Hacker News Reader

ormax3on Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives

I noticed in the "A penguin juggling chainsaws" prompt that Qwen created an animated svg

ormax3on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

https://devdocs.io/

ormax3on MinC Is Not Cygwin

it seems possible to install GfW into an existing MSYS2:

https://gitforwindows.org/install-inside-msys2-proper

ormax3on MinC Is Not Cygwin

microsoft introduced Dev drives for this reason, they are optimized such that no file system filters are attached

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

ormax3on How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

one might argue that one of the advantages of languages like C is that you only pay for the features you choose to use, no unnecessary overhead like initializing unused variables

ormax3on Sid Meier's Civilization VII

and here I am still playing Civ II MGE

https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions

ormax3on Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

I use this handy bookmarklet to kill sticky headers::

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

ormax3on Where Is OpenCV 5?

While OpenCV was born at Intel, I don't think it's solely developed by Intel anymore, there's now a non-profit organization in charge of the project:

https://opencv.org/opencv-platinum-membership/

ormax3on Linux ate my RAM (2009)

the cache being talked about is for recently/frequently accesses things, not stuff pending write

ormax3on What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

first thing I did before reading the article, using uBO to block JS on the page

ormax3on RealFill: Image completion using diffusion models

https://petapixel.com/2022/12/14/man-fakes-an-entire-month-o...

ormax3on Inside the Matrix: Visualizing Matrix Multiplication, Attention and Beyond

I agree, the visualization is pretty but kinda useless to explain mat-mult.

It would have been more intuitive to show every element in output matrix corresponds to a dot-product of row/column vectors from input matrices, the animation doesn't even highlight those corresponding vectors clearly..

ormax3on What it takes to pass a file path to a Windows API in C++

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Layer_for_Unicode

ormax3on What it takes to pass a file path to a Windows API in C++

The above manifesto makes the argument to use UTF-8 *everywhere*, even on windows where the internal representation is not native utf8.

The conversion overhead is really negligible: https://utf8everywhere.org/#faq.cvt.perf

(note: the two api calls per conversion is because how those specific functions work, first call to get the size to allocate, second to do the actual conversion, but you can always use another library in the implementation for the utf8<->utf16 conversion that might be more optimized than those windows api functions)

ormax3on What it takes to pass a file path to a Windows API in C++

Like explained in https://utf8everywhere.org/#windows , you can write simple wrapper functions `narrow`/`widen` used when you are about to call window api functions.

    ::SetWindowTextW(widen(someStdString).c_str());

Implementation is straightforward, relying on `WideCharToMultiByte`/`MultiByteToWideChar` to do the conversion:

https://github.com/neacsum/utf8/blob/master/src/utf8.cpp

ormax3on Usability of Old Computers

- TLS 1.2

https://www.emailarchitect.net/eagetmail/sdk/html/object_tls...

- Root Certificates

https://msfn.org/board/topic/175170-root-certificates-and-re...

- XP Browsers / Mail Clients

https://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/search/label/browser

ormax3on DALL·E 3

SD is uncensored, you can generate anything you want with no "safety" rails to stop you.

Just take a loot at civitai to see the kind of finetuned models that are out there.

ormax3on Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

Nowadays even consumer-level hardware can run some decent local LLMs, completely offline.

You might want to browse /r/LocalLLaMA/ if "security" is an issue for you.

ormax3on Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

both work in the same way, by setting up a proxy/local-vpn through which all traffic passes in order to filter ad hosts at the dns level.

ormax3on Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

sounds like something LLMs can help with, sift through huge amounts of documents to summarize and highlight the interesting ones

ormax3on AI real-time human full-body photo generator

private/incognito window?

ormax3on Shrinking a shared library

given the proliferation of electron-based desktop apps, which are known to be resource heavy, making various so libraries smaller is indeed a welcome improvement.

ormax3on Show HN: I revived a game I abandoned 5yo ago and released it for free today

> What really does itch.io or Steam offer in the way of protection if a developer wants to be malicious anyway?

more eyes; if a game contained some kind of malware, there will likely be reports made on the game discussion page (hosted on steam), and game will likely be taken down with enough complaints

i've seen this happen before when some random game added a cryptominer in a silent update

ormax3on Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control

It should be possible to disable many of these connections as documented here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-con...

ormax3on Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control

something like this using mitmproxy (from 2017):

https://www.softscheck.com/en/blog/windows-10-enterprise-tel...

ormax3on Tell HN: Whole Yandex Git repository leaked

just means that given the nature of BitTorrent, you will be exposing your IP address to other peers and trackers

ormax3on Removal of Heroku free product plans

https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/project-t...

> You can have one free project on your user account, and the resources you create within it will be limited. You will not be billed for any usage within a free project, but you must add a card to your account for verification first.

not having to add credit card info before using the free tier is one of the main reasons for Heroku being so popular with students and toy projects, truly a friction-free experience.

ormax3on More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web (2021)

uBlock Origin can: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

ormax3on Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

Egypt has over 100 million people. Facebook/WhatsApp is quite popular in that part of the world, so I would image it had significant traffic..

ormax3on Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B

since Discord is very popular in the gaming world, one can only wonder what the future would bring seeing how another acquisition of Microsoft in this space ended, namely Mixer (Twitch-like service).