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daremon

286 karma · joined September 25, 2008

Personal site: https://daremon.gr
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daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
So many common things! It also inspired my love for Linux (I installed Slackware back then), for "hacking" and also pushed me into the demoscene which I much enjoyed!

PS I read the one by AQUARIUS

daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
It gets better: I could not finish Pattern Recognition, it was a struggle and I cannot remember anything from it!
daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
Generally I don't like translations. After the Internet became a thing and Amazon started shipping to Greece (probably after 2000) I never read Greek translations of English literature again.
daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
Yes I read them and I loved them. Not the same effect of course, as Gibson's futuristic world was already described, but good nonetheless.
daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
Yes exactly, I had this story written in Greek and used GPT to translate it. The Greek edition I read was from 1989.
daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
He really tried IMO. Actually I wrote this story to him, the translator of the Greek edition when I happened to find him on Facebook. He told me he felt he didn't do justice to the original work and always felt a bit bad.
daremon··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek).

In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.

I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.

That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.

At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.

To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.

P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.

P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.

daremon··on Show HN: AI dub tool I made to watch foreign language videos with my 7-year-old
I honestly don't see how movies are different with any content ie YouTube videos. I am pretty sure MrBeast etc have the same lawyers as any big studio.

Could this run locally? I would certainly pay for that and you're off the hook on how anyone uses it.

daremon··on Show HN: AI dub tool I made to watch foreign language videos with my 7-year-old
This is really amazing! Well done.

I already joined the beta but I want to point out another use case here as well:

In many countries (ie Greece where I'm from) movies and TV shows never get dubbed. We rely on subtitles. This means that if you can't see well (disability or age-related eye problems) and if your English is not excellent, then you are doomed to only watch locally produced movies & shows.

This can be a real life-changer.

daremon··on Show HN: CoinVision – Live price and volume data for crypto currencies
Some more info:

It took me and my co-founder ~3 months of hard full-time work to build this first version.

We pull data straight from the exchanges (>30 at this time) and one of the most time consuming tasks is taking care of outlier prices, overpriced sales of small coin amounts, erroneous trades and the general instability of the 30+ APIs we consume.

We’re not 100% sure what our direction should be - suggestions welcome. We do intend to integrate with more exchanges, add more and more user features (ie a better portfolio that pulls data from exchanges, push notifications etc) and redo the whole UI.

Some links:

Main page: https://coinvision.io/

BTC page: https://coinvision.io/coin/BTC/Bitcoin

Compare page: https://coinvision.io/compare

daremon··on PDFmyURL.com - Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free
Excellent work - congratulations! Even ignoring the advanced options your converter is fast and produces accurate results!

Very well done!

daremon··on PDFmyURL.com - Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free
Try doing that with your Mac OS X and http://www.woothemes.com/demo/dailyedition/

Does it work correctly? pdfmyurl.com does and so do a few more online such services.

daremon··on Google Ad Planner
I don't know about keyword affinity, but traffic stats are very accurate based on ~15 sites I tested (ranging from small to large).
daremon··on Facebook speeds up PHP
"...that will increase speed by around 80%..."

I guess this is compared to plain PHP not to accelerators? And what exactly is the difference from a PHP accelerator?

daremon··on HubSpot has now raised $33m... and is growing fast
With 1600 paying customers and a minimum of $250/month they should generate ~$400.000/month!
daremon··on XSS is not a feature
In my understanding the video highlights 2 problems:

a) csrf: Basecamp search results page could reject input that didn't originate from the respective search box. But it's useful to be able to send someone a link that will perform a search - it isn't a state changing operation after all. So everyone allows that.

b) xss: the main problem of course is that the search results page prints the search input without any filtering...

daremon··on Bug #48669: PHP now includes GOTO
About (1), what's wrong with break? (it also accepts a level e.g. break 3)
daremon··on Hiring a sales person... Any advice?
This is also an interesting read: http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Closing_the_Gap_Part_1.html
daremon··on Ask HN: What do you think of my project?
Nice idea and the implementation seems good. I am tempted to use this on some of my sites.

Some questions:

a) How does it work? Lets say I have a recipe site and a visitor arrives from Google having searched for "steak". How do you find related articles on my site?

b) What if my site isn't indexed? (e.g. new, blocked etc)

c) The widget has 8 actions (links/buttons etc). 2 of them point to my site and 6 to yours! I would prefer something like 7 to mine and 1 to yours :)

d) Certainly add some options. The "Looking for more on", "Or try a new search" and the 3 related keywords should be optional.

e) The 480px is very limiting. I can't put that in a sidebar it has to go to the main area

f) The site copy needs a redo. I could not easily grasp what it does, how it works etc.

Great work overall - I hope my suggestions are well taken!

daremon··on King Size Linodes Now Available
Of course it's 2TB (2000GB).
daremon··on Ask HN: What's the Browser Distribution for your site?

  Greece         92.95%	
  Cyprus          3.36%	
  Germany         0.80%	
  United Kingdom  0.62%	
  United States   0.38%	
  Netherlands     0.23%	
  France          0.19%	
  Italy           0.19%	
  Sweden          0.13%	
  Belgium         0.12%
daremon··on Ask HN: What's the Browser Distribution for your site?
http://greekcook.gr

It's a Greek site with recipes with ~100k visits (last 30 days)

  Internet Explorer 61.20%
    7.0    46.78%	
    6.0    28.36%	
    8.0    24.74%
  Firefox           33.35%
  Chrome             2.33%
  Safari             1.59%
  Opera              1.20%
  Mozilla            0.13%
daremon··on Is this Official Google merchandise site?
http://googlestore.com/home.asp is the USA+Canada official Google store. Probably it runs an older shopping cart script written in MS asp.

http://google-store.com/index.php is the official Google store for the rest of the world . It uses osCommerce!

daremon··on Ask HN: What to do after selling startup?
Certainly read this: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
daremon··on Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?
The really impressive thing is that this is the work of a 1 person startup
daremon··on Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?
I was very impressed with the results I got for some queries. The images were spot on. The first results were indeed official sites. I liked the fact that I see web results, images, news in one page.

Cons (sorry!): 1. I disliked the name 2. The design was bad. Huge textbox, ugly duck, everything seems scattered around 3. I think I liked the ajaxy interface and the more links, however I would have liked more results in every category (images, news etc) before I had to press "more"

Overall excellent work.