Hacker News Reader

arantiuson Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?

I rarely click on my bookmarks, but I use them very frequently. It's a way to pin an important thing into the personal search engine that is my (Firefox) address bar.

arantiuson I’m now in charge of Audacity [video]

In practice, on Windows, one can still use most things made 25 years ago. In actuality, I still use WinAmp 2.91 marked "Apr 16 2003" in the about screen. See also http://www.oldversion.com/ .

arantiuson Looks like you are typing while in full screen

This has been tried in the past, I remember when Yahoo had a system to put a secret image on their login page with the exact same sort of goal (avoid phishing). Regular people don't use/understand such a system (enough to make it worthwhile).

arantiuson The Lost Apps of the 80s

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content="killer+app"

With a peak in 2002 it seems.

arantiuson RIP Google Reader

Everything (in the UI) just seems smaller and harder to read? With slightly more space between everything?

arantiuson Ask HN: Always on low power home server

Sounds like you want pretty much any couple-generation-old laptop.

arantiuson The Dunant subsea cable

Laziness, baroque toolchains, and (most probably): Shipping your org chart.

arantiuson Deprecate FTP support (deprecated)

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/04/13/what-to-expect-fo...

arantiuson Ask HN: What finished/done/complete software do you use?

ClipX ( https://bluemars.org/clipx/ ) Mezer Tools ( https://bayden.com/mezer/ ) AllSnap ( https://github.com/iheckman/allsnap )

No updates in years (this thread is making me realize one does have, minor, updates actually ...). Do what they do perfectly. (Except, only on my laptop, ClipX will randomly crash/close.)

arantiuson Linux from Scratch

I just got the warning from portage yesterday that, in that case, told me it had been 33 days since my last sync.

arantiuson Regulating Technology

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/16-pixels-body-copy...

"16px" is a very good font size. I.e. don't do anything, just let the browser use its default.

arantiuson Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

Also in the late 90s (maybe super early 2000s?) I used "LRP" for my router, booting from only one floppy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project

arantiuson Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from

"Sane" is one of my personal pet-peeve words. But only because people use it in an extremely approximated sense. It seems to always mean "good, for whatever meaning of good I personally choose to define, along whatever axes I choose to measure", without ever coming close to defining it any further.

arantiuson Bookmarklets I Use

I felt the same until I wrote https://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/fixed-only-at-top.use... which works automatically. Sticky bits are visible at first, disappearing only when you scroll down.

arantiuson Simplifier

Ok, but you didn't say why they're bad.

I bought into that hype back in the day. I don't anymore. They're a tool, they're not inherently good or bad.

arantiuson In protest of the web{*} bulldozer, a response to websocket port scanning

That's unidirectional. Websockets allow fully stateful bidirectional data transfer (just like a regular socket). They're wonderful when that's what you need.

arantiuson Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?

> A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question (or to just see what they are working on) becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people.

Which is better than interrupting the hundred plus people in the giant open-office space?

arantiuson Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

I'd suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach . I was much younger when I first read it, but it blew my mind at the time.

arantiuson Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant

Thanks Aaron!

GreaseMonkey is still pure open source, MIT licensed. For a while we had some general telemetry built in, but that was back in the 3.x days, so not for over two years now.

arantiuson Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

In the past you used to be able to choose from various stages, which went down to _very low_ level. Now you must start from stage 3, which is already a (slim, but) fully bootstrapped/running installation, which you customize from there.

arantiuson DigitalOcean is laying off staff

Amazing, TIL. I'm usually picky about words, but I've gotten this one wrong. Turns out the verb "jive" like was used here actually means to speak falsely -- a sort of literally/figuratively meaning inversion.

arantiuson The Advertising Industry Has a Problem: People Hate Ads

I do my best to block ads. But YouTube is most likely to leak through.

Within the past week, I've actually opted to watch more than one complete ad on YouTube, because it was relevant. (More to the channel than me, but interesting for the same reason that the channel itself was. Channel about making things, ads about high end (multi hundred thousand dollar?) CNC tools and the such.

arantiuson Cartridge Printed Circuit Boards

Can't find a better way to contact you: little typo, grammatical issue really. Article says:

> In Pilotwings' case, a fix to one algorithm resulted in the attract sequence showing a plane landing to fail, and the plane to infamously crash.

That's easy to misread. I'd suggest:

> In Pilotwings' case, one of these algorithms failed, so that a part of the attract sequence a plane infamously crashed rather than landing as intended.

Or similar. As originally written it's easy to misunderstand what is failing.

arantiuson Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

I use https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee... to restore this functionality.

arantiuson Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel

What I see there is that the EPYC 7601 (first graph, second from the bottom) is much faster than the Xeon 6138 -- it's only slower than /two/ Xeons ("the much more expensive dual Xeon Gold 6138 configuration"). The 32-core EPYC scores 30% more than the 20-core Xeon.

arantiuson Why a mock doesn’t work

It sounds to me like you've got two things: some hardware code, and some data code. You're not testing the hardware code, you are testing the data code.

If you split them into two places, you could get the same effect, with no mocks. And be more clear about what parts are tested and what aren't.

arantiuson Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?

FYI:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenant

arantiuson BootOS: Monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

You're looking for YUMI: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

It's not 100% compatible with every ISO, but it's definitely possible to boot more than one thing from a single USB drive.

arantiuson Notqmail: Collaborative open-source successor to qmail

What is it that you want, which you're not getting? I also use and love daemontools. Stability is a feature.