Hacker News Reader

irq-1on Show HN: SignatureAPI – Electronic Signature API

I didn't see any verification of the person, like checking an ID. Is that not a normal part of electronic signatures?

It seems like a path that a tech savvy company could excel in: document/ID photos, voice or video confirmations, recorded interviews..

irq-1on Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

> 4. Keep supporting self-distributed extensions with developer managed signing keys and update URLs.

Mozilla followed the big corps in the 'store' model, instead of keeping it open free-form. We might have a viable developer certification trust system by now, but with that too, only the corps have enforced signing systems (that are closed and fragmented.)

irq-1on Show HN: 73,530 free book summaries in 40 languages (with paid audio)

> Please wait for the current search to finish.

This message modal appeared when I tried to select a book. I'm sure you know that's not the user experience anyone wants.

irq-1on NIST Interoperable Randomness Beacons

P2P gaming should use this too: everyone makes their moves, send a hash of the moves, then send their moves. It eliminates cheating during the final move exchange, where someone could change their moves after seeing other players moves.

irq-1on NIST Interoperable Randomness Beacons

> ... there was no way that they could do the serial computation fast enough to know what actual beacon value they were creating.

But that also means they can't validate the calculation until long after it's used. For a video game I like this strategy (accept then verify) as you don't have to catch cheaters in the moment. For a system of currency, not so much.

irq-1on An easier way to get your logo in the inbox: Google's latest BIMI changes

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

irq-1on Orion, our first true augmented reality glasses

I think it's telling that any movie or game with cool AR visuals includes access to huge(!) amounts of data, like face recognition + criminal history.

irq-1on New standards for a faster and more private Internet

What will ECH mean for places like China or South Korea? Do governments have access to Cloudflare logs? Only with court orders?

ECH seems directly opposed to Chinese governments control of the web.

irq-1on Pipe Syntax in SQL

What you want is an HTML tag or response header that restricts network access, which the browser can then enforce. Offline or a list of allowed domains, this would be great for security in general. Not so great for advertisers though.

irq-1on Make Firefox Private Again

This feels like Adblock Plus adding "acceptable ads".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...

irq-1on How the Totem Compass Works

It's cool tech and there seems like lots of opportunities: tracking kids, event security (tie the device to the 'ticket'), disaster emergency (how many people in this area).

They don't talk about battery life. Isn't the Airtag an RFID reactive (no battery) device? A big difference.

irq-1on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

No, go is not for native gui apps. I recently made some rough go bindings to minifb and while easy to do, it wasn't productive at all. Errors are hard to follow; are they go or minifb? Callbacks work until I have too many calls then the app might freeze altogether.

Go is great for image/draw and things like passing pixels: (C.uint)buffer.Pix

It comes down to Google wanting Go to use the web as the interface, which in practice means not doing dynamic linking (except in Windows.)

To your question, go gui apps will have 'runtime.LockOsThread()' near the start so it's all green/light/go threads and only 1 OS thread.

irq-1on Deep Live Cam: Real-time face swapping and one-click video deepfake tool

Job interviews, bank loans, anywhere racism or discrimination exists (or might exist.)

irq-1on Driving Compilers

Great article but K&R shouldn't be blamed for lacking this material:

> Print the words

hello, world

> This is a big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere,compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy.

irq-1on A simple procedural animation technique [video]

Great video. Much more complicated, but checkout Godot "fish" in the docs.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance...

> The animation will be made of four key motions:

A side to side motion

A pivot motion around the center of the fish

A panning wave motion

A panning twist motion

irq-1on For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

> Our hope is that if we develop a good attribution solution, it will offer a real alternative to more objectionable practices like tracking.

There is no negotiating with the advertising industry. No system will stop them from acting unethically to gain an edge.

My idea for such a system: random GUID added to each ad. Browser plugin collects GUIDs. Client protects itself with random GUIDs removed and new random GUIDs added. Client sends GUIDs to a Collector they choose. Collectors run client GUIDs against Advertisers lists (bloom filters). Advertisers pay Collectors, and Collectors give to orgs.

Edit: replace GUIDs with 6 random bytes, so the existence of an id is not proof of it's being viewed. it needs to be plausible that the client added an id randomly, and that's not the case with a GUID.

irq-1on Show HN: Create a portrait painting from one photo

> I wonder if this augurs a larger shift in artistic taste.

People have distorted/blurred/abstracted images from the start with 'Vaseline on the lens' to airbrushing to modern concerns about 4k showing too much detail. Popular art wants to remove the detail and portray the subject as better-than.

irq-1on The Swift compiler is slow due to how types are inferred

Why not make it a warning if the compiler leaves the happy path? The fix is easy for the programmer (enums, casting, etc.) and could be left unfixed if the programmer knows its OK (meaning it wont take 42 seconds and give an error.) The LSP would have to know when the compiler ran into this, but if the compiler can identify the type explosion problem, it can tell the LSP.

irq-1on HSBC Writes Down Byju's, Once $22B Indian Edtech Giant, to Zero

Huh, I was just happy to see HSBC lose billions.

irq-1on DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database

Take a look at https://www.hydraulic.dev/

>Build self-updating desktop app packages in minutes. Deploy to every OS from any OS. Platform native formats, fully signed and notarized. Electron, Flutter, JVM and native.

And free:

> Conveyor is free for open source projects.

irq-1on Show HN: Use Go's HTML/template to write React-like code

You can also use `go generate` to create all the .html routes/handlers at compile. Not that it would matter much in a small app.

irq-1on LuaRT: Lua programming environment for console, desktop applications for Windows

LuaJIT has access to the system libraries:

https://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html#sleep

irq-1on The Fall of the House of Etsy

Etsy should charge the sellers fees per sale, and make them post an expensive bond. Then Etsy can ban drop shipping, give instant refunds, pay return postage, and generally hold the creators to high standards.

Etsy should also mandate the inclusion of a scan code in the package, which the customer can use to show they received the shipment but it wasn't as advertised. This would catch people lying about the contents, when the creators take a photo of the item & code in the box (and send it to Etsy before shipping.) Creators taking a photo and then changing the item will be caught because of the number of complaints, and customers can be refunded long after the transactions using the bond.

irq-1on .NET History

Half of this is just the re-naming. It's like reading 'history' thats a list of names. And it doesn't seem like its changed with the open, modern 'core' components.

irq-1on Running PHP fast at the edge with WebAssembly

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829557#38834787

>> Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024?

> Server-side WASM takes off with the re-implementation of PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python, and others, and a WASM based virtual server (shell, filesystem, web server, etc..) Cost more but has better security for both the host and user.

Guess I was wrong about it costing more?

> … we can run PHP safely without the overhead of OS or hardware virtualization.

But it only runs at half the speed of PHP, so you need more resources.

irq-1on SecureDrop Protocol

From the Bitmessage website https://wiki.bitmessage.org/

> Security audit needed

> Bitmessage is in need of an independent audit to verify its security. If you are a researcher capable of reviewing the source code, please email the lead developer. You will be helping to create a great privacy option for people everywhere!

irq-1on Meta String: A more space-efficient string encoding than UTF-8 in Fury

Wow. Didn't know about Train and custom dictionaries. Very cool.

irq-1on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster

Thank you for this comment. Trying to sort through the mess of GUI frameworks for .NET and other languages is difficult.

irq-1on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster

Is the website wrong? The repository for the toolkit is MIT, but the website says free for under $1million...

https://github.com/unoplatform/uno.toolkit.ui/blob/main/LICE...

https://platform.uno/uno-toolkit/

DEV FRIENDLY LICENSING

Uno Toolkit License

Uno Toolkit is available for free for individual developers and businesses with revenue of less than USD 1,000,000. If your revenue exceeds this threshold, please reach out to us to obtain a license for Uno Toolkit and access the complete suite of development accelerators.

irq-1on Self-hosting forms, the sane way

Netlify forms looks like it could be great, but the pricing is awful: 100 per site /month ($19+ when exceeded)

Cloudflare form plugin sets up a worker/handler, which is cheap and easy. It does require coding though, unlike the formsubmit.co link.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/plugins/st...