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boogieson Calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code (2019)

My OpenBSD server came with the ancestor of The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play™®ʲᵏ¹ preinstalled. Been using GNU ever since I replaced Windows ME and 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet with Slacko Puppy Linux and Xsoldier, and fully quit Windows when it started shipping with Candy Crush Saga ads and no Minesweeper. Also I typed all but two characters of this message, thanks to the X11 Compose key.

¹https://thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/

boogieson 'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life

Isn’t that what Filecoin is?

boogieson Endless Operating System

OpenBSD has a help command that’s basically just an alias for man, except without arguments it opens the manpage for help(1)¹. GNU help is a bash builtin for help with bash builtins, but does redirect to more general help.

  GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
  Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
  Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
  Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

¹https://man.openbsd.org/help

boogieson Suez canal blocked by a massive ship

> this is not going to be 2h fix

In fact it’s already been 20 hours since the tweet was posted. I think the Twitter UI makes that clear enough, although reading the full thread is probably easier on Nitter https://nitter.cc/jsrailton/status/1374438210315513864

boogieson XQuartz 2.8.0

X11 is mostly finished. There’s still active development ongoing for eg. the hardened version of Xorg Xenocara (by OpenBSD, also used by Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre), and the suckless mobile UI sxmo (last commit 18 hours ago https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/).

Edit: also it’s fairly ironic you’re calling it dead on HN. Official Arc (the language HN’s written in) hasn’t been updated in about 12 years IIUC. xorg-server was updated last December https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2020-December/003....

boogieson Setting Up Arch Linux with KDE Plasma in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Not a new idea, see eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599397

boogieson MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

The XPS line in particular has had Developer Editions with pre-installed Ubuntu, and IIUC significant effort by Dell to provide good Linux drivers, for years.

boogieson Setting Up Arch Linux with KDE Plasma in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Not for me. Probably `prefers-color-scheme` CSS detecting your OS/browser settings ?

boogieson Setting Up Arch Linux with KDE Plasma in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Why not use a Windows VM on GNU/Linux to have both OSes around usually, and one even when Windows is BSODing or Blue Screen of Forced Update-ing (yes I know you can procrastinate those for various amounts of time with various hidden settings or hacks, but seems easier to just use GNU, and personally even grow out of AAA gaming)?

Edit, responding to now-deleted reply:

> a good way to virtualize Windows that maintains decently high compatibility and performance with the games I want to play

Isn’t a normal VM with GPU passthrough that? I’m genuinely asking, because I’ve asked my original comment’s question several times before and never received answers except something about wanting to buy a computer with the OS installed from a brick-and-mortar retail store, which didn’t seem to apply to you given you’ve already installed GNU/Linux.

> I can lose out on a hobby I enjoy and pretend it's "growing up". Because as we all know games are for kids; adults who play them are manchildren.

I said personally because I personally have felt less addicted to games as I personally have grown older. Of course most people are different from me in many ways, but I don’t think everyone is in every one.

boogieson Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

IMO the strongest plausible interpretation of what the comment you’re replying to said would include the Linux Foundation clearly communicating the new practice beforehand.

boogieson Nyxt Browser

WebExtension support is ‘on their roadmap’ (thanks dang for the discussion and so much else): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972374

boogieson FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

> Like yesterday I had to upload a file and the interface only supported drag and drop, and I took it personally that I had to use a mouse.

keynav to the rescue! (As I’ve said before it’s no replacement for proper vi bindings like Vimium or better Pentadactyl, but it is useful as a second-to-last resort before a hardware pointing device.)

Dragging is not bound by default but it is easy to uncomment in the example config (cp /usr/share/doc/keynav/keynavrc ~/.keynavrc and gg72 in vi on Debian):

  ### Drag examples
  # Start drag holding the left mouse button
  #q drag 1
  # Start drag holding middle mouse + control and shift
  #w drag 2 ctrl+shift

boogieson From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)

> This article fails to explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim.

In other words it does one thing, hopefully well. The philosophy behind the original vi, and IIRC originally vim too — didn’t it previously have an explicit non-goal of adding an embedded terminal emulator? If it did, those days seem over, so you IMO you might as well use an editor that does many things well (eg. having a proper designed language as the default for configuration, not the bodge that is vimscript with Lua as just a secondary option ), if you’re going to use an IDE and not an actually minimal text editor like vis or sam.

Fortunately you don’t need to ‘re-learn everything’ with evil-mode. I doubt other editors’ support for reasonable vim bindings is as complete as the common base of Spacemacs and Doom, they certainly aren’t as complete of operating systems, capable of being your WM (EXWM) or your init system or shell (http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....), nor capable of running in a terminal over ssh.

boogieson Minecraft vs. Roblox (2020)

> Also none of your kid's friends will know or want to play it

Kids I know have enjoyed it.

> the game looks and feels like something from Aliexpress

https://media1.tenor.com/images/883860f55cb3da5a24413c972dfc...

I personally disagree about the (subjective) looks at least with texture packs (https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=txp&sort=score&o...), but I’d say the feel was part of the charm when I played Roblox as a kid. There were and now probably are more of polished games like Phantom Forces, but my favorites always included unpolished ones like the old disaster survival games with shops of dozens if not hundreds of copypasta items from little half-broken handheld video game players and RC toys to the essential [anti-]gravity coil to hot sauce that made you run faster to freeze guns that let you entrap innocent bystanders in blocks of ice. And every few waves of disaster some slightly retextured blocky noob character would be spawned in the sky and fall down only for rapid unscheduled disassembly because its physics engine joints were broken, and if you were unlucky its spherical head would fly into and one-hit kill you on contact. The games felt like something a kid could make, and I tried to, but I couldn’t see the source for any I enjoyed and I never learned nearly as much as I did when given root on an (airgapped) old spare computer revived with Puppy Linux and loaded with Pygame, including example games which I learned to code by modifying. Later my favorite Roblox games became Armored Patrol and Urban Patrol, which had no micro transactions and used the physics engines to great effect — as long as you learned to enjoy being flung into the sky far enough to see the world unload, or finding the similarities between its mapgen and modern art. As I did:

https://ibb.co/dKFght1 https://ibb.co/CtxZ6wF https://ibb.co/2YqJWdL https://ibb.co/nP0m8kd

boogieson Patten Matching in Nim

> The forums were great but there's an inevitable time lag between posting and getting a response.

FWIW the core devs and many others are present on the #nim channel on Freenode with bridges to Discord, Gitter, and (non-Gitter) Matrix.

boogieson I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

My n00buntu derivative has some emojis and other logograms out of the box, eg. lines 326–337 of /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose:

  <Multi_key> <C> <C> <C> <P>             : ""   U262D # HAMMER AND SICKLE
  <Multi_key> <O> <A>                     : "Ⓐ"   U24B6 # CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
  <Multi_key> <less> <3>                  : "♥"   U2665 # BLACK HEART SUIT
 
  <Multi_key> <colon> <parenright>        : ""   U263A # WHITE SMILING FACE
  <Multi_key> <colon> <parenleft>         : ""   U2639 # WHITE FROWNING FACE
  <Multi_key> <backslash> <o> <slash>     : ""      # PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION
 
  <Multi_key> <p> <o> <o>                 : ""  U1F4A9 # PILE OF POO
 
  <Multi_key> <F> <U>                     : ""  U1F595 # REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED
  <Multi_key> <L> <L> <A> <P>             : ""  U1F596 # RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS

Unbutchered: http://ix.io/2SsC

boogieson Minecraft vs. Roblox (2020)

> Should my child learn Minecraft or Roblox?

No, they should learn Minetest¹, which is more limitless than Minecraft and more accessibly scriptable than Roblox, with an infinite world in all dimensions and basic modeling² and coding³ tools that work within a running game, but more importantly is Free software. Free as freedom from micro-transaction pushing companies, and free as in freedom to learn and tinker in the depths of the engine core and transform the entire world⁴.

1: https://www.minetest.net/education/ 2: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ 3: https://mesecons.net/luacontroller/ 4: Literally: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=15643

boogieson Show HN: I made a tool to convert images of tables to CSV

https://github.com/eihli/image-table-ocr seems to automatically find tables within larger images, IDK if it works without borders though.

boogieson When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

This site best viewed in Lynx or otherwise without JavaScript.

boogieson DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

Have you heard of Julian Assange’s surfraw?

  $ alias d='sr duckduckgo -text -ducky'
  $ d '!man surfraw'

  [www-browser opens http://manpages.org/surfraw]
  […]
  DESCRIPTION

   Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.
  […]

Edit: even better, dict(1) (or GNU dico):

  $ dict foo # same text as !dict’s http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=foo

boogieson DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

It always annoys me to lazily type the short “ddg.gg” in and wait for it redirect first to duckduckgo.com, then to https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/, but once it’s bookmarked it’s easier to use than SearX.

boogieson DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

I agree. Fortunately, to move off Bing doesn’t have to be a sudden flip of a binary switch.

> DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). — https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

I find their instant answers fairly useful, enough to often not use the other results at all — unfortunately for them enough to use some of the sites some answers are sourced from directly, in particular often using my browsers’ built in Wikipedia searches.

DuckDuckBot I can’t judge, because I don’t know which results come from it (previous comments on HN seem to show the amount of difference between DDG and Bings results vary between search terms¹), but it seems that non-Bing links are a thing and DDG can adjust what fraction of the page they take as whatever gap there is between them and the bigger crawlers’ narrows or widens.

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

boogieson DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results

These are great, and I’m glad to be able to use them without direct contact with “Big Tech” and the tracking bloat that entails, but as I understand it DuckDuckGo is more or less a glorified — albeit relatively glorious and pleasant — proxy to Big Tech’s Bing (well, more, not less, because it does add some great conveniences like the IIUC formerly open source Instant Answers¹ and !bangs, and some fraction of results from its own crawler, and likely some from Yandex. But still, the largest fraction of its core service seems dependent on Bing. Not that that’s its fault or there are attractive alternatives).

1: (Edit) https://duckduckhack.com/

boogieson Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling

As others have mentioned, they run ads — based on the search query of the page they appear on. They also (not unlike Brave) participate in affiliate programs. They get referral commissions when they funnel people to Amazon or eBay, whether through their shopping carousels or through !bangs.

> use them anyway because they at least claim to be private

Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get sued if they’re as terrible as Google. But

> haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it

I do doubt they’re as private as they could be, because they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their source code, and have had serious past privacy problems in other products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 ‘We’re not collecting your info, our servers are receiving it but just trust us we just throw it away’).

boogieson Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling

> I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for.

Right now you can pay to host an instance of the internet meta-search engine SearX: https://searx.github.io/searx/

boogieson ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’

And a shorter update thread: https://nitter.dark.fail/i/status/1366522131811627009

boogieson Microsoft Power Fx – A low-code general purpose programming language

> You kind of just described Linux, Unix, modern Web dev, iOS dev, Android dev etc.

More devs seem to have this opinion of Microsoft technologies though. Their desktop OS is the most dreaded as a platform, and the most dreaded of any OS except for Android (by 4‰, and of course devs already killed Windows Mobile)¹. And even more relevant to the link we’re discussing, another relatively low-barrier-to-entry language they created is the single most-hated programming language there is².

¹https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo... ²https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

boogieson Elegant Bash Conditionals

> I do not want to have the information of "which characters are special only when escaped in base grep" in my brain

Tangential but relevant to the Edit thread today were vis was mentioned, “No more {very-,}{no,}magic modes with different semantics and escaping rules. Instead we use the familiar and predictable POSIX Extended Regular Expression variant.”¹ is a real advantage over vim.

¹https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Vi(m)#...

boogieson Perseverance rover uses same PowerPC chipset found in 1998 G3 iMac

Or more Ubuntu-like, Debian (in fact IIUC they just recently added support for ppc64, as it’s only in unstable while ppc64el is in stable).

boogieson Robot AI beats world-class curling competitors (2020)

There was an interesting thread about e-sports in the Olympics eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726597

IMO Olympic sports should have rules that everyone is allowed to use, study, modify, and share variants of, in other words they should give players the Free Software movement’s Four Freedoms¹. This way the rules are accessible and adaptable. Good candidates might be Quake or a freed NES Tetris or Super Smash Bros. Melee. The latter two have benefited from being reverse-engineered enough to be modified by their communities for better training and competitive play.

1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html