Hacker News Reader

clonon Show HN: Eesel – Federated search without API integrations

Caught my attention as eesel means donkey in my mother tongue. Privacy policy and terms of service links lead nowhere. Does not seem like those topics are considered seriously, just to make the footer look right. Seems like a scam.

clonon What Is Paramotoring?

Having been in the aviation community for some time and having seen more than a few accidents with these things, it's worth to mention that they are way more dangerous than they appear. The thing to look out for is "collapsing" the wing, which is likely fatal at the kind of low altitudes normally flown. That "wing" always needs a positive loading. Downdrafts at the perimeter of a thermal, orthographic winds, rotors, fronts, convergence lines, other causes of turbulence and vertical drafts - there is a reason why you often see paramotors in the calm of the evening, when you can cut the air like butter. If you like flying, a more safe hobby would be gliding.

clonon Show HN: DevToys.app – An offline Swiss Army knife for developers

Looks great. Is there a similar tool around for Linux?

clonon How the Finnish survive without small talk (2018)

As an Estonian, I can relate to this. "How are you" and similar drivel gets me every time and borderline drives me mad.

There is a brilliant comic called Finnish Nightmares that covers many situations like this. For anyone not Finnish (or Estonian) it is probably an inside joke.

http://finnishnightmares.blogspot.com

clonon Faker.js is now a community controlled project

Am I the only one who'se browser really struggles to scroll this page? Firefox Mobile.

clonon Reversing an integer hash function

Excellent tutorial for bitwise arithmetic this is. The key is the motivation you receive from the prospect of being able to do something that seems "l33t".

clonon In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)

The plain utf8 covers the "basic multilingual plane" (x0000-xFFFF), so it will get you very far, actually.

In our app, we finally went for utf8mb4 to allow people to enter emoji. As a side "bonus" you will also soon see some clever people entering their names to stand out, such as "𝙹𝚘𝚑𝚗". Note that this is not "John". It is actually a series of mathematical symbols:

  U+1D679   MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE CAPITAL J
  U+1D698   MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE SMALL O
  U+1D691   MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE SMALL H
  U+1D697   MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE SMALL N

clonon The Metaverse Is Already Here for Cows and It’s Sad

The 5L of extra produce cannot possibly pay for the equipment and power.

clonon Webb Sunshield Fully Deployed

Here is the mission control broadcast for the final stages of the sunshield deployment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBPNi7uGgWM

A lot more information and happy faces

clonon Webb Sunshield Fully Deployed

Have been following the Webb blog ever since the 25th, but come to think of it, this would have been a better link:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/sunshield-successfully-de...

TL;DR 139/178 release mechanisms have worked flawlessly!

clonon Intimate portraits of a hospital Covid unit from a photojournalist-turned-nurse

How many of those do you recon had already been exposed before vaccine availability?

These people were putting their neck out almost a full year before the first shot was administeres. Chances are, many of them already acquired immunity via this route.

clonon Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2021?

Event Horizon by John Micheal Godier

clonon Log4j 2.16: Certain strings can cause infinite recursion

You would still be doing the job of concatenating together the error message, possibly rendering some complex objects to a string, that is then fed to the no-op. The point parent was making is that there is also a performance aspect to this, in addition to the security aspect.

clonon Imagor: A fast, Docker-ready image processing server written in Go

For what it's worth, libvips is part of OSS fuzz

https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/tree/a21768ce6a5056d27f82...

I thought they mostly fuzz the loaders, which are the most critical, apparently the found bugs present a picture of a pretty wide coverage:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/list?can=1&q=Lib...

As of June 2021, OSS-Fuzz has found over 30,000 bugs in 500 open source projects.

clonon Imagor: A fast, Docker-ready image processing server written in Go

libvips is great! The performance is so good you can probably process your images on the fly. Can't recommend it enough.

clonon Show HN: Minimalist offline journal app with a chat interface

It's a SwiftKey quirk, apparently, trying to be helpful in inserting common punctuation.

clonon Show HN: Minimalist offline journal app with a chat interface

Thank you. This will replace my notes app.

One small thing that got me confused. Typing ? in my SO's Android (MS SwiftKey) automatically adds a space after it: "? ". No idea why it does that, but it stops search from working. Maybe skip leading whitespace?

clonon Estonian winter 1, delivery robots 0

Absolutely. Sidewalks were never meant for meandering robots. At the very least we should tax those stupid things as they consume a public resource.

clonon Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?

To be clear, I did not mean that my fingers are caught between the keys. More like I often felt like I'm hitting keycaps sideways. I could not always discipline myself to operate the keyboard like a 1970s typist. This was very distracting and caused errors. Probably I bottomed out too much, instead of just breaking the click? I'm sure there's technique that can be mastered.

I guess I'm a slimline keyboard person and thanks for the recommendation. Perhaps I will try a mechanical slim as well, to fully close this experiment. For the moment I enjoy just getting some work done on the MX Keys, it is an absolute delight. Can't say enough good things about it.

clonon Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?

Exactly the same sentiment. My yearlong experiment to try to love mechanical keyboards left me with a thousand euro hole in my wallet and physical problems spanning from fingers to upper body musculature. I loved the tactile feel, but hated what they did to my body.

I think mechanical keyboards are just too high, with excessive travel. You sort of have to keep your hands floating in the air, which transfers stress to your neck, shoulders and upper body. No palm support I tried offered any substantial relief, probably due to the long travel and finger contortions required.

Second issue, perhaps I'm a poor typist, but my fingertips frequently got stuck between the keys, causing mistakes by triggering adjacent keys.

One day I got tired and bought a 10 euro keyboard from the grocery shop. Noname, slimline, rubber domes. What a relief that was.

These days I swear by Logitech MX Keys. Best keyboard I have ever touched.

clonon Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit

It does offer a diff option when you have local edits in the /vendor (for whatever insane reason). Always assumed it could be triggered manually as well. TIL.

I also love how easy it is to declare conflicts [1]. Some sub sub sub dependency down the tree had a bad 0.0.1 release? Just declare a conflict and have the tool do the work.

[1] https://getcomposer.org/doc/04-schema.md#conflict

clonon Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit

For all the animosity that PHP gets these days, every single item on your list (granted, of very basic demands) aligns with PHP's composer. I am surprised that Rust is that much worse off than PHP in this regard.

clonon Microsoft blocks EdgeDeflector to force Windows 11 users into Edge

Where do you place the teams in charge of the steaming pile of manure that is Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Office 365 et al? Seemingly these turds have also dropped from the cloud faction. My experience seems to be that excluding dev tooling, all attempts by MS to bring productivity tools to this brave new Internet thing have failed dismally.

Office 365 vs Google Suite is not even funny, if you have to use O365, that is. Dynamics 365 looks fancy at first, but make a few clicks towards settings and you can witness 5 different UX languages, one half-assed modernisation attempt laid on top of another. Plus the churn from ongoing attempts, pointless rebrands and nonsense invented by bizdev guys. Add the famous MS back compat policy and you have a special kind of hell.

clonon Sed challenge: join cal -y months into a single column

At what point should you give up writing a sed "program" and just write a few lines of Python to arrive at an answer? Seems he went way past that point.

clonon How to Read “Gilgamesh” (2019)

This seems analogous to some documentaries and TV shows that restart the story pretty much from the beginning at 15 minute intervals, after each commercial break. Basically allow people latch on that just joined or were not paying attention. It must have been equally tormenting to the ancients.

clonon Private keys used to sign EU Digital Covid Certificate might have been leaked

It strikes me as one of those things that society is perfectly happy self-regulating

clonon Private keys used to sign EU Digital Covid Certificate might have been leaked

https://g.nh.ee/images/pix/1200x0/lYFSVUXJ5XY/1d2e261794d4d3...

This QR code proves Adolf Hitler has received 2 doses of Pfizer vaccine. At the moment you can still use the Estonian app to verify this (https://kontroll.digilugu.ee). Probably this specific cert will be revoked soon in all the apps.

But the cat is out of the bag. Everyone's grandparents will need to do the certificate retrieval dance again, which is another confusion that we did not need at this critical junction.

Someone out there has a serious problem with ethics. Or someone really screwed up to the point where it was obvious that a responsible disclosure was already a moot point. In my experience, CERT-EU is normally very competent and would have handled it professionally.

clonon How our SaaS landed its first 20 B2B partnerships with cold email

Came here to say the same thing. A good example how to nerf a marketing opportunity by showing disrespect towards your reader.

clonon Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics

It was implied that the correct answer is 4.

clonon [dead]

I think Web 3.0 is currently a nickname for IPFS.