Hacker News Reader

Theofrastuson ArkhamMirror: Airgapped investigation platform with CIA-style hypothesis testing

It's always interesting to stumble upon a bubble you never heard of.

This is super interesting. I will probably (hopefully?) never need to use it, but interesting nonetheless. It also makes sense to have this type of application airgapped. Journalists need to have near-perfect OPSEC depending on what they are working on.

Theofrastuson Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!

Theofrastuson Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too

Theofrastuson Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

I'm honestly surprised Hepburn wasn't the official standard yet. It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.

> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.

I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.

Theofrastuson Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

I moved away from tinkering, ever since I had to juggle family, job, chores, and social contacts. I don't want to spend the little free time I have fixing broken configs. Instead of rolling my own self-build NAS / home server like I used to, I just have a Synology now. I moved back to Windows after I fcked my graphics driver on linux and didn't have enough time to fix it in a day or two.

Still, I love the tinkering spirit, and it still is a part of me, but it's not very pragmatic to implement in my life nowadays.

Theofrastuson Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard

I tried an ergonomic keyboard with just 3x10 keys (or rather since it was a split keybaord, 2x3x5). I found that I am unwilling to spend the time to learn how to use it, type special characters, numbers, etc. Especially since most of my training time would need to take place during work, where I didn't want to take that huge initial efficiency hit. In the end, I chose a ZSA Moonlander and I'm super happy with it, even though it might have too many keys for enthusiasts ;)

That being said, I do have a soft spot for handheld hacker keyboards like this. It reminds me of the cyber future we all dreamed of when we were younger, when tech was still cool and exciting. Very cool project!

Theofrastuson A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

I'd say it still is. I wouldn't even know how to begin if I were to write one.

Theofrastuson I know genomes and I didn’t delete my data from 23andMe

This whole article is a single big "but what about X?" argument.

The main concern stays, even if it's just a tiny bit of your genome, even if web-fingerprinting is also bad, the sequenced genome data is enough to identify and relate you to others. (Didn't they catch a serial killer that way?)

Even without the whole bankruptcy spin, I haven't had my DNA sequenced out of privacy concerns, with being US(-jurisdiction)-based as a big factor against most of the big competitors.

Theofrastuson Introduction to Indian English

I came across and am fond of "give a click". Came across it watching youtube tutorials, used along the lines of "to open the context menu, give a click on the menu item"

Theofrastuson One Billion Cells – Another Multiplayer Demo with Clojure

Has someone already animated Bad Apple on there?

Or played Doom, for that matter.

Theofrastuson A maths proof that is only true in Japan

Things have moved on since then, as artificial intelligence has started being used in formalisation, [...]

With how AI works fundamentally, wouldn't you still need to verify the results generated by AI? Doesn't seem like an applicable field for it, at least in its current state.

Theofrastuson Magnus Carlsen might walk away from classical chess

Chess960/Freestyle Chess is where it's at for me. There, the game feels fresh, it's about creativity and clever positional play. Sometimes when playing classical, it feels like a contest of who can memorize better, without room for creativity or passion. I'm not a particularly good classical player, but the mountain of grinding to get good just seems insurmountable to me.

Theofrastuson Show HN: Donut Browser, a Browser Orchestrator

Looks great! Useful for privacy but also to keep work and private life separated. Will be on the lookout for other OS versions!

Theofrastuson Show HN: eInk optimized manga with Kindle Comic Converter (+Kobo/ReMarkable)

Slightly related: I'm currently reading manga on a normal Android tablet using Mihon. I'd love to read on an eInk display, but I'd rather manage my library on device instead of having to use a pc and transferring chapters manually.

Does anyone have experience with Anrdoid capable eInk tablets? Are there any good, affordable ones?

Theofrastuson Psytrance Guide

All those different subgenres are quite daunting as a newcomer. I've listened to songs labelled as “Psytrance” by Spotify, though I couldn't pinpoint the subgenre after listening to the examples provided by the guide.

For example, what would the song “Shiva Style, Pt. 2” by Mandragora classify as (if it counts as Psytrance)?

Theofrastuson Linux Hits All-Time High of 3% of Desktop PC Share After 30 Years

My thought as well. I'd suspect Valve's work with SteamOS and Proton has a noticable effect on Linux adoption rates

Theofrastuson More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

As a parent working a full time job - I can finally play games again. As weird as it sounds, there was always a pychological hurdle to go and sit at my desk, boot my pc, select a game and play it.

With the deck, I just sit on the couch and play games - the sleep/standby function is amazing.

Theofrastuson OsmAnd 4.3 for Android devices

I wanted to give OsmAnd a try, to replace my dependency on Google services. I could not for the life of me find a setting to correclty transliterate Japanese names to my native language. I only found three states: 1) Display original Japanese characters 2) Transliterate. Here the problem was, that oftentimes, it used the chinese pronounciation of the characters instead of Japanese. 3) use translated names, where a lot are missing, and then it falls back to the original characters.

openstreetmap.de (my local variant) correctly transliterates even the smallest region names in Japan.

In the end, I used Google Maps to navigate during my vacation, and everything just worked.