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notpushkin

7,177 karma · joined May 30, 2019

[Verifying my OpenPGP key: https://keyoxide.org/dbed7086f4662ac59eaa343536271a1d783b07c4]

alexander@notpushk.in

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notpushkin··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
Waterfox, a Firefox fork, has actually built a builtin qdblocker. (And yes, they do whitelist their search partner by default, but you can turn that off.) Apparently it’s faster than uBlock Origin, but there’s been problems on some websites, so I’ll be sticking with uBO for now.

Edit: actually, it seems the underlying functionality was built by Mozilla themselves, just not exposed in the UI yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020

notpushkin··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
> I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages.

If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.

notpushkin··on I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)
Good point, thanks.
notpushkin··on I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)
Why even type anything? Just ssh to 7000, and use the same public key to authenticate. The server responds with “You’re in”, opens up 22 and closes the connection. You then ssh normally.

This bespoke server should not advertise it in any special way though (generic OpenSSH banner), and can be used to also ban port scanners if they try to do something fishy.

fwknop is impossible to even scan for, though, so it’s a bit more robust in that sense.

notpushkin··on I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)
You could run both on 443: https://github.com/yrutschle/sslh
notpushkin··on I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)
fwknop is a bit lower risk though. If all an attacker can do is open a port, they’ll still have to exploit OpenSSH.
notpushkin··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
This can briefly happen, but until VCs run out of money we’ll get competitors about as soon as the enshittification starts. Well, at least in theory, regulatory caprure is a thing, so it doesn’t always work out.

This also doesn’t work when there’s network effects at play. I believe this is why Grab (Southeast Asian Uber/UberEats) is adding social features like a whole fucking messenger into the app. Didn’t help: Bolt has launched there as well and is often cheaper and faster so I usually check both.

(Now, Grab is publicly traded, and maybe it’s profitable, which would undermine my whole argument. But I’m still getting cheap transportation and discounted food. Maybe they externalize the costs somewhere else which indeed also sucks.)

notpushkin··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
All that aside, I’m happy that VCs are paying for my stuff! I have no idea why they keep doing that. They’ve studied my behaviour so they should already know I’ll delete {app_name} as soon as I get a better deal elsewhere. (Better yet, I’ll keep both and let them fight!)

Maybe they can capture the market for a brief moment, but if they do have a long term strategy, I’m not seeing one.

notpushkin··on WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
100 Mbps is sometimes just enough for the job. And it’s easy to see that you only have two pairs instead of four – just look at the connector.
notpushkin··on WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
WhatKable was right there!
notpushkin··on Bluesky Protocol Services
There’s a next-route-announcer tag on the page, so probably not Astro. (Can’t recommend Astro Starlight enough though!)
notpushkin··on Gloomberb
I think it is more oriented towards retail investors (if anybody) than professional users. In theory it could compete with TradingView?

(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)

notpushkin··on Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states
The number of permutations of n distinct objects is n!. So, probably a bit more than 8, since 8! < 10⁸, but I don’t think you are terribly off :-)

Edit: 58! < 10⁸⁰ < 59!

notpushkin··on Show HN: Mcptoon – Token-efficient MCP CLI client
Cool! Can we get a human-efficient MCP CLI while at it? I want to be able to use MCP just as well as the LLMs can.
notpushkin··on My server is a phone now
> It came back, and lesson learned: Android already has working drivers for every piece of this hardware. [...] Throwing all of that away in pursuit of a more conventional userspace was the wrong trade.

pmOS is a proper port with native Linux drivers, but there’s also Libhybris / Halium which runs Android drivers in a more typical “Linux” userland. Ubuntu Touch uses that, so it could be a good starting point. Sadly, I don’t see CMF Phone 1 in the devices list: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/

notpushkin··on Pareto Front
Something like that! But for any font.

I think fontTools instancer could work here, though it’s a CLI: https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/varLib/instancer....

notpushkin··on Taste Is All That's Left
Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.
notpushkin··on Pareto Front
...so it is the Pareto font indeed!
notpushkin··on Pareto Front
I feel like there should be a GUI tool to bake in any alternates into the font itself.
notpushkin··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Yeah, but it’s a third party mechanical keyboard with a Touch ID sensor.

I suppose if one came across a pile of old / broken Magic keyboards, they could extract a bunch of Touch ID sensors and sell those to a keyboard manufacturer (or in their own keyboard). This does not scale, obviously, but including it as an option could work.

notpushkin··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
https://meet.hn/ is tangential but not quite for meetups, just discovering who lives nearby. Could be a good starting point though!
notpushkin··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
This is very cool. I’ve lived in Tallinn for a while so definitely would attend if it was ~5-ish years ago.
notpushkin··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
Tell a bit more about yourself and maybe somebody would invite you as a +1?
notpushkin··on Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF
It’s vibe coded but it’s not slop. There’s a lot of human input here. So either the author overlooked the elevation issue or it was a deliberate decision, but in any case you can’t just pin this on “LLMs don’t understand isometric 3D”.
notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
Not all banks do SEPA Instant, yeah. I suppose the answer to that is connecting using PSD2 and sending the payment request then checking payment actually went out (using something like https://gocardless.com/). Many countries also have local bank link systems (e.g. in the Baltics it’s common to have dedicated buttons in the payment form for the big 3 or 4 banks everyone uses).

I’m talking about in-person payments though. It would be so easy to implement QR payments backed by the existing SEPA Instant rails. Many bank apps already understand EPC QR codes (usually found on invoices), so shops could just show these to accept payment. In case your bank doesn’t support SEPA Instant, you could show the cashier the receipt in your bank app, which, well, horribly insecure, but probably fine for low-stakes cases like grocery shopping (you don’t want to be banned from your grocery store chain for forging a 35 € payment).

notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
Yep, the duopoly is pretty strong. There are national card networks (which sometimes make their own tap-to-pay apps!), but if you want universal acceptance you’ve got to deal with the big two.

You can sidestep this however by not dealing with cards. I’d look into various QR payment schemes.

notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
They are making something like that as we speak. I’m not sure why though, they’ve had free SEPA Instant transfers for ages now.
notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
This is a great solution if you have the physical card. One very nice use case of Google/Apple Pay is being able to pay with a virtual card in-person.
notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
There’s been some progress over at microG, however not fully reverse engineered obviously, and I wouldn’t hold my hopes up for now: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/361
notpushkin··on A big win for Android interoperability
> They claim first tap to pay will happen later this year.

Big if true. I guess the main problem is, would the banks from all over the world join in?

Fidesmo (https://fidesmo.com/consumer/fidesmo-pay/) has managed to sidestep this by integrating with Curve (https://www.curve.com/), which issues their own card and then charges your bank’s card from their end when you pay with theirs (tokenized and emulated by Fidesmo).

(Fidesmo also integrates with a whole bunch of banks directly, though mainly EU.)

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