Hacker News Reader

aaronaxon Hacking SimCity 2000 saved games

The best selling game of all time is relatively recent and supremely hackable/mod-friendly. It also contains gameplay elements that simulate electricity and logic gates. People have built computers in-game.

Minecraft

aaronaxon F-Droid 2.0

I run Calibre Content Server on a VM. So my ebook reading is just accessing that in the browser. Works great.

aaronaxon Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

Why not use real email?

aaronaxon Java 27

"The Java Story" documentary by CultRepo on YouTube is pretty great. A major topic is the release cadence which some other comments here are mentioning / joking about.

aaronaxon Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

A label maker, as they said they use, prints durable and easy to read labels.

aaronaxon Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux

Beeper?

aaronaxon Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

A more powerful search tool for the contents of Palo Alto firewall release notes: https://firewallissues.axvig.com/

A tool to periodically sync Device 42 data to Netbox (work).

aaronaxon Retro-Tech Parenting

I was thinking that the writing is upside down. Very wrong IMHO to write on a floppy disk that way.

aaronaxon Books are not too expensive

Where can I buy DRM free Anathem? The Road? Hunger Games?

aaronaxon LittleSnitch for Linux

Same. And in a similar vein--AnalogX NetStat Live.

aaronaxon Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

A half rack weighs probably 1000 pounds. Good luck getting that into someone's basement.

aaronaxon Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

A Bitcoin mining node is the simplest possible way to turn compute into money. Very minimal storage and bandwidth requirements. And yet we still do not see those in houses.

Everything about doing productive computing tasks in houses is more complicated than that! At least it is more profitable, I think?

(I wonder what a rough profit per watt figure is for a datacenter. Very much "it depends" I'm sure.)

aaronaxon Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw.

A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...)

And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.

aaronaxon Car Seats as Contraception

(Have 3yo and 1yo, another one the way, goal is 4)

I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions.

It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."

Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.

The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!

aaronaxon Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.

aaronaxon Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ who fished for nearly a century dies aged 105

When I was a boy I had to call the library to get the definition of a word that was not in my family's dictionary. 39 years old now.

aaronaxon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://aaron.axvigs.com

A pretty average personal blog--mix of homelab updates, tech solutions, and family ongoings.

aaronaxon CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

Supermicro has some low power options such as https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E...

aaronaxon CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

And use a wildcard cert so that all your services don't get proved due to cert transparency logs.

aaronaxon Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

Exists: https://www.hmdb.org/

aaronaxon TP-Link Tapo C200: Hardcoded Keys, Buffer Overflows and Privacy

My initial read of proximity being sufficient to exploit 3 is incorrect, so yeah as long as you control the Wi-Fi network sufficiently then things should be fine.

aaronaxon TP-Link Tapo C200: Hardcoded Keys, Buffer Overflows and Privacy

This is so bad that it must be intentional, right? Even though these are dirt cheap, they couldn't come up with $100,000 to check for run-of-the-mill vulnerabilities? There must be many millions sold. Quite handy for some intel agencies.

I assume any Wi-Fi camera under $150 has basically the same problems. I guess the only way to run a security camera where you don't have Ethernet is to use a non-proprietary Wi-Fi <-> 1000BASE-T adapter. Probably only something homebuilt based on a single board computer and running basically stock Linux/BSD meets that requirement.

aaronaxon Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

A law can fix that!

aaronaxon Wacky Fun Physics Ideas

Scott Locklin is one of my favorite reads, in occasional doses though. Kind of unhinged-seeming but always some perspective that seems fresh.

He's like Casey Handmer turned up to 11, and throw in a use of the word "retarded" in pretty much every post which surely is some repellent just to make certain types of people go away.

Actually I'm not sure I really get anything out of reading either of them but they provide some enjoyment and glimpse of a possible future.

aaronaxon Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage

I find these numbers to be way outside of what I have heard of. I would be surprised if you could give an example that comes with even 1.5x capacity. (4TB capacity, 6TB actual flash on chips, for example.)

aaronaxon Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model

Can you create a list of the most common book names? I think it would be funny to have a shelf of books that all have the same name.

aaronaxon AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

Costs have not dropped. Computing becomes cheaper over time, but AWS largely does not.

aaronaxon Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

Search Amazon for "pfsense mini pc". (smile as you think about how this triggers that one pfsense guy!) Intel N100 or N150 processor, passive cooling, typically 5 1000GBASE-T or better ports, RAM and SSD included. Should be able to get one for ~$200.

aaronaxon Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

The UI for the fs.com programmer is merely "not bad". This could easily be great in comparison.

aaronaxon Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

Fun fact: each one also consumes approximately $4 in electricity per year.

Assuming 2.5W typical consumption, $0.18/kWh rate. More like $8/year if you are in a high rate area!