Hacker News Reader

lozfon Spymarks, not Watermarks

Does the shorter enwp.org/Steganography render any better? It's quite handy for English Wikipedia links.

(Edit: hmm, without the "https://" it seems to depend on the browsers ability to recognise a URL.)

lozfon English: A vs. An

Certainly English can be odd. It can usually be understood through tough thorough thought though.

lozfon Λ Snap – An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study

. o O (Maybe Ubuntu users can use snap to download Snap! from the Snap store…)

lozfon Authorization terminology is a mess: Let's fix it

> ENTI- can you enter, ORI (or ORIZ) what can you do?

I don't mean to quarrel about it, but I understood Authentication to be closer to identification. To provide "adequate proof that you are actually who you claim to be".

Even the "can you enter" question falls under authorization; "does the user have appropriate permissions?" Entering is just one of perhaps many subsequent levels of permissions.

lozfon Stopping the smart TV from being used against you

> nothing like this in the UK.

It turns out there are several similar services offered in the UK by ISP's like O2, Sky, and BT¹ (recently rebranded as EE-WiFi²) who claim to be the UK's largest WiFi Hotspot Network. Perhaps that's due to it being opt-out on their routers since it was first introduced over a decade ago.

[¹]: https://info.btwifi.com/help/

[²]: https://ee-wifi.ee.co.uk/public/ee/index.htm

lozfon AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

Don't forget to check out: "bosh", "cosh", "dosh", "gosh", "josh", "mosh", and "nosh" too! ;)

lozfon Severance

Before people were getting fired in AI chats or Video calls, they were getting fired by voicemail - as featured in the track "Exciting New Direction"[0], by The New Deal.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ViJ3yA4d0Y

lozfon Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?

Better still, if Unix time tracked TAI (monotonically increasing every SI second), and Leap Seconds were handled in a distributed database much like time zones - possibly even the same one we all use anyway.

lozfon FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder

That paper was published in 2014. The reference Opus encoder has certainly had a number of improvements that affect sound quality since then, whereas very few AAC implementations have.

lozfon The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation

Heh, "funrollloops" reminds me of recompiling FreeBSD 4 on my thinkpad back in the early aughts. The word made me imagine some sort of processed breakfast cereal with too many additives.

lozfon The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

Indeed, but some scoundrel is probably scraping this page and having an LLM prepare their pitch as to how manufacturers could improve Ad / Data collection revenue by bypassing these suggestions :/

lozfon What Is a Dickover?

      uBlock-Origin settings | Filters | Cookie notices

Works well for that subset of dickovers at least.

lozfon Ubuntu 26.04

I'm not certain about CLI, but Plasma 6.6 does allow preferences / settings to be exported & restored / shared.

https://youtu.be/RuxNnfllxco?t=3894 - Neal Gompa on the Fedora 44 Release party stream,

lozfon An open letter to the UK Government on digital privacy

I recently found this video about UK's track record regarding privacy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_70iqBCDc

lozfon Make Tmux Pretty and Usable

Prefix-w works, or did you want something more?

lozfon Show HN: Crust – A CLI framework for TypeScript and Bun

also: no "C", and no "rust", despite being a portmanteau of both these other languages names :)

lozfon Linux explores new way of authenticating developers and their code

> The article seems to be insinuating that it would have.

I disagree, the article clearly states:

      Montgomery and others were careful to say that Linux ID 
      will not magically prevent another xz‑style supply‑chain 
      attack, but they argue it materially raises the cost.

lozfon Linux explores new way of authenticating developers and their code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47166473

- the video is well worth a watch.

lozfon AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

> That's the literal topic of War Games (1983)

Probably ran out of tokens before the end, during training.

"How about a nice game of Chess?"

lozfon Show HN: Clocksimulator.com – A minimalist, distraction-free analog clock

Really nicely done. I usually settle for

    xclock -analog -update 1 -norender -hl grey -fg grey -bg black

(You can put a `TZ="Wherever"` variable at the start for different timezones, and those that don't like the seconds ticking can pass e.g. 0.01 instead of 1 to the -update option).

Brits of a certain age will recall (and might appreciate) the clock faces available at https://625.uk.com/tv_logos/flash2.htm#clocks too.

lozfon Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Those are not "speed" cameras, they're to enforce daily payment (or fines) for driving in "Ultra Low Emissions Zone" areas in non-compliant vehicles. The area covers all 32 London Boroughs, around 1,500 km² (580 square miles), - affecting approximately 9 Million people.

lozfon ShannonMax: A Library to Optimize Emacs Keybindings with Information Theory

I like "both Shift keys" to toggle caps lock on the odd occasions it's useful.

lozfon Meta patents AI that takes over a dead person account to keep posting-chatting

Some information about this leaked 3 years ago (February 2023), see:

https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/64D3E63614C36/media%2FHBUh4...

via

https://xcancel.com/BasedTorba/status/2023560958023450771

lozfon Traintrackr – Live LED Maps

> unusual maps https://raildar.co.uk/map/KGX

Nice one, OpenRailTimes[0] is a similar style, but split in to smaller local sections by rail company and area.

I also like SignalBox[1] maps for their more traditional geographic layout, and for "less map -- more data", with accurate times that trains pass through stations and junctions, then RealTimeTrains[2] is hard to beat.

- [0]: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps

- [1]: https://www.map.signalbox.io/

- [2]: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/

lozfon How Markdown took over the world

Good call, I've had success with:

     pandoc -f gfm -t typst -o file.typ file.md

and as you'll know it's easy to add a Template if required.

lozfon Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities

You know that "this dude" is basically the UK Governments version of the NSA, right?

https://github.com/gchq

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/

lozfon Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

"encrapsulated"

lozfon My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

It's just one press of the G key in Vim, or Alt > in Emacs. Even nano has Alt / to jump to the end of a file.

I find those preferable to reading things in reverse order, but Vim opens up at the last location anyway so it's usually just there.