Hacker News Reader

daemoncoderon PySimpleGUI 6

I switched to Freesimplegui as a replacement.

daemoncoderon Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

Or "fount" from older, non-American English.

daemoncoderon Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Ability to handle email coming soon.

daemoncoderon Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

This is excellent clarity of thought.

daemoncoderon The new science of “emergent misalignment”

It seems possible to me at least, that social media can distort or negate any parentally installed firmware, despite parents best intentions and efforts.

daemoncoderon Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8

First thing I did after getting the csv export was throw together a python script to save all the URLs as PDFs based on the title. Not horribly robust, but a csv list of failed URLs will be ready when I wake up in the morning.

daemoncoderon Crimean bridge: Who – or what – caused the explosion?

So is trolling: one of the meanings is: fishing by trailing a baited line along behind a boat

daemoncoderon History and effective use of Vim (2019)

There's an AutoHotkey script for that!

daemoncoderon South Africa is running out of Marmite

But Pa won't.

daemoncoderon Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox (2012)

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-power-tools/059600...

I used this a great deal, when I first started out on serious UNIX tasks (1996+)

daemoncoderon How the Rosetta Stone yielded its secrets

And so it goes on: Egyptian temples defaced by early Christians, Palmyra temples destroyed by Isis...

daemoncoderon A read query can write to disk: a Postgres story

I like to say they should remove the block from under the accelerator pedal.

daemoncoderon In-demand tech skills are the last thing to look for in IT hires

I have the opposite problem: colleagues who don't want to learn how to do anything new.

daemoncoderon Autonomous drone navigates independently through the forest at 40 km/h

With the 'no drone left behind' policy, there will be drones to fetch injured drones.

daemoncoderon Gigerenzer’s simple rules of thumb often outperform complex models

TED Talk

https://youtu.be/-Lg7G8TMe_A

daemoncoderon Ask HN: What is your low stress, high paid job?

Somewhere around 2005, most of my job as an Oracle DBA/developer for a pension company seemed to consist of writing small scripts to automate some process. Somewhat like little Unix daemons to do my bidding - hence the handle ”daemoncoder” :-)

I often joke that I'm just writing a small script to replace myself with.

Currently I do a lot of data wrangling and analysis, mostly in Python, so still plenty of small programs to automate the boring stuff.

daemoncoderon System Design Interview book review

”The Fine Article” that this discussion is about :-)

daemoncoderon Ask HN: How do I become a shell god?

Unix Power Tools was a great help when I was learning shell scripting:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-power-tools/059600...

daemoncoderon Ditch high definition and new tech to fight climate change

digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions - reminds one of David MacKay's book: Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.

In particular as Professor MacKay puts it: "Obsessively switching off the phone charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is."

https://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

daemoncoderon Vimflowy

I've been using The Vim Outliner (TVO) for years now, haven't found anything else that works as well for my daily workflow.

https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=517

daemoncoderon RIAA Takedowns Backfire as Pirated MP3s Now Surface on GitHub

Those two groups are not mutually exclusive :-)

daemoncoderon Tools for Better Thinking

I've heard this concept called the cardboard colleague - you explain the problem to a cardboard cutout representing a colleague instead of an actual person. Of course it remains a concept, I don't think anyone would go so far as make one :-)

daemoncoderon 75-year-old woman with shovel accidentally took down Armenia's internet (2011)

Time-domain reflectometry

daemoncoderon Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

”I can leave anytime I want!” :-)

daemoncoderon Any way to find a lost Kindle inside a house?

This is a good point - the cable is probably 20+ years old and has been used for weed eaters and lawn mowers. It's been regularly uncoiled and re-coiled, not always correctly.

The correct way is using the over-and-under technique: https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/tools/a15873/over-unde...

daemoncoderon Any way to find a lost Kindle inside a house?

I got the capacitance idea from having worked with TDR in the late 80's. As students we used them to tune FM antenna combiners, but I never quite got the hang of it at the time.

daemoncoderon Any way to find a lost Kindle inside a house?

I found the break in a 10m extension cable, by measuring the capacitance at each end and calculating the ratio of the two values. This predicted a break at roughly 1m from one end. Then started probing the cable from 10cm towards the ”short” side, moving towards the long side. Found the break within 15cm, saving roughly 9m of cable.