Hacker News Reader

arantiuson Notqmail: Collaborative open-source successor to qmail

Technically netqmail and with some other distribution (Gentoo) patches added, but I still happily use qmail.

arantiuson Tinder Bypasses Google Play, Joining Revolt Against App Store Fee

According to WikiPedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_app_distributio... ):

Google Play: 3.5 million apps App Store: 2.2 million apps F-Droid: 1,878

Several orders of magnitude off.

arantiuson Firefox 68.0

Because I want it to be that powerful.

arantiuson There’s more than one way to write an IP address

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99336/how-does-ping...

Because it's special cased in ping. Because that's what a relevant RFC says to do.

arantiuson An informal survey of z-index values found in the wild

This is why I care so much about grammar. Author wrote "1242 times the number 9" but meant "the number 9 1242 times". A very minor difference, just the order of the words, but such a change in meaning!

arantiuson HTML is the Web

I did something very similar back in 2006: https://programming.arantius.com/dollar-e

arantiuson Which has more sales: a single long checkout form or a multi-step one?

There's tons. https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/

arantiuson macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

Your context link is not an accurate measure:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Extend the time window and it also shows that homebrew was more popular than macports in 2004. Despite being released in 2009. (The word "homebrew" refers to more than one thing. Like the thing that the mac package manager was named after.)

arantiuson Why Airplane Boarding Got So Ridiculous

Really? For me it's getting halfway undressed (no jacket, belt off, shoes on the conveyor, empty your pockets) that takes the most time.

arantiuson Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

I agree with you. I dislike digital distribution in general, largely for this reason. I believe it's likely that as long as I can find (say) a working PS4, my physical media PS4 games will continue to work as long as I would like them to.

Unfortunately, the general public wants convenience over these benefits. Instant gratification.

arantiuson Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

Whatever they feel like it being. Including images.

For some reason, this keeps getting flipped to "on" for me, and I have to keep turning it off, to get images to load correctly in both my RSS reader and via a convenience user script.

arantiuson I lost my data trying to back it up

GP's third sentence:

> I keep 180 days with snapshots on the remote backup and 30 days for the local.

arantiuson The pros and cons of placebo buttons

> ... box-blocking laws aren't enforced as it is in NYC.

I'm from NYC and they're definitely not enforced. (Outside of rare exceptions?) They happen all the time. On the major street I live on (two lanes each way), they recently converted one lane each direction to "bus only". There's more cars than fit in one lane, and so there are /regularly/ cars blocking the box, and I've never seen any kind of enforcement, just awful effects to traffic. (Even as a pedestrian. It's hard to predict what the drivers of those cars are going to do, even if you have the signal and you're in the crosswalk.)

arantiuson Android vendors, don’t kill my app

Limits the potential battery impact.

Without this restriction, how long before an app maker schedules their alarm every millisecond?

arantiuson Show HN: Websites in 2018

Interesting. I wrote a (much) simpler version of this a short while ago, which I also find terribly useful:

https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/unfix

Might need to add a "nuke" like option.

arantiuson WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

If you just want big maps, that's already been done (by hand):

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=legend+of+zelda+map

arantiuson Restaurants are figuring out how to do without servers

Overall agree, but for some reason I can't grasp, they never have the full menu, at any such place I've ever used them.

arantiuson Hacking a cheap fitness tracker bracelet

Electronics is a similar situation to programming: from the right perspective, it's quite easy: all of the details are very small and simple. The complexity is all to do with the way that many (MANY) small details are packaged together into a larger whole. Experience just helps you recognize common patterns, because you've seen them before. In theory, anyone with patience and determination can do this. The original article is well detailed for someone with knowledge of (or willingness to research) all the things called out, generally by name.

arantiuson Show HN: Transfer files to mobile device by scanning a QR code from the terminal

http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/woof.html

arantiuson Blocking Top-Level Navigations to Data URLs for Firefox 58

Note that it said "top level" navigation.

arantiuson Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative

This is an immediate non-starter for me.

I have had plenty of real-world situations, with Google Docs, whereby I have fixed someone else's spelling (or vice versa) as they have been typing. Working on sheets/slides where this isn't available has always felt awkward in comparison, and I wouldn't look to get more of it.

arantiuson America has a monopoly problem

> 20 years ago, Netflix had a few million DVD customers ...

Off topic, but I was amazed/interested, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#Founding_and_establish...

"Netflix was founded on August 29, 1997 ... Netflix was launched on April 14, 1998, with only 30 employees and 925 DVDs available ..."

So you're technically wrong, but not far off. I thought Netflix was closer to 10 years old than 20.

arantiuson Pollen: the book is a program

> I like your idea of a slow fade after scroll.

Things blinking/fading/shifting/changing when I'm taking completely unrelated actions (or, worse, all on their own) is one of the most unreadable/unusable design decisions I regularly face. It's a good way to get me to close a tab, regardless of any other factors.

arantiuson The scientific reason you don’t like LED bulbs – and the simple way to fix them

> I don't get why LED bulbs need to flicker though

It's _much_ cheaper/easier to blink an LED on/off for 75% of the time than to drive a constant but lower current to produce 75% of the brightness. Most products are cost optimized.

arantiuson Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

I've seen plenty of suboptimal code in review, commented about what I consider a better/more readable version to be, and gotten the response "this is what the clang formatter produces". Boo to automatic formatting. It produces the worst lowest-common-denomninator version of code.

arantiuson Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

This.

I've got incremental snapshots sent to a box in a family member's house (and vice versa).

arantiuson Are They Slim Yet? Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari

AIUI It's about separating all untrusted web content from everything else on your computer. As long as you have _one_ content process (and one parent/browser process), you get the vast majority of security benefits (by limiting the capabilities of that child content process).

The same origin policy already works fine, when talking content-to-content.

arantiuson Microsoft Launching $10/month Xbox Game Pass

> It's certainly in both the consumer's interest

I have to disagree. I dislike subscriptions for several reasons, especially in an area like video games where there is replay value. (I, at least, don't re-watch tv/movies the way I re-play video games.)

A) Subscriptions give me anxiety, a feeling that I have to maximize the value I'm getting from the fixed cost. B) As a direct follow-on, it makes me feel rushed. My game play style is slow, I like adventure games. But if playing longer/slower costs more then I have pressure to hurry, rather than to enjoy. C) For casual play, I can buy a game once and enjoy it in small bursts over a long window of time. With subscriptions, I have to pay $X/mo even if I only spend an hour in a given month consuming the subscription. D) I have subscription overload. I still have cable, for a variety of reasons (including its attachment to the internet service I'd buy anyway), and Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping). But I don't subscribe to anything else. If I did I'd feel like I need to subscribe to Netflix, and Hulu, and Spotify, and Google Music, and PS Now, and Xbox Game Pass, and .. and .. and ...

arantiuson When Discs Die

See sibling post about PAR2.

arantiuson Lossless Web Navigation with Trails

> The obvious solution is to add full-text indexing by page content. And maybe even store pages for offline use.

I built something that did exactly this, over ten years ago! I was a much less capable developer then, and it never worked as well as I wanted, so it was never truly finished.

Today this would be even harder, with the prevalence of web pages that are actually _heavily_ dynamic apps. Navigation to a new "page" is a much fuzzier concept now. What gets indexed? How do I generally know what content is/is not addressable by URL?

> And filtering open tabs by a keyword.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

"Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs."