Hacker News Reader

aloknnikhilon Visual effects for the Indian blockbuster “RRR”

Being over the top is a unique characteristic of the Indian Cinema. If I wanted to watch "believable action scenes", I'd go watch a documentary. I honestly don't get this idea of standardizing everything as the West does. It's a great idea for some. For art? Come on.

aloknnikhilon Actual is going open-source

Try https://ghostfol.io/portfolio (there's an option to self-host too)

aloknnikhilon The Datadog WebApp is down

Quoting DataDog:

Investigating - We are investigating intermittent loading issues on our web application. As a result, some users might see a blank screen when loading the web application.

Please note that data processing and alerts are not affected by this incident.

aloknnikhilon Show HN: A simple Wordle clone in 60 lines, using Hyperscript

On Safari on iOS, at least, typing fast will accidentally zoom into that part of the page instead of registering it as a character press.

But pretty neat implementation otherwise. Awesome work!

aloknnikhilon There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

Genuinely curious, why is the next step creating a Gemini client?

aloknnikhilon Apple stopped sales in Turkey after the lira crashed 15% in a day

Well I was confused too. And for exactly the same reason as the other commenter. For a minute I assumed they were in the US buying furniture and equipment from Turkey and they were complaining about not waiting enough to get a better deal.

aloknnikhilon India is leading IPv6 migration with 61.67% adoption

This seems to be particularly because of Reliance Jio (the largest Mobile network in India?) https://conference.apnic.net/50/assets/files/APCS790/Harness...

The adoption timeline matches Google's stats here

aloknnikhilon MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

Have you tried using a CSI driver to help you do this? https://kubernetes-csi.github.io/docs/drivers.html

A brief description of what CSI is - https://kubernetes.io/blog/2019/01/15/container-storage-inte...

aloknnikhilon Show HN: FreshSQL – Modern, Native, Fast SQL Querying Tool

Why is this better than something like https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/ which is open source?

aloknnikhilon WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

It maybe a bad argument but it's a practical view. Governments around the world (see: India, China) have strict laws around crypto. By law of association, any service that remotely mentions this is severely scrutinized. I can hardly blame my friends if they want no part of this.

aloknnikhilon VPNCloud: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN written in rust

There was some discussion on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628285

aloknnikhilon Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI

Makes sense. Thanks!

aloknnikhilon Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI

Nice work! I played around with the demo and launched an SSH session for the last layer (hosting the website). And I was able to trigger a VM reboot from the shell. And now the website is not up anymore. Curious to know if there's any monitoring or alerting that I can see when something like this is happening? And how do I go about debugging it/restoring functionality?

aloknnikhilon Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations

I'm not sure this works very well. I tried running the test on T-mobile's LTE which has free Spotify streaming. It basically said there was "no differentiation" implying there was no packet inspection?

EDIT: Re-read the technical details. I think it can only measure one aspect of Net Neutrality I.e. Throttling one in favor of the other. Which seems reasonable. But I don't think it should be marketed as detecting "Net Neutrality Violation".

aloknnikhilon TimeTagger: Open-Source Time Tracker

I see the same thing. I'm on iOS 14.3

aloknnikhilon Why mmap is faster than system calls (2019)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24842648

aloknnikhilon Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some users for over 24 hours

They're inconsistent too. macOS updates have progress bars that give you an estimate for completion. iOS updates just show you a progress bar with no estimated time. And this is what I worry with macOS becoming more like iOS.

aloknnikhilon Blob Opera

And it works perfectly on the phone too.

aloknnikhilon Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

On first glance that page looks like something Apple might have put together. I genuinely thought this was from Apple.

aloknnikhilon Summary of the Amazon Kinesis Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region

Kafka uses a thread pool for request processing. Both the brokers and the consumer clients use the same request processing loop.

This goes a bit more in-depth: https://jaceklaskowski.gitbooks.io/apache-kafka/content/kafk...

aloknnikhilon Why TCP over TCP is a bad idea (2001)

VPNs are almost always over UDP.

See IPSec (most common VPN implementation): https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-ip...

See Wireguard (increasing popularity): https://www.wireguard.com/

aloknnikhilon The total PC market (including tablets) had 23% year-on-year growth

Other than all the software glitches and the increasing number of bugs with every release, Macbooks still have the best (& possibly the biggest?) track pad I have ever used on a laptop. Personally, I am yet to find a terminal front-end on Linux that is as feature rich as iTerm. Also, if you're all in on the Apple ecosystem with a watch/iPhone/iPad, the Continuity features work pretty well too.

aloknnikhilon DoorDash S-1

https://media.chase.com/news/chase-partners-with-door-dash-t...

Seems like free DashPass is valid only for a year.

> Complimentary DashPass Subscription for Chase Sapphire Reserve and Preferred cardmembers: Your Chase Sapphire account will receive one complimentary DashPass subscription from DoorDash for at least 12 months when the subscription is activated by 12/31/21. After the DashPass discounted period ends, you can choose to continue to be enrolled and charged the then current monthly DashPass rate

They also have an offer for the Freedom and Slate cards (which have no annual fee) albeit free DashPass only for the first 3 months and a 50% discount for the next 9. So, still a good deal overall when compared to paying $9.99 every month. Thanks!

aloknnikhilon P.L. Deshpande

Probably because Google doodled him on his birthday (8th November)

https://www.google.com/doodles/purushottam-laxman-deshpandes...

aloknnikhilon About iSH’s pending removal from the App Store

But you have to go through the hassle of signing the certificate every 7 days. It's not exactly the same experience.

aloknnikhilon Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

I was watching a TED talk on the "Good Country Index" a couple of days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X7fZoDs9KU

Funnily enough, Finland is #1 right now. https://www.goodcountry.org/index/results/

aloknnikhilon iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

I think there was a thread here on the disadvantages of all the software processing in phone cameras today. I had a similar experience trying to capture the orange skies when the wildfires were raging here in California. My iPhone corrected every single image to remove the orange and replace it with a dark gray sky. It looked more overcast than apocalyptic. But I'm not fully against the idea of shipping some of those algorithms in a DSLR, especially the Pixel's low light photography.

aloknnikhilon 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

It's also the unprompted responses that has started to bug me. I don't know if Google is having a bad rollout or this is deliberate but my Google Home is being triggered a lot more often now and I don't recall anything remotely close to the wake phrase being said. Also, the responses to questions when actually prompted are not at all what I'm expecting. Particularly, Google has trouble understanding a lot of context around Spotify playlists. It still cannot distinguish between a song and an album with the same name despite me prepending the request with "Play the Song...". Overall it's just a terrible experience and that makes the whole assistant thing less like an assistant and more like a toddler that refuses to cooperate.

aloknnikhilon Porting Firecracker to a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

Are you talking about this project? https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker containerd

I think it's still very much active. Not sure how usable it is if that's what you mean.

aloknnikhilon Bongo Cat

It's impressive that this checks for the system theme switches between dark/light modes