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jsmith99

1,472 karma · joined January 3, 2018

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jsmith99··on Open Source Maintenance Fee
Yes, the repo readme says the code is open source but the fee is required for using the repo's issues and releases features.
jsmith99··on Postgres IDE in VS Code
I just use a MCP server (with copilot or cline) that has a read only login to my database.
jsmith99··on I Built My Own Audio Player
I strongly recommend the apps you mentioned, but in the author's case they wanted to keep their music in iCloud.
jsmith99··on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
There's a dedicated settings page for quickly setting popular dev settings such as showing extensions and full paths. Getting rid of the rest just involves tweaking a few other settings like don't show tips or welcome screen. I also hide the weather and news widget because it's tabloid rubbish but many people seem to love it.
jsmith99··on Show HN: Min.js style compression of tech docs for LLM context
I'm also using RR7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro just refused to believe me that I could import Link from react-router. Just ignored my instructions and went down a rabbit hold in copilot agent mode, deeper and deeper, trying every possible package name (none of which were installed). I've now created a copilot instructions file into which I've copied most of the RR7 migration docs.
jsmith99··on Modern LaTeX
I've also used pagedjs for a relatively complex booklet with bidirectional text in different languages, images and long footnotes. The result was great but there were some annoying bugs, some of them seeming to be possible underlying bugs in chrome and Firefox. Still, latex would have been even more frustrating.
jsmith99··on Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers
Very nice colours. However I am mildly red-green colour blind like 5% of men (and very few women) and the two in the middle look practically the same to me. The left and third from left are almost indistinguishable too. I'm guessing this isn't the case for everybody?
jsmith99··on My Amazon TV Now Unmutes Itself During Prime Video Commercial Breaks
No scam required, if you ask nicely they are usually happy to. Not always, but you could always try again with a different agent.
jsmith99··on Hacker of the year nominee: Gromit the Dog
Looks like this was written before the recent film Vengeance Most Fowl. That has a lot of pretty good jokes about how annoying chipper, overconfident, AI assistants are, along with Wallace finally realising that his horrifyingly irresponsible creations could be used for evil in the wrong hands.
jsmith99··on How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year
In practice most people treat the UK tax year as ending 31 March - this is sufficiently close and actually explicitly permitted.
jsmith99··on Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
cooklang is very nice but not all parsers seem willing to display comments or metadata. Eg there are two plugins for obsidian but neither seems willing to display the recipe description or anything else that isn’t a step.

You might also want to consider why you want your recipes to be machine readable. I loved the idea in theory but unless you’ve integrated this with your smart larder/fridge or something it might not be useful.

jsmith99··on Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July
Sounds like wrongful or fraudulent trading. Many countries have laws about it. Eg in UK https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_trading
jsmith99··on React for R
I wouldn’t want to deploy a Shjny app externally (although loads of people seem to do so with no problems) but for internal tools it’s incredible. You can make reactive dashboards and analysis tools with no plumbing - just refer to an input when specifying your charts/outputs and they will be automatically plumbed and update automatically.
jsmith99··on One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)
Actually Microsoft have recently added a warning dialog about certain automatic csv conversions. Perhaps they finally read the thread. https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog/control-data-con...
jsmith99··on Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
Yes, use a different operating system, one that gracefully handles null pointer dereferencing by third party kernel modules? /s
jsmith99··on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops
Do Linux systems not crash if a third party kernel module crashes? Or was your comment sarcastic?
jsmith99··on The economics of the Birkin handbag
It’s very hard to compete on quality in leather bags without a reputation and a good bricks and mortar network because online customers have no way to tell the quality and even in person customers probably lack the knowledge - so from the producers perspective why bother spending more?
jsmith99··on NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use
Many bundlers output module format - it makes features like code splitting (chunking into separate files) convenient.
jsmith99··on Travelling with Tailscale
I wonder if trying to account for that would make you look even more risky/fraudulent. Eg you access the bank portal from a US address but at similar time you physically use the card in Europe.
jsmith99··on 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
The weirdest thing about this bizarre comment is the suggestion that rabbis have any influence on the Israeli army.
jsmith99··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
The attacker changed the projects contact details at oss fuzz (an automated detection tool). There’s an interesting discussion as to whether that would have picked up the vulnerability https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/issues/11760
jsmith99··on IrfanView
> It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.

I use Faststone, what am I missing?

jsmith99··on Manipulating Chess-GPT's World Model
Article says: ‘Chess-GPT also played chess well, with the best model playing at approximately 1500 Elo.’

So I’m guessing this wasn’t full strength stockfish.

jsmith99··on TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl
This is what a TPM is designed to prevent, but they’re not very popular in Linux community.
jsmith99··on USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update
This macOS version only supports models since 2017-19 (depending on product line). Apple don’t really have an excuse compared to Microsoft since they only have a few hardware options.

It’s amusing to compare the comments here to the comments on windows update threads. As nobody else has, let me add the reminder for everyone to switch to <different OS>.

jsmith99··on The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions
I’m surprised at the poor performance of python here. For reference there are several very brief R examples which are just 2-3 seconds. Eg http://blog.schochastics.net/posts/2024-01-08_one-billion-ro...
jsmith99··on Can confirm a current Broadcom VMware customer went from $8M renewal to $100M
Is $8m small for a VMware contract? Surely if you’re big enough at some point it becomes cheaper to put something together in house - surely this point is far before spending $100m a year?
jsmith99··on Old London Bridge
It’s very worth visiting - a Palladian mansion with a big art collection that includes some gems such as one of Rembrandt’s greatest self portraits.
jsmith99··on Notes on my Remarkable tablet
It’s almost as if there is a connection between subscription revenue and development progress.
jsmith99··on Breaking Bitlocker – Bypassing the Windows Disk Encryption [video]
Nothing new. This attack is demonstrated here many times and the Microsoft docs discuss a similar attack using self encrypting drives. The counter measure is to use a virtual TPM built into the CPU or to use TPM+PIN (which is standard practice for security).
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