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stonesweep

382 karma · joined January 1, 2021

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stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
Nah. +4 for the thread after adding up the down/up votes. I dipped out, the conversation held no further value to continue to me especially after being told "well it's an idiom you just don't understand". No minds will be changed, no positive outcome will happen from continuing.
stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

> Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1]

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything. Useful? Yes, great for finding random solutions to random problems. Authoritative source on terminology used in the industry I work? Nah.

stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
Man pages can be tricky as the content can vary distro by distro (how up to date is your copy of man-pages, what changes have happened, etc.) - this technique is pretty portable to extract the synopsis of a man page specifically due to the format it uses (most times I'd use like grep -A3 -B2 foo /some/file, e.g.).
stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
> One definition of "server" is "a service in a network"

Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

I was not nerd-sniping and could care less about serverless as a term, I'm specifically talking about calling a "service" a "server" in this chat. I feel this is presenting something as accepted definition which does not match my experience in the field.

stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
This makes no sense (too abstract of a statement), but here let's try this:

    $ man systemd | head -4 | tail -1
       systemd, init - systemd system and service manager
An email daemon (Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, UW-IMAP, Sendmail, etc.) are services running on a server. An "email server" would be a server running a daemon to provide email service in this example.
stonesweep··on Health of the KDE Community
100% agree, I missed that - at this point in time (and maybe still a bit today?) there was a lot of grift between C and C++ being used for Linux systems things around that time as well (including how big the resulting binaries were, because modems to download!). Thanks for the reminder.
stonesweep··on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
I disagree with your assessment, email is a service and not a server. A service can run on a server, or ephemerally as in this article (which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them). S3 and SES are services running on servers.
stonesweep··on Health of the KDE Community
In the beginning (95-ish) Qt was license encumbered, there was serious agitation about KDE becoming popular while using it, leading to the very-open GTK based GNOME desktop competition. It was a big kerfuffle at the time.

See the History of Qt section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

stonesweep··on Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves
In the US it's the same, the FDA has regulations and all the (not real cheese) items have either a funny name ("cheeze") or have something like "imitation cheese product" or "cheese food product" (I've seen a number of different labels over my life) to indicate it's not real (milk) cheese.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...

stonesweep··on Bronze Disease
It's an extremely mild abrasive in this form (of vinegar, yep) - some folks dilute baking soda in vinegar, I feel that's too coarse myself. One of the mildest silver polishes I know about and use, Blitz (not Flitz) is still grittier than ketchup in your fingers. I only use organic, free range grass fed no corn syrup ketchup, my metal is pampered. /s ;) (you just use your fingers or qtips for the crevices, then wash in warm soapy water, dry well then plop into a sealed glass jar of acetone for a few days)
stonesweep··on Bronze Disease
Many hobbiest collectors (in my travels, which is of course my experiences) use 100% acetone soak on metals. A brand known as Renaissance Wax is a popular microcrystalline coating used to inhibit reactions (ive been told its popular with knifemakers as well). Ketchup is a great copper/bronze/brass cleaner while we're here, not so hot on nickel, sort of ok on silver. Titanium and zirconium just don't care how you clean them, aluminum is ketchup friendly.
stonesweep··on Google promised its contact tracing app was completely private, but it wasn’t
> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread.

I am a US citizen, I simply have lost confidence in any promise made by any tech company in regards to my privacy and roll back to War Games - the only winning move is not to play. We have lost all confidence that any data shared will be kept private, there is little oversight or penalty for abuse of it.

stonesweep··on Sisters with Transistors
It seems like this website is trying to convert to local timezone in browser, the ICS places it at 8pm on 4/24 New York time:

    DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T200000
    DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T212400
If you're a frontend developer on HN reading this, please don't do what this website does - please list an absolute date/time stamp of your event in plain text on the page(s) in question. Thanks in advance.
stonesweep··on X11 Universal File Opener and XDG Mess
nod and the .desktop file is just an INI-style file that one can hand create for anything at all, the launched app just needs to accept the URL as a parameter input as if typed on the CLI for this scheme.
stonesweep··on Converting Markdown to ePub or Mobi Using Pandoc
Sure thing, it's pretty simple and straightforward I can post right here. In your CI/CD runner, you add a "before" script like so (Gitlab YAML example):

    image: debian:latest

    before_script:
        - bash myscript.sh
Your myscript.sh can be as simple as four lines (one to install curl, it's not a default on Debian), example:

    apt-get -y install curl
    VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")')
    curl -sLo "pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb" "https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/${VERSION}/pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"
    apt-get -y install "./pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"
The Github API used above has the nice default of listing the latest release as you see used there in the grep on the right, one could enhance that with `jq` for higher intelligence but this very simple setup is functional as a starting point to develop your own style.
stonesweep··on X11 Universal File Opener and XDG Mess
Each DE can have slightly different paths, but in general find the file mimeapps.list. It's typically looked for in the traditional manner of /etc/, /usr/share/ and /usr/local/share/ and $HOME to find global, local and personal configurations. In your $HOME it's usually something like this:

    ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
    ~/.config/mimeapps.list
In here you find the MIME type pointing at a .desktop file (app launcher), it's a matter of changing that. Mine for example related to using Firefox:

    [Default Applications]
    x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
    x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop
Find the .desktop file you want to launch and just update that bad boy. Most DEs have a GUI tool to manage this for you without having to resort to manual editing...
stonesweep··on Converting Markdown to ePub or Mobi Using Pandoc
I use pandoc in a CD pipeline, the version in the repos is stale compared to upstream (normal, that's how it is) unless you're on a rolling distro like Arch.

I have reported pandoc bugs and had them fixed (great dev team), pulling the latest single-DEB install (no deps, unlike the one in the Debian repo) and using it gets all the latest updates which matter to a process like this.

In this particular case your needs to use the latest pandoc lead to the wget pull and install, which thanks to their DEB design is easy and clean to do in an ephemeral CI container.

stonesweep··on Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
The author is using random online radios so they don't get to choose the server end - as a client, VLC is powerful but I prefer Audacious for the user interface. (random user survey :) ) - I have the same problem with VLC on my Android, it works but I much prefer other streaming clients for the better (subjective) UI.
stonesweep··on Are top websites using WebGL for fingerprinting?
It's been awhile, but IIRC the recommendation to disable it is based on security, not privacy. Other comments here explain it better than I could, not a programmer by trade.
stonesweep··on Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
If the author is reading this, you've hit/stumbled on "HTTP Live Streaming" radios which are sort of the next evolution of classic Shoutcast/Icecast generated streams. There are better clients for it out there than Chrome which could probably enhance the experience (proper audio controls, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients
stonesweep··on Are top websites using WebGL for fingerprinting?
I've had WebGL disabled forever, I don't use Twitch (as the other comment describes a valid use for) and really have never missed having it enabled for many years.

It's frequently included in "secure yourself" tuning guides: Firefox -> about:config -> webgl.disabled: true

stonesweep··on Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme
> mines would shut down

This sparks an interesting thought (for me) - gold mining (and really, any mining) is intertwined in modern times; copper mining produces gold as a by-product for example. We derive palladium and platinum from refining for other metals, we get sand for concrete from gold mining, etc. Point being, the mining industry is interwoven as to what is extracted for refinement, the by-products of that refinement (and the environmental destruction :() which of course is all economically intertwined. A mine probably won't shut down, it would probably shift to another focus?

But Bitcoin is mined for one thing (itself) and produces environmental waste (heat, etc.) with no by-products (another coin?) and no other mining (Monero?) produces Bitcoin as a by-product. So it makes me think that while it sounds good on paper to compare Bitcoin to Gold, it really doesn't work like that in real life.

stonesweep··on Why has no one made a better Goodreads
> In fact the whole site is completely free

Blog about this: https://blog.librarything.com/main/2020/03/librarything-goes...

stonesweep··on Why has no one made a better Goodreads
You're not the only LibraryThing user around - we get drowned out in these HN threads because the UI isn't sexy.
stonesweep··on Ask HN: My startup has more annual subscribers than monthly. What to make of it?
B2C random internet user here, it's more complex than that for me and not always about price. I'd say the thoughts go something like this:

- is this a product that involves a lot of personal time to get started with and migrate away from? (example: cloud hosting for files and photos)? With this type of product, I'm going to spend more time on the initial 30 day evaluation, and if it suits my needs then I go right for the (multi)year contract. The personal investment is large (get all those photos uploaded, e.g.) so my chances of leaving after a few months are statistically unlikely.

- is this a product that I can walk away from with no real loss? (music streaming service) well this a service which quality can vary month over month, I'm more likely to use monthly pricing just so I can cancel at any time if I don't like it. I have no real investment to your brand, yeah it's nice but there's 100 others out there I can move too easily.

Usually with a multi-year discount, I'll buy the first year just to be sure and if I still like it after the first year, I'll buy multiple years. Just so I never have to worry about randomly missing a payment or somehow "losing" it (my login, my access, my files, etc.) but balance that against "how long will this company be around, really?" - it's a sense of security over time because I've invested a lot of personal time into the product. Walking away is not in my plans at the time.

Third reason that doesn't fit for you but is also a thought: is this a donation to (open source project)? Will I give them more money - less recurring middle-man processing fees - by paying one lump yearly sum instead of donating monthly? I use Liberapay for some FOSS donations and they tell you to do this straightaway, one lump sum is better for the receiver than monthlies.

stonesweep··on Eu_sst: 20% probability for large satellite collision
Does the debris have a degrading orbit and eventually get pulled earthward and burn up on entry? Or is that chaff out there floating around forever just outside the gravitational pull?
stonesweep··on Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
Really, any company with say >2500 (?) falls in this category. It's an entire job of several people to just maintain the worker Inventory (laptops, monitors, etc) room for example. It takes a lot of infrastructure to support a company of size, plenty of people in my 10k person company doing what you want - run the company that runs the product.
stonesweep··on Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
I think it sort of floats in 2 territory and sort of resembles the LGPL based kernel modules which require a binary firmware blob to run (kind of, not exactly). In order to create the APK, the code must compile against the SDK and encumber it by binding to an API, however if I understand this correctly in Android terms it means a stub of non-free code is now inside your APK, instead of say an external firmware blob. (I am not an Android coder to know the subtle details here)

(I'm aware that the code will try and use Google services, then if it fails it falls back to websocket(?) - so the actual Services don't have to be present, but the compiled APK contains the non-free hooks to use it if present? I tried to use the word encumbered to reflect that)

stonesweep··on Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
You may be missing the subtle point - the APK provided is the same one from Google Play, which includes the Google SDK encumbered libraries (links? hooks? features?). If you run a libre device without the Google Play store (non-Google android build) then the software cannot function. The code for the client is open source, but the act of compiling it against the required Play store libraries encumbers the final binary. F-Droid requires that all code compile without the Google SDKs in order to be hosted (IIRC).
stonesweep··on Kallithea – Self-hosted alternative to GitHub
These URLs kill me, I share a lot of links and these branches use full commit strings (instead of just "default" or "stable" human readable) and the links it creates to PRs includes the actual title (which I find I can delete manually, but this is the default behaviour).

stable: https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea/files/7f3515800bd8...

PR: https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea/pull-request -> https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea/pull-request/140/_...

(...which you can delete everything after /140/ and it works fine). Oy vey.

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