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alanpearce

78 karma · joined January 30, 2019

<https://alanpearce.eu>
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alanpearce··on Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal
We have free instant payments in the Eurozone, UK has had them for about a decade and I'd say PayPal is doing fine (unfortunately). So what's the concern?
alanpearce··on Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/). Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time).

I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.

alanpearce··on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
This can be enabled or disabled under the System Settings > Battery > Options > Wake for network access (Always / Power adapter / Never). Or possibly the phone registers it as connected for a while after it sends its last packet?
alanpearce··on Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol
Hurricane Electric support a hidden primary as part of their free DNS nameserver service (do you actually want to expose your primary when someone else can handle the traffic?)

https://dns.he.net

alanpearce··on The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long
I for one found the technical difference interesting
alanpearce··on Show HN: I built a tool to solve window management
Funny, this sounds like a good idea, but I'm quite happy with the exact opposite: I use rcmd[1]. I hold down the right command key and press the first letter of the window name to switch to it. I can override this dynamic mapping by pressing right command + option + <other key>, so I have an IM client on I, for example. It means I never have to remember/guess how command+tab works (although I had fewer issues with alt+tab on Windows)

[1]: https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/

alanpearce··on A year of funded FreeBSD development
40 hours/month. Not week.
alanpearce··on OpenAI Acquires Multi
It might be somewhat different in that it's only for programming, but Zed is a "multiplayer code editor" with channels, notes, video chat, screen sharing etc.

https://zed.dev/

alanpearce··on Engineering for Slow Internet
This sounds fascinating. Do you have some articles describing your setup?
alanpearce··on Engineering for Slow Internet
Not any more? https://unternehmen.bvg.de/pressemitteilung/grossprojekt-erf...

Summary: since 2024-05-06, users of all networks also get LTE in the U-Bahn thanks to a project between BVG and Teléfonica (not surprising that Teléfonica deployed the infra because they had the best U-Bahn LTE coverage beforehand)

alanpearce··on Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
> It’s ok for jargon and acronyms to be confusing to people who are not at all in the field.

On the site itself, sure. Here, where not everyone "uses USD as part of their work", spelling it out in the title would have avoided this whole stub

alanpearce··on Show HN: OPML list of Hacker News Users Personal Blogs
Seems like my blog was not even included in the console output, but it has been part of the thread for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596022

I know I don’t have enough karma, but it seems like the log output should have logged something for that. I also wonder if you’d consider account age as an alternative to karma for anti-spam, as I’m a bit of a hardcore lurker here and I highly doubt that I’m the only one.

alanpearce··on Show HN: OPML list of Hacker News Users Personal Blogs
There are quite common and they're usually called planet <topic>, which might help to find useful resources or software
alanpearce··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://alanpearce.eu

I really want to write more often, I'm not sure if it's that I don't know what to write about or that the idea of blogging doesn't come to mind easily when I'm doing things that I could blog about.

alanpearce··on The quest for a simple smartwatch
I used to have a Garmin running the Simply Late[0] watch face to achieve a similar goal. I wish there was something better on a more everyday-looking watch.

[0]: https://sl8.ch/

alanpearce··on macOS command-line tools you might not know about
If you set

    alias firefox="open -a Firefox"
This will work
alanpearce··on ChatGPT: Fear Litany
> ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things

FastGPT[0] is some way towards that: it uses the web to provide answers

[0]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt

alanpearce··on Ask HN: Alternate Email hosting to G Suite
Works fine for me so far. From memory (like 7 years ago) gmail’s filtering rules are more powerful, but iCloud has the basics at least
alanpearce··on Show HN: Prestige, a text based HTTP client, for working with HTTP APIs
A very similar project for Emacs users: https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el
alanpearce··on Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins
This is about extensions, not plugins. The latter would include Widevine, H264 and previously Flash.
alanpearce··on Ask HN: My startup has more annual subscribers than monthly. What to make of it?
Yes, there's a different kind of debit card. I usually use a different term that's country-specific (like the cards themselves).

For Germany, a German debit card (the "other sort", as you put it) isn’t the same as any other. It doesn’t have Visa or MasterCard co-branding like other countries’ debit cards, nor a 16 digit number, so it can’t be used online. I might also use the term "bank card" for this, because there are actual debit cards with Visa/MC co-branding which are available in Germany, but less common than other types.

It's also common for Germans to use "Kreditkarte" to mean anything with Visa/MC co-branding, which probably spills over into English. This also leads to the hilarious term "echte Kreditkarten" (real credit cards) for cards that actually have a rolling line of credit attached (these are rarely offered).

However, in the UK I recall that people are usually specific about whether they mean a credit card or a debit card.

alanpearce··on Update on beta testing payments in Signal
Something somewhat similar already happened: Stellar gave away XLM to Keybase after Keybase added an integrated Stellar wallet. Many people didn’t like it[0], even I was not too impressed despite working in the Stellar ecosystem. Some people didn’t like the mix of cryptography and cryptocurrency (at least, I certainly didn’t)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913496

alanpearce··on Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?
hyperscript (`h()`) had its first commit 9 years ago and the syntax is common in other rendering libraries (e.g. mithril, ivi).

_hyperscript (this one) seems to have released 0.0.1 only last year.

Definitely very confusing on the naming front. It is at least possible to disambiguate searches with the underscore.

alanpearce··on Bring Your Own Client
remoteStorage[1] is already a thing. I don't think anyone's made a full Word-style document editor for it yet, though.

[1]: https://remotestorage.io

alanpearce··on Bit – A modernized Git CLI written in Go
GMT stays the same throughout the year. The UK switches to BST for the summer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

alanpearce··on Proposed EU rule may mean you can finally delete some apps from your phone
As a previous Android user, this feels right. I think the tipping point was the replacement of the e-mail app with Gmail. After that, I got frustrated with the stock app situation and switched to LineageOS to avoid it.

As a current Apple user, this feels wrong. I bought iDevices because I don't want my data shared, and want reasonable stock apps—I don't want to spend days comparing every single calendar app because the choice is "necessary". Apple promote third-party apps in the App Store anyway, even when they do the same as their stock apps.

alanpearce··on Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation
For anyone confused about the debit card comment: A German debit card isn’t the same as any other. It doesn’t have Visa or MasterCard co-branding like other countries’ debit card, nor a 16 digit number, so it can’t be used online. I would rather have translated Girokarte to bank card, because there are actual debit cards with Visa/MC co-branding which are available in Germany, but less common than other kinds
alanpearce··on Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
With macOS and iOS, Airdrop, as others have stated. For other platform combinations, there is NitroShare[1] which works in almost the same way.

[1]: https://nitroshare.net