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ptman

1,073 karma · joined September 13, 2007

https://paul.totterman.name/

ha: https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=ptman at.hn: https://ptman.at.hn

submissionscomments
ptman··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c very nice book about this time
ptman··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I've been reading graphical novels, lots of non-fiction and adaptations. Many that I've read as regular novels and many that I would never have read otherwise.

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168840-the-arab-of-the...

- https://www.goodreads.com/series/329945-sapiens-a-graphic-hi...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769712.Palestine

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203767306-the-hidden-lif...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207003952-capital-ideolo...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9844623-feynman

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23167775-the-age-of-self...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38589785-to-kill-a-mocki...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208512484-the-mythmakers

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61783727-the-bomb

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50159458-kent-state

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12959045-my-friend-dahme...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32951507-the-park-bench

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493321-logicomix

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569864-insectopolis

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48638303-billionaires

Currently I'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210384823-shroud

ptman··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I read a comic book series that sounds somewhat similar, history in generations. "My China" https://www.goodreads.com/series/74422-une-vie-chinoise
ptman··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
Closed federations. Only trusted servers
ptman··on SAML: A fractal of bad design
You can use Keycloak as a SAML/OIDC -adapter.
ptman··on SAML: A fractal of bad design
https://sso.tax/
ptman··on How to build a printer
vim/nvim at least have :print
ptman··on Authorization terminology is a mess: Let's fix it
I've seen a spreadsheet with NATO abbreviations and terms. It's tens of thousands of entries. And the best ones have tens of definitions.
ptman··on Hang on to Your Firefox
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...
ptman··on Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal
And instant (under 10 seconds)
ptman··on Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes
Clickhouse seems to be a popular logstore these days. And is column-oriented.
ptman··on Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
Go isn't perfect, but $GOPATH isn't really used that much anymore. There's a bunch of stuff in ~/.config/ and ~/.cache/
ptman··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
Desktop operating systems don't have very good separation between programs. If some malware gets access, it will be looking for e.g. ssh keys and using a keylogger to get the passphrase if you encrypted your ssh keys. Tpm protected passkeys are much better protected
ptman··on Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase
Umm, what about machine readable JSON in .well-known instead of yet another txt in root
ptman··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
Looks like a Fiskars axe https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/collections/axes-and-wood-prep...
ptman··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
It is free market supply and demand. Clearly a stronger force than Moore's law.
ptman··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Not credit card. Bank account. Webauthn/passkeys could also work for auth as they check the domain and can't be phished
ptman··on Just Use Go
So what happens when you write through the nil pointer?
ptman··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
If only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code supported a sepa instant bit so that one could just show a qr code, scan it with whatever payer banking app and authorize the sepa instant payment.
ptman··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
SEPA instant already exists. I think it guarantees sub-10s transactions. Unfortunately it is not the default.
ptman··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
ptman··on Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why
Compare the cost and you will find the reason
ptman··on Dobase – Open-source, self-hosted workspace with installable tools
Some will argue that it is Open Source. But Open Source came from commercial interests against Free Software.

It's clearly not free software, since the user freedom is restricted.

It's not libre, since that also refers to freedoms.

It's not really Open Source.

Source-Available has been used to describe this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

ptman··on Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
Stalebot closing is a problem. There's no problem with stalebot adding a stale label (but really, a filter with last update x time ago does the same).

Adding filters so that developers only look at actionable tickets would be much more sane.

ptman··on A sufficiently detailed spec is code
I've heard various suggestions of only committing spec.md or change requests in the git repo and using that as source of truth.

We have spent decades working on reproducible builds or deterministic compilation. To achieve this, all steps must be deterministic. LLMs are not deterministic. You need to commit source code.

ptman··on Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc
use gemini and ask it to summarize a youtube link
ptman··on /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
ptman··on Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification
Teamspeak is using matrix under the hood
ptman··on Running My Own XMPP Server
There are several independent clients and servers. None of them support all features, not even synapse/element. But most keep improving steadily.
ptman··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
There are other terminal clients.
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