np1810

I just read somewhere on HN that "code is a liability, not an asset, the idea behind the code/final product is the actual asset." And, I can't agree more...

> It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.

In one of my previous org, LOC added in the previous year was a metric used to find out a good engineer v/s a PIP (bad) engineer. Also, LOC removed was treated as a negative metric for the same. I hope they've changed this methodology for LLM code-spitting era...

> LittleSnitch is great for MacOS; it is easily configured to alert you every time your machine makes ip/domain connections, which can then be accepted, denied, or rules made

For an open-source alternative, consider checking out - Lulu [0]. It's not as feature rich nor has impressive UI like the former but gets the main work done.

[0] https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu

> Big sand will eat us all.

Sand companies more like sandworms who are producing melange (Chips) and not hesitating to eat away its consumers (Users) on the way... (# Dune vibes)

> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.

> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.

Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.

UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.

Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.

> Anyone know the best way to get the SpaceX video from Twitter/X onto Apple TV?

I don't have Apple TV but for videos on X, I download it temporarily to a intermediate server then stream using VLC [1] it's a hassle but I get great watching experience on all platforms. For now, you can stream this on VLC: https://bin.hrzn.pics/0AdLye8

Though I generally watch Everyday Astronaut's [2] coverage on YouTube.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vlc-media-player/id650377962

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtUMt0gsqrs

> It is, but you have to reinstall it every week.

I'd greatly appreciate it if you can share the relevant link/repo for it?

> If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.

If it were just individuals doing it, maybe it would've been somewhat digestible. But it's a pity that sometimes even trillion-dollar companies do it.

Pre-LLM days, the doers were atleast aware of their copy/clone/wrapper, but now it's happening unintentionally when LLMs give out modified versions of someone else's code without binding to its license, because AFAIK LLMs do not automatically add licensing details of libraries used inside their outputted code, or do they?

Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!

If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].

In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.

[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan

[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...

> Time in the video: 1:51

Thanks

> It looks like Gaussian blur. Probably "deconvolution" can fix it. Random link from Google: https://www.ianmorison.com/deconvolution-sharpening/

After a quick search, the Smart Sharpen I used along with setting the remove dropdown to Gaussian Blur, does indeed deconvolution sharpening.

Will try the same in Lightroom & CameraRAW which the author suggests may have better results. [1]

[1]: https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-tips/what-is-dec...

> PWA's killer features are circumventing the app store and the app store tax and not maintaining two codebases for Android and iOS.

Agreed, I wish we lived in world where PWAs had atleast an equal share compared to mobile apps. Apps winning, mostly have been a suicide for privacy.

Coincidentally, there's another HN story with even more relevance to our discussion. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689059

On one hand, SPAs took off and became massively popular. On the other, I’m still curious why PWAs—especially the kind with service-worker-powered offline access—never really did. I don't like SPAs only if I find them bloated and with a messed up browser history that back button moves you out of the website.

Imagine an e-commerce site that lets you review your order history and product pages offline (even if a bit outdated). That kind of experience feels genuinely useful—much more so than the "you're offline, here’s a cute dog (I love the pictures though)" fallback most sites provide.

Over the weekend, I experimented with service workers for the first time (assisted by Vibe coding). My initial impression was honestly a bit magical—“this website works offline, unlike most mobile apps these days that are just WebView-wrapped SPAs and crash offline.” [1]

That said, debugging was rough. Vibe coding output had subtle issues I found hard to untangle as a newcomer, cache saved v/s cache matching was being done incorrectly in the code, which LLM wasn't able to point out (cors/non-cors requests had issue).And Chrome’s DevTools made debugging manageable, but Firefox’s service worker support felt clunky in comparison (personal take).

Curious if others feel the same—are PWAs underused because of DX hurdles, lack of awareness, or just industry momentum around SPAs?

[1]: https://ball-sort-game.vercel.app/

Cool idea and this was nostalgic as well... I created a similar application to communicate and send beacon signals over SMS (using Twilio) without Internet (as internet went down) during emergency SoS situation motivated by 2015 Chennai floods...

Suggestion: You can possibly try if you can use OpenHaystack [1] to send some "unknown tracker found nearby" alert to any nearby iPhone even if the receiver device doesn't have your app installed or use the FindMy network to send arbitrary data for your app's communication. [2]

[1] https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

[2] https://github.com/positive-security/send-my

This is so awesome. I hope I can expand my knowledge such that I can understand most of this project, right now it was way past my limited CS proficiency.

Though my highlight (which I could completely comprehend) is "Section 14.b & 14.c - Getting the data..." All it took was 400K files (~275 photos/day after 4 years). We have so much of raw power of processing, storage & network still the most-used (probably) media-sync apps crashed or faced slow sync, AirDrop fails & lack of 'Select-All' UI feature. Crazy times we live/will live in... :)

Well written article... nitpick - your article date [1] as of posting this comment is DEC 31 2024...

> fullstack dev versus youtube - DEC 31 2024

[1] https://vincentsg.dev/blog/

> I'd be happy if they banned all vaping devices

(circa 2019) Why has India banned e-cigarettes? https://www.thehindu.com/news/why-has-india-banned-e-cigaret...

Worth sharing and the reasons are justified atleast for me...

> We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing.

If you're looking such option for Android, you can check out Mull [1] which is available on F-Droid [2] as well and use it along with uBlock Origin.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix

[2]: https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

Uneasy co-incidence, that recently an Indian Uber competitor (named Ola) also had a report of lobbying efforts...

https://twitter.com/shrutisonal26/status/1544540603932758016

Edit: Apart from the tweets, the actual article is behind a paywall.

Anything (points/karma/coins) which is free & unlimited will find it's way to get exploited. "What if" there's a barter system for karma/points, you do a +1 and get a -1.

Though I do not know how the initial allotment of karma/points could be distributed for the pioneers and for the new growing community, maybe allot 'n' points for new user after a year...

Well, here's the tweet from Bret Taylor (chair of the board at Twitter)...

https://mobile.twitter.com/btaylor/status/154552608708969676...

> "The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery."

As much as India can rely on Solar/Wind/Water/Other green energy sources, we would still need good storage solutions that can cater to high demand-low supply scenarios. Any country has to be least reliant on foreign countries for energy, especially for future worst-case situations. India barely has any raw lithium reserves[0] compared to other countries[1] to go for battery energy storage. (Long-term possibility: India does have abundant raw material for "some new-age" batteries like sodium-ion.) Optimistically, I think just like batteries have improved so much in the last few decades[2], we might overcome the current problems with hydrogen as well.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_India#L...

[1]:https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2020/03/lithium...

[2]:https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

Location: India

Remote: Yes (Preferring US/Canada timezones)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Full Web/SaaS stack, Java, Python, Git, Docker, Linux, and quick adaptability in an unfamiliar stack.

Résumé/CV: http://nitinpathak.com

Email: np1810[at]pm.me

From school itself, I was actively involved in software development, with my first public application being released in 2012. In 2016, during two months internship, I developed a web app to create geofences over Google maps and send alerts when breached. After college as a CS graduate, I started as an intern in 2017 and eventually progressed upwards to SDE1 and then SDE2 by 2018. Over time within different projects, I have worked with AWS S3, SQS, DDB, Firehose, ElasticSearch, StepFunctions, Lambdas, API Gateway, CloudFront, and Route53, EC2, ECS, and frameworks like – AngularJS, ReactJS, FabricJS, SpringMVC. Over the past two years, I have tried to involve myself in every engineering aspect that a programmer might not usually find himself in. I got into hardware by dissembling and repairing my old 2014 college laptop, installing Hackintosh understanding Apple kexts, learned about networking, Linux iptables and created wireguard exit rPi node for accessing Indian sites from the US, built Kali Nethunter for Nexus 5, repaired PCB for household washing machine, did freelancing for family-network clients, installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel and have been trying out different ideas myself that might turn into a startup.

Please mention HN while connecting with me.

In any case, that's all I have for you today, if you do have any questions or comments about this please put them below if you like this video and would like to see more like it please subscribe and as always have a nice day, thank you!

> It's much harder to bullshit your way through a 1-2 hour long podcast conducted by a knowledgeable host.

A great take, in one line... ;)

I agree, I recently found out about Lex Fridman [0] podcast and I am very satisfied with the experts in their field expressing their history and opinions, kinda reminds me of old TED... :)

[0]: https://youtube.com/c/lexfridman

> When humans are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?

Haha... I think it depends on the current situation of the human is in... Sometimes human just wants to have a meaningful conversation, sometimes just reacting aptly to prevent social awkwardness or being tagged rude...

> I used autossh many years ago. There was nothing wrong with it. But with systemd user service managers available everywhere I just put a normal ssh command into a service file with RestartAlways and activate linger for the user.

Thanks, there will be multiple ways to do same thing, user can choose whichever they find the easiest...

Adding an example of such systemd file - https://gist.github.com/drmalex07/c0f9304deea566842490

> No need to install an extra package. No idea whether it is maintained or not, but I know systemd is, both upstream and in the distro.

Definitely not updated with the same frequency as systemd... https://salsa.debian.org/debian/autossh

Thank you for such a thorough book...

This book does discuss autossh [1] which I came to know about recently while setting up my dynamic home ip (w/ CG-NAT) as the exit node in a wireguard network to overcome geo-restrictions on streaming services when traveling... :p

autossh [1] is such a simple and useful utility, wish I had known about it earlier when any connection changes in VPN/WiFi used to break my ssh tunnels to the corporate network during development...

If you're a frequent user of ssh tunnels, do check out autossh... ;)

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/autossh

Your thinking is so resonating with mine too... Also I'd like to add...

> 3. Some degree of repeatability in work environment.

Instead of the above point, I am looking for...

A place where I make greater impact in a small company working along side ethical people who are not trying to exploit their customers/consumers, rather than a FAAMG where you're replaceable within a few days and follow no ethics just revenue in mind...

A place where managers are accommodating of suggestions just because I write code doesn't mean my ideas about the product/solution aren't worth listening to...

A place where you admire or atleast respect the CEO and the company's business tactics instead of my ex-company whose past CEO is now an "astronaut" just to play a marketing gimmick I guess... :p

Please connect with me if you consider your startup/company is one such place... ;)

Tip: If membership pop-up stops you from reading... After page load, before the pop-up quickly open Reading Mode in Firefox or other similar mode in your respective browsers... ;)