Hacker News Reader

pjoton Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

The difference lies in how we conceptualize the noun:

- Computer code is seen as a continuous substance or body of work, like "writing" or "music."

- Other types of codes are seen as discrete units or systems.

It's similar to how we say "information" (uncountable) but "facts" (countable), even though they're related concepts.

pjoton Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval

As is “codes” - I hear this often from non-native colleagues

pjoton Arthur Whitney's one liner sudoku solver (2011)

  > Advocates of the language emphasize its speed, facility in handling arrays, and expressive syntax.

Indeed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

pjoton Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT

I’ve done something similar, but with a TUI to select files/directories as well as search!

https://github.com/patricktrainer/pbtree

pjoton MTA Open Data Challenge

This is super true. For my city’s portal as well. I’ve found one way around this by versioning the dataset - that is, committing the diffs in git. Credit to Simon Willison’s git-scraping technique.

I do this with my power company’s outage map: https://github.com/patricktrainer/entergy-outages

67k commits!

https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/

pjoton Scaling up linear programming with PDLP

GAMS is such a wild language/environment.

I don’t know of anything better, but I’m currently reliving nightmares from my Masters

pjoton Tech jobs have dried up

  > Employment for software engineers has cooled as resources shift toward developing artificial intelligence

Wait, who is doing the developing?

pjoton Interning in Go

  > I have a very large plaintext file and I’m loading it fully in memory. This results in a string variable book that occupies 282 MiB of memory.

At what point does something become (very) large?

pjoton Show HN: Open Scanner, an open-source document scanning app for iPhone

The camera and photos.app has ocr as well.

Whenever im wanting to copy text on an app that hijacks the clipboard (LinkedIn/Slack) I take a screenshot, highlight the text, and copy as you would normally.

pjoton Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

GH Copilot chat specifically has directives like

  @workspace /new “scaffold a ${language} project”

that automagically creates a full project structure and boilerplate. It’s been great for one off things for me at least

pjoton Lesser known parts of Python standard library

To run a localhost webserver on port 8000, serving the content of the current directory:

  python -m http.server

Pass -h for more options.

pjoton Layman's Guide to Python Built-in Functions

Since an empty list has no elements, there’s nothing to contradict the condition.

pjoton EUCLEAK Side-Channel Attack on the YubiKey 5 Series

Just fyi, Google lists sites you’ve used to “sign in with Google” in your account setting page. Apple and GitHub have this as well.

pjoton 13ft – A site similar to 12ft.io but self-hosted

> Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content

Probably so. I think the differentiation is in the scale at which scraping is done for those kinds of systems.

pjoton Releasing everyone's SSN and the hacks used to acquire them

Be sure to create a pr to remove your ssn from this list.

Also your passwords: https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155

pjoton Releasing everyone's SSN and the hacks used to acquire them

There’s less actually. Each state has its own unique 3 digit prefix.

pjoton the US Navy's warship production is in its worst state in 25 years. Why

In Alabama the LCS was being built - it took roughly twenty years end to end to deliver. Aside from giant cost and time overruns since it was completed there’s been a struggle with learning to effectively use the ship.

All in all though seeing a tri-hull warship on your morning commute is a cool treat. It had been front and center of Austal’s hangar doors for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Mobile_(LCS-26)

pjoton Daily marijuana use linked to increased risk of deadly head and neck cancers

Is propane and propane accessories better alternatives?

pjoton Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our new $5 microcontroller board, on sale now

Yes, it can run DOOM.

  We’ve seen some amazing demonstrations of that power: from our very own Graham Sanderson’s port of DOOM

pjoton Sqlite-vec: Work-in-progress vector search SQLite extension that runs anywhere

I’ve done something similar, but using duckDB as the backend.

https://github.com/patricktrainer/duckdb-embedding-search

pjoton Canarytokens: Honeypot for critical credentials, get notified when they are used (2015)

Pretty certain, yes. Series A startups generally aren’t that sophisticated.

And when the ip address comes from the employers location…

pjoton Canarytokens: Honeypot for critical credentials, get notified when they are used (2015)

I’ve used this to see if my employer was spying on my email. They were.

pjoton Oh man! Our entire team has been replaced by Vietnam developers.

I never really thought about it being a cultural difference in the way US devs and those offshore work in the day to day. But that may explain much of the disconnect. Curious what your experience is like.

pjoton Show HN: Wat – Deep inspection of Python objects

There’s the help() function as well! Super helpful!

pjoton Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists

I’ve done something similar, but using duckDB as the backend/vector store. You can use embeddings from wherever. My demo uses OpenAI.

https://github.com/patricktrainer/duckdb-embedding-search

pjoton Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

Why not roll your own? Sure, you have to build it and maintain it, but isn’t that in the spirit of programming? It’s fun.

pjoton CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

What? No.

pjoton CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

The DNC has since has implemented many layers of protection including crowdstrike, hardware keys, as well as special auth software from Google. They learned many lessons from 2016.