Hacker News Reader

sanskriticalon Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

There's actually a solution, it's NostrGit, decentralized git. No single point of failure, and your identity is a public key. You can also just host your git via http on a Tor onion or i2p eepsite to get a public key identity namespace that is also resilient to the operator of your namespace registrar trying to sabotage or subvert you.

sanskriticalon Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.

sanskriticalon Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

> Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.

It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.

sanskriticalon So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

nntp was built on horribly naive assumptions that do not carry to the present day internet. nostr is a better option.

sanskriticalon Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

there's decentralized git on Nostr:

https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/

Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.

sanskriticalon Steam Machine launches today

> same performances in the same form factor with the same OS (but more upgradability) for less

This also remains true for Apple! I don't care about performance. At all. I write text in a terminal! I only care about the hardware working as expected, out of the box, without having to tinker with bullshit. And Steam provides a platform that fulfills this, every time!

sanskriticalon Steam Machine launches today

I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!

sanskriticalon GitHub and the crime against software

Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/database with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.

sanskriticalon GitHub and the crime against software

People should consider decentralized git over Nostr, rather than switching to a replacement like Codeberg or Gitlab and waiting for the resulting enshittification after it attracts everyone else.

https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/

sanskriticalon Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

no recaptcha / works on tor, unlike archive.is:

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.newyorker.com/news/le...

sanskriticalon Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment

I don't know. I think people would notice if Google were being MITM'd on Tor.

sanskriticalon Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/when-...

Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.

sanskriticalon Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire

Presumably these are lightning invoices, which can resolve in milliseconds.

sanskriticalon Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem

How long until agents begin routinely abusing local privilege escalation bugs to break out of containers? I bet if you tell them explicitly not to do so it increases the likelihood that they do.

sanskriticalon Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

Someone already mentioned the hoarderware issue, which is big for me, so I'll give my other concern.

Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.

My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.

sanskriticalon Show HN: Elecxzy – A lightweight, Lisp-free Emacs-like editor in Electron

If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev

Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.

sanskriticalon U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

I think people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable are likely sitting in a comfortable sinecure, and it isn't the role of the taxpayer to provide sinecures for people with doctoral degrees.

Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.

sanskriticalon U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle.

My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.

sanskriticalon Vibe coding kills open source

Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is still freely available, forever.

Vibe coding eventually creates more value for FOSS, not less.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

They did not. And many apps (Ricochet Messenger comes to mind) were not visited by a web browser. So it isn't like you could announce an HTTP 302 and just seamlessly transition.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

I think relay discovery by clients has improved by leaps and bounds and will continue to do so. Previously you had to give some complicated "follow me at such and such relay" thing. These days you can just tell people your npub and things seem to "just work". I don't know what's going on under the hood, I can only say that clients figuring out which relays have content seems to have improved drastically.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

I am unaware of an app that sees present day use for communicating short messages that uses BEP-44 or mainline DHT. Nostr works today for millions of people. These services have normal people using them, not Hacker News commentators that are extremely sophisticated -- imagine telling someone who only knows how to use normal web services and apps they install from the app store to "just retrieve a BEP-44 message from the DHT".

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists.

Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism" (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever conceived.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content.

Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

> It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER

This also remains true for Nostr.

But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it.

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia, not if it can sustain petabytes of data.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

> This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr.

It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.

Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.

> Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.

Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.

Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.

sanskriticalon Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it) that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed distributed.

"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.

sanskriticalon Sabotaging Bitcoin

Bitcoin has the benefit of being the first way in human history of being able to transfer value between two countries in a way that a corrupt bureaucrat, judge, or customs official can't freeze, reverse, or steal it. That's the benefit Bitcoin brings humanity, and to me, I prefer it to having a car.

Proof of Stake is an absurd security proposition. Stakeholders are immediately centralized. In every single PoS coin, the governance immediately becomes the exchanges because they always hold the most coins. They can and have used this to guide PoS coins towards governance unfavorable to the users, like as happened with Steem.