thesis so I still have a bit to go; The biggest problem is that I have a bunch of failed exams resulting from a multitude of things (both psychological because of the pandemic, idealistic because of some sketchy privacy practices, and very bad sleep causing me to _oversleep_ on exams). This is hard to explain to anyone asking, which happened to me before while I tried to apply for a job.

The course I study has requirements for how many credit points you need at the end of certain semesters to be allowed to continue studying, which I fear I will not reach if I lessen the uni load to focus more on earning enough to pay my bills.

I do have years of hobby-level programming in a multitude of different languages and environments, some of it going as far as almost being "professional" (I was paid on a few occassions to develop custom web solutions) and having contributed to a charity project centered around Minecraft a few years ago. I am unsure how to present any of this and if it actually matters at all, outside of just linking my GitHub profile. The same goes for my Scrum Master certificate, it feels a bit wasted after I found out how little people actually care about it.

I wish I could utilize a network to look for solutions, but outside of my siblings and that flatmate I don't really have any contacts (there wasn't much social interaction during the covid semesters and I never recovered from that). Especially none who would be working at places that'd look for someone like me.

Pako··on Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays?
Not sure if this fits but compsci student from Germany here.

Ever since I was unceremoneously kicked out of my parents' house after graduating from HS I've lived in a student dorm, now sharing a flat with a friend splitting rent. Been somewhat "cruising along" financially in the sense that I gained roughly enough to pay my monthly expenses with not much wiggle room. Had to go a bit into debt to fund moving into the dorm initially and never exactly recovered from that debt, just hovering with nothing really changing.

Recently lost access to my student loan as I am too slow to study for their requirements but I've managed to offset that by working as sysadmin/tech support at a small uni lab. My main sources of income being this job, "child benefits", and a half-orphan pension (lost my mom to alcohol when I was 15, dad remarried later). This half-orphan pension now _also_ fell off until I have the paperwork handled to re-request it after they asked me for proof that I've been studying two years ago, which I sent in too late. This pension also covered healthcare automatically.

Now with my pension out of the picture until they process it I have been thrown into the regular healthcare system, which added a monthly expense that I was not prepared for, especially because they are also requesting that I retroactively pay up for 3 months of apparently missed contributions/fees. Sent them an email a few days ago asking if it was possible to pay this off in monthly rates to hopefully make it a bit more manageable, but they have a very archaic policy of not responding to emails and only sending out paper mail. I also tried calling but the person I talked to wasn't exactly helpful outside of "have you tried sending an email". I am honestly at a bit of a loss as to how to approach this.

There were some pipe dreams of finding more work but the job market is, excuse the expression, fucked. Nobody would employ a student who hasn't finished their bachelor's yet. I'll probably try to find a job at some fastfood place or grocery store next and put my studies on pause. This might bite me back later because of credit point requirements from my course but still better than having debt collectors on my ass.

I understand that this is all over the place. It would mean the world to me if someone could even find the time to chime in and give some advice.

Pako··on Why you should probably be using SQLite
SQLite has a solution for this! There's called strict tables and final SQLite to get mad at you when you try to put a string into a number column, etc.

https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html

Pako··on Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation
We could remove this comment and not lose much of value.
Pako··on Tech giants are hijacking the internet
It took me a while to even begin to understand what Qbix is trying to sell people on. In my humble opinion the website is a disaster, especially on mobile. After a few minutes all I could gather was that it claims itself to be a "social operating system" (nice buzzword). After exploring the GitHub readme it got a bit clearer but it kinda "just" seems like WordPress but for websites seeking out more user interaction?

I have not looked into it too deeply, but I also have not seen any mention of any sort of open standards that would lift Qbix from being another vendor to be locked into. No OID/OID Connect, ActivityPub, etc. Instead it mentions integration with Facebook of all things. Where is the openness?

Pako··on Semihosting with VS Code on RP2040
Not just hostile but also illegal to be served to EU citizens under the GDPR.
Pako··on EchOh-No: a Vulnerability and PoC Demo in a Popular Minecraft Anticheat Tool
I'm particularly interested in their shady data privacy shenanigans. How would this hold up against a GDPR complaint? It doesn't sound like they're properly listing what data is to be tracked, meaning users are by definition unable to consent, so any amount of data collection is unlawful, no?
Pako··on Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor
European here, sorry if I misunderstood, but I always thought the "free speech" protected by the first amendment only protects your right to e.g. voice your political opinion without being punished for your particular views, not your preferences in porn (or the distribution and even existence of it)? As an extreme counterexample the government banned CSAM and one couldn't weasel their way out of such a case by pleading first amendment, right?
Pako··on Information about a recent security incident at Mailchimp
GDPR to the rescue! /s
Pako··on Ask HN: Video games that will make me smarter and are addictive?
Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but IMO Path of Exile helped me understand just how much spaghetti a code base can actually contain, with all of its interwoven mechanics and calculations. People spend hours theory crafting and optimizing a character to make numbers get bigger, and it takes a lot of planning skill to, well, plan all of it.
Pako··on Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds
Servers are not interoperable by default. There is 3rd party software that acts as a proxy letting Bedrock players connect to Java servers but it'll just remove anything that the more limited client doesn't support.

They both use completely different network stacks, Bedrock using RakNet over UDP, Java using Netty (?) over TCP, so they have to be translated accordingly.

Pako··on GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
This kinda looks like an attempt to get a commit into a bigger open source repository. It'd look nice on a resume to say you "contributed to Unreal Engine on GitHub".
Pako··on Ask HN: What are some interesting examples of Prolog?
Not sure if you'd consider this a "complete application" that is bigger than a "Hello-World-esque example" but I've worked on a Discord bot in SWI Prolog[1] for a while with a friend. It was an interesting experience and although a lot of the work (e.g. SWI has a ready-made library for interfacing with WebSockets and sending out HTTPS requests).

Some interesting applications of Prolog specifically include using predicates to filter messages by certain criteria (e.g. if it was sent by the bot's account or not), being able to hot-reload by invoking the make/0 predicate, and homoiconicity to (in theory) easily evaluate random code supplied by a user.

[1]: https://github.com/prolord-pl/prolord

Pako··on Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
This sounds really americentric. Have you considered that the every non-US citizen'd PII is fair game for US companies one in the county? As a European I wouldn't want my stuff to be routed through the US the same way you don't want your data going through Russia.
Pako··on The world's worst Linux kernel module
Yet.
Pako··on Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design
It also probably wouldn't exist anymore. last time I heard anything about it YouTube was in the red and only sustained with income from other Google services. (I might be wrong on that, if so please correct me)
Pako··on Is Porn Becoming a Monopoly?
Serious question:

> This is an issue bigger than Patreon (In the climate of FOSTA/SESTA) It probably goes beyond even the payment processors. it’s a world wide, online AND in person crack down on freedom of expression, on women, on marginalised people, on sex and sex work, on non conventional forms of labour that counter the status quo: the domination of corporations and the patriarchy. On dissent. (Taken from the blog post mentioned because it provides a bit more context than the quote on the linked site; emphasis not mine)

How is this a crackdown on either women or freedom of expression? Isn't every sex worker equally affected? Not like Patreon still shows penises on their platform. Neither is any company forced to allow arbitrary personal expression on their platform if I understood it correctly. Freedom of expression only protects you from the government, like freedom of speech, no?

If anyone intends to respond to this comment please consider that I'm genuinely asking this. I really want to understand.

Pako··on The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
In regards to Steins;Gate and the main character being "over the top": this probably won't make his antics any more bearable but maybe put them into some much needed context which the anime is kinda bad at providing. After his childhood friend, Shiina Mayuri, lost a grandparent she fell into a kind of PTSD, which caused him to assume the persona of a mad scientist, claiming he'd take her hostage because he didn't want her to go/leave. This helped her get over that death somehow but he still regularly lapses back into that persona.
Pako··on In Defense of XML
On the note of type safety I can always suggest people to take a look at Dhall.

https://dhall-lang.org

Pako··on Luau: Augmenting Lua’s Syntax with Types
Looks like you're having a Lua Uppercase Accident
Pako··on Show HN: Host your own minimal file sharing site (now with expiring files)
Definitely not as concise as your PHP impl but meh https://gist.github.com/MagnificentPako/b67b081d5cac0d0185ef...
Pako··on Show HN: Host your own minimal file sharing site (now with expiring files)
I like the idea of a really small MVP; I might give this a try later in Prolog to see how they compare.
Pako··on Show HN: Host your own minimal file sharing site (now with expiring files)
https://0x0.st
Pako··on For sale: Oil Tanker asking $17M
I can contribute like 10 bucks
Pako··on Please ban sites which fail to function using vanilla HTML
Isn't submitting your own stuff usually subbed shunned upon on here? Or was that Reddit?
Pako··on Ask HN: Is it risky to use React-Native?
This isn't strictly related to React Native but have you considered using Flutter? IIRC it compiles to a "native" iOS app instead of doing this weird JS stuff React does.
Pako··on Ask HN: What should I learn in 2019 – Elm, PureScript or ReasonML?
I'm not too sure about that because I haven't used either in some time unfortunately. I tried some stuff on their online REPL. From what I gathered Purescript is doomed to produce more "unwieldy" error messages because of the more complex type system.

Take this definition for example: ` some = drop (Just 5) [1,2,3,4,5,6] `

Purescript isn't even doing _that_ bad in this case: it complains that `Maybe Int` doesn't match `Int` but then goes on talking about checking if `Maybe t0` is "at least as general as" `Int` which will probably be useful information for an experienced developer but not newcomers. This is, at least from what I experienced, what happens most of the time with Purescript: you get way too much information with way too many details.

Compare this to an error produced by the Elm compiler:

>-- TYPE MISMATCH ---------------------------- Main.elm

>The 1st argument to `drop` is not what I expect:

>8| List.drop (String.toInt userInput) [1,2,3,4,5,6]

> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>This `toInt` call produces:

> Maybe Int

>But `drop` needs the 1st argument to be:

> Int

>Hint: Use Maybe.withDefault to handle possible errors.

Pako··on Ask HN: What should I learn in 2019 – Elm, PureScript or ReasonML?
Elm is kinda limited in the sense that it really only works for UI. You can't use it outside of that. It also doesn't come with all the nice advanced features Purescript has which also makes it "easier" for beginners in my opinion: you don't have to learn as many foreign concepts to get productive. For example I believe I hadn't read "Monad" in the Elm docs even once.

Purescript on the other hand is more advanced and can run anywhere JS does (mainly web and node). FFI with JS is a lot easier than what Elm provides too. It has a better type system but arguably a worse compiler in the regards to error messages. Elm on the other hand has an amazing compiler: thanks to its more restricted nature it can mostly figure out what you were trying to do and give you really helpful tips.

Unfortunately I haven't used ReactML yet.

Page 1 of 2Next →