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mavidseron Write good git commit messages

I really hope this was sarcastic.

Tangentially related: There's an excellent documentary from BBC about a hospital during London's Westminster's bridge terrorist attack. They were there to shoot a planned documentary when the attack happened. Not anywhere at this scale, but it gives a pretty good behind-the-scenes look at the doctors and hospital staff preparing for the victims of a mass-causality incident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pjUNZSajuE

mavidseron How Fast Is a PS/2 Keyboard?

AFAIK, it was mostly because a lot more PS/2 keyboards support N-key rollovers than USB keyboards.

mavidseron Designing Google Maps for Motorbikes

This looks really cool. Especially liked the compass mode.

mavidseron Software-Defined Radio for Engineers [pdf]

One application I've seen people use is to spoof GPS signals.

mavidseron Show HN: Mimicking the Bloomberg menu widget without JavaScript

For one, many people prefer to browse websites with javascript turned off. Aside from performance benefits, you turn off user tracking, flashy ads, autoplay videos, annoying popovers, etc.

mavidseron Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

Turning on my AC when I leave work. I recorded the "ON' IR signals for my remote, and hooked up an IR emmitter on the wall opposite the AC. A Tasker profile (useful for automating stuff on android) pings my ras-pi home server whenever I leave work in the evening, which turns on my AC, so I arrive to an already cooled room. I also have a clunky webpage to manually turn it on/off which I use if I'm not going home directly from work.

And then, auto-downloading TV shows/movies via Jackett+Radarr+Sonarr

mavidseron European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

This bill reminds me of the 'Melancholy Elephants'[0] story by Spider Robinson, about the dangers of unchecked copyright.

[0]: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

mavidseron Dispatch: web-based IRC client in Go

Maybe for speed. Local lounge installation would feel more like a desktop app.

mavidseron Ask HN: What are you currently self hosting?

I self-host a few things on a cloud instance, and some other on a Raspberry-pi at my home.

On the cloud instance:

- Tinc VPN

- FTP and a postgres server

- NextCloud - For storing files

- ZNC - IRC Bouncer

- Lounge - IRC client

- Prometheus - TSDB for aggregating emtrics

- Grafana - For displaying the above metrics

- Cloudtorrent - A nifty app when I don't want to download torrents on my machine.

- Monica - An app for managing personal relationships, as I'm really bad with remembering people.

- Cloud9 for a web-IDE.

- Gitea - for mirroring some git repositories.

- FreshRSS - RSS Reader

- Some personal projects

- Traefik - the webserver I use for all these services.

- HAProxy - To proxy traffic from a virtual IP to the raspberry PI at my home.

The rPi is connected to the cloud-server over over tinc VPN. It hosts things which are related to my media:

- Traefik - webserver

- Prometheus - for monitoring purposes.

- Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett - for downloading some TV shows and movies

- Transmission - torrent client

- Ubooquity - for hosting comic books

- Kodi - for browsing/playing media.

mavidseron Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

I too was surprised by the date, given that I've been using it for the past year, at least, or more.

Apparently, it went into beta in 2014[1].

[1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-availab...

mavidseron Ask HN: Raw SQL vs. ORM?

For those who don't use ORMs in large projects:

What's your preferred approach to store table definitions and migrations? Raw SQL queries there too? Doesn't it make them more susceptible to mistakes?

mavidseron MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

I tend to disable Javascript for news/blog websites. In maximum cases, I get a popup-free, ad-free experience, and no private browsing warnings too.

mavidseron Payments is not a consumer product

Didn't you miss two steps - Go to cart, Pick 'Simpl' payment method.

Also - it's basically reinventing the wheel to be similar to how credit cards in the US work, linked to your email/phone instead of a card. (Not dissing the product, though. I do use, and prefer Simpl when it's available).

But honestly, I'm still waiting for a proper payment system which behaves in a responsible manner while giving me a great deal of control and security.

Using credit cards for online payments is kind of ridiculous. I literally have to take pics of both sides to skim you off. Moving liability to the banks is not an ideal solution. The Indian way of OTPs on every transaction, I agree, has too much friction.

Why isn't there a oauth-like permission based system yet? Where I can authorize recurring payments of fixed/variable amounts, authorize one-time payments, etc, and manage all these merchant at one place? Today, if I have to block a company from charging me, either I go to their website, or get in a long and unfruitful call with my bank.

mavidseron Everyone can write bad code

I never really noticed that I do this. On paper books, I remember I didn't use a highlighter, but used to drag a pencil down the right margin, as I went through the page.

mavidseron The Door Problem (2014)

Kind of. The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for opening different doors.

mavidseron ESP8266 ePaper WiFi Display Kit Runs for Months on a Charge

Yeah. Teem is another one.

mavidseron Uber is officially a cab firm, says European court

> it got almost no use cases

You don't think calling cabs to your location, paying with your stored card, knowing the fixed cost beforehand is a valid usecase?

mavidseron Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

I remember old feature phones which had a fancy light on the back, which started blinking whenever a call was about to come through. Was a pretty nifty feature when you were expecting calls ['twas a time when I used to give "missed calls" for a callback].

mavidseron I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived

The RAT actually worked. It was what made the radio come back online.

mavidseron Updates to DevTools in Chrome 62

I've seen people use the same shortcut in sublime text to copy small code blocks (without copying the indentation).

mavidseron Delete Facebook Account

I'm still on the fence about the fact that having a facebook account is a bad thing.

I have seen it consuming a lot of my time in the past, and I did deactivate my account for a few months last year. I improved my life a lot, there were fewer distractions, and I generally had better self esteem. Not much was missing, except for a few conveniences I had with the account.

I have since reactivated my Facebook account, using it sparingly now. Instead, I uninstalled all IM apps from my phone, and turned off Email/slack/work notifications. I do not have the Facebook app, or the website in my bookmarks. I receive no alerts, no messages anywhere. Every week or so, I take 5-10 minutes to scroll down the News Feed (btw, doing this has the effect that I usually see much higher quality posts which Facebook thinks I've missed rather than a whole stream of memes and ads). I may or may not read the messages, and don't reply a lot. I have my email and phone number listed on my profile, so if anyone needs to really contact me, they almost always find ways to do so.

This gives me the option to use the perks at my will without being addicted and consumed by it. Visiting a city? Use the graph search to connect with friends you can visit. I can look up old photos at will if referencing anything. All this, given the fact that it's one of the only ways to connect with most of my non-tech (who rarely check their emails) friends in an asynchronous manner.

PS: This is not a comment praising Facebook. I definitely like having my privacy in my hand, out of NSA's reach. I'm just giving a reason as to why so many people might not be keen to delete their Facebook profile.

mavidseron Indian government bans archive.org

AFAIK, Jio, at least is using IP based blocking. Unable to ping or connect to any port on the the blocked IP addresses.

mavidseron Ask HN: What is your home media PC setup?

Raspberry Pi 3 running OSMC. Connect an external HDD and plug it to your TV. I use Yatse on Android to control it. It also doubles up as a NAS if you want to watch movies on other devices.

mavidseron Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

Exactly. I always imagined a future where there would be an oAuth scopes like gateway for banks. Something like -

This website requires the following permission:

    [x] Monthly recurring payments of $20
        [o] Automatically get the payments
        [ ] Send me the link to deposit every month

    > Proceed
    > Cancel

Life would have been so simpler then (Obviously I haven't thought this through completely, but something similar to this with proper security would be far superior than our current model of Name + Credit card number + CVV).

mavidseron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2016)

  Location: Jaipur, India
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: Depends upon the location
  Technologies: JS, Python, C, Go, Bash. Full-stack web and system tools.
  Résumé/CV: http://sidverma.net/Resume.pdf
  Email: sid[at]sidverma[dot]net

mavidseron Push notifications when you have 8M followers [video]

Nah, he gets one for every one of his post that gets a new like. He has 8M followers, so that's a lot of likes.

mavidseron 'New' Python modules of 2015

It's really good for prototyping things, actually.

mavidseron Gotty – Share your terminal as a web application

I can't convey how I grateful I am to you. I haven't been so excited by any service in a long time. This is awesome!

mavidseron Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?

Thanks. I'm looking at it right now, and it looks really cool.