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sudobash1

1,978 karma · joined February 6, 2020

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sudobash1··on Tell HN: Use news.ycombinator.com/active
I think RSS feed reader users are also unaffected by flags. At least hnrss.org feed followers are. I haven't tried news.ycombinator.com/rss. But as long as the post hits the RSS feed before it is flagged, your reader can pick it up.

Honestly, for me, most of the time I am not interested in the flagged posts, but if you are, RSS is another way to see them.

sudobash1··on How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.

The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.

sudobash1··on [dead]
This title is misleading (or at least it doesn't correspond to the article content). According to the article, Version is having an outage. AT&T and T-Mobile are fine. Their only issue is that they can't reach Version (because it is down).
sudobash1··on Postal Arbitrage
You can even still do fax machines if you really wanted to.
sudobash1··on Postal Arbitrage
I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.

I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.

Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.

sudobash1··on Single Sign on for Furries
Not at all related to the article, but I think this is the first time I have seen a page modify its contents based on the referrer site. If you click the link (and your browser uses the "Referer" header), it will have a blurb at the top welcoming hacker news readers. If you copy the URL manually, it does not.

You can also see this using curl:

    curl -H "Referer: https://news.ycombinator.com/" https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-08-15-single-sign-on-for-furries.html | grep hacker
If you remove the -H "Referer: ..." part, it will no longer contain the word "hacker".

Honestly, I am a little surprised that Firefox is sending the "Referer" header. It feels like a relic from the days when we (mostly) weren't concerned with being tracked. I suppose that it must have practical uses that would break without it.

sudobash1··on Eat Real Food
> Protein target: 1.2–1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day.

I was amused to see (kilo)grams used for the weights. I'll admit that as an American, I have no idea what my weight is in kilograms. Body weight is something that I always think of in pounds. I do use grams sometimes in food prep, but I think even that makes me a bit of an abnormality around here.

Not that I am complaining about their unit choice. I think American's would do well to be a bit more "bilingual" in our measurement systems. Also, the measurements they give are a lot easier to parse than 3/128 oz per 1lb bodyweight.

sudobash1··on Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux
For those who want to disable middle-click paste, KDE already has this as a setting (of course it does, everything is a setting in KDE). Under "General Behavior" there is a checkbox for "Middle-click pastes selected text".

Personally, I find middle-click primary selection paste one of the nicest conveniences in Linux, along with Alt (or Meta) dragging of windows. But if GNOME made it a default-off option that wouldn't be the end of the world. Those of us who love it would quickly seek out the option to enable it. But I get the impression that GNOME tends to value opinionated simplicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if that default-off option just disappeared after a while.

sudobash1··on AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome to America's New Surveillance High Schools
> Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".

That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.

In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.

sudobash1··on Classical statues were not painted horribly
I think that the medieval art article is making a different point. The art there had a style that was dictated by its purpose and the beliefs of the artists.

For example, most of the examples given in that article are illustrations from manuscripts. This was something (as far as I know) that was new in the western world. The idea that books should be illustrated. And being before the printing press was introduced, each illustration (of which there were often many per page) was hand made. This added a substantial amount of time to an already labor-intensive process. And each image was not intended to be a standalone work of art.

Also, some of the other examples are of iconography. That style remains, largely unchanged to this day. If you do an image search for "religious iconography", you will see plenty of examples of sacred art that are not visually realistic but are meant to be metaphorically or spiritually realistic.

sudobash1··on Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
I am using a raspberry pi pico with a modified pico-cec program to control my Jellyfin-client media PC. CEC is actually really fun to hack on, and once you get a custom setup working, it is (at least in my experience) rock solid.

Jellyfin even has a TV mode that you can enable in a normal desktop browser. So my media PC runs the browser in kiosk mode, and it has CEC buttons mapped to keyboard presses. Guests have used it, and I don't think anyone could tell that it wasn't a "smart" TV.

https://github.com/gkoh/pico-cec

sudobash1··on Framework Sponsors CachyOS
It looks a little bit like a tempest in a teapot to me, but I'm impressed with their community guidelines. That thread got an exception to allow for more discussion, and it even permits "Critiques of Framework as a company" and "Calls for boycotts or product criticism".

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

sudobash1··on Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs–and They Have No Idea What They're Doing
From the bill summary:

> The bill also requires a business entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material to prevent persons from accessing the website from an internet protocol address or internet protocol address range that is linked to or known to be a virtual private network system or provider.

Later:

> A business entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall prevent persons from accessing the website from an internet protocol address or internet protocol address range that is linked to or known to be a virtual private network system or virtual private network provider.

No mention is given to where the business is located.

sudobash1··on In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All
I think it also gives it a better chance as an experiment. The federal government tends to pendulum swing between left and right on a fairly short cycle. Most states seem to be considerably more stable and less prone to trying to revert policies put in place by the "other side" every few years.
sudobash1··on Your smartphone, their rules: App stores enable corporate-government censorship
I don't get your point. This article is about control of the high level software running on your phone, not the firmware controlling your phone's radios. Even if an app store allowed any software without filter, this would not allow anyone to transmit "arbitrary radio signals". The much lower level firmware ensures that the radio communicates at proper power and protocol.

The phone hardware is not capable of arbitrary radio signals anyway. People can buy software defined radios off the shelf, but people generally don't abuse this because a) there really isn't any motivation for them to and b) they would quickly land in really hot water with the FCC.

sudobash1··on Guests ejected mid-stay from bankrupt hotel chain Sonder
Perhaps more commonly known in the forms "asunder" (as in "torn asunder") and "sundry" (meaning "various").
sudobash1··on Firefox expands fingerprint protections
To make that analogy closer to the Internet reality, I would say that Internet tracking is more like a cabal of shop-keepers, librarians, neighbors, utility pole workers, and so on who are keeping track of all the faces, all their habits, what they look at, what they say, who they interact with, and share this information amongst themselves, recording it in perpetuity. They also share details with the police and anyone who cares to purchase them.

When you talk about a "shopkeeper" it gives it a small community charm. The Internet is anything but that.

sudobash1··on Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers

Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.

sudobash1··on Free software scares normal people
> And I'm not interested in re-teaching her every bit of software, and she's not interested in relearning every bit of software.

I don't see Windows as having much of an edge there. Lots of things seem to change on Windows just for change's sake. I get so tired of the churn on Windows versions and finding how to disable the new crummy features. If you want to avoid relearning all the time, something simple like XFCE is going to be way better.

sudobash1··on Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic plastics
I was reflecting on this a week ago when discussing how ubiquitous plastic is now. There are rightfully many health and environmental concerns about plastic, but it's nice to remember many of the positive impacts it has had. If celluloid had not been invented when it was, humans would have absolutely hunted elephants to extinction for something as trivial as pool balls.

I like the promotional quote at the end. It ties in petroleum too. Again, our dependence on petroleum is coming back to haunt us, but at the time, it averted extinction for whales. Mass adoption of technologies always comes with tradeoffs.

sudobash1··on Mapping to the PICO-8 palette, perceptually
Dithering is still more important than is commonly known, even with 24-bit "true color". For example, imagine that you had a gradient that goes from white to black across a 1920x1080 monitor. 24-bit color means you only have 256 levels of color, so a naive gradient implementation will result in 256 discrete bands of different grays, each about 8 pixels wide (about as wide as this "w" character).

You might not thing that you'd notice that, but it looks surprisingly bad. Your eyes would immediately notice that there are "stripes" of solid gray instead of a smooth continuum. But if you apply dithering, your eyes won't be able to notice (at least not easily). It will all look smooth again.

In a situation like this, I like to use "blue noise" dithering, but there are scores of dithering methods to choose from.

sudobash1··on Show HN: HumanAlarm – Real people knock on your door to wake you up
I was curious, but your FAQ and Contact links do not work for me (Firefox & Chromium on desktop Linux).
sudobash1··on A mind–reading brain implant that comes with password protection
> When a participant imagined the password ‘Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang’ (the name of an English-language children’s novel) the BCI recognized it with an accuracy of more than 98%.

I wonder how difficult having a conversation about that novel (or film) would be. I imagine you would accidentally start saying your thoughts out loud.

sudobash1··on Fuse is 95% cheaper and 10x faster than NFS
The title is confusing since FUSE is not a network filesystem. It can be used as a "frontend" for multiple different network filesystems (as used in sshfs and smbfuse). There is even a fuse-nfs project to allow you to run a NFS client using fuse.

But if you scroll down, the article lists a few specific network filesystems using FUSE that were tested (JuiceFS, goofys, etc...).

I don't follow all of the reasoning, but I am not surprised at the conclusion. The newer FUSE-based network filesystems are build for modern cloud purposes, so they are more specific for the task.

sudobash1··on Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts
Unless you are doing more steps, that is still just a crash consistent backup. Better than plain rsync, but still not ideal.
sudobash1··on Google can now read your WhatsApp messages
You can pay for Google services. But even if you pay for Google One or YouTube premium, I'm sure that Google will still track your behavior and mine your data. Why would a company not "double-dip"?
sudobash1··on Why English doesn't use accents
English still sometimes (albeit very rarely) uses one type of diacritic. The diaeresis is in occasional use. Now days it is mainly used in the word "naïve," but it will be familiar to readers of the New Yorker on words like "coöperate."

The diaeresis is used disambiguate when a pair of vowels make two separate vowel-sounds, instead of one. For instance, if you didn't know better, you would think that the words "naive" and "nave" (said "nāv", the congregational of a traditional church) were homophones. But the diaeresis shows you that the "a" and "i" are said independently (nah-ēv).

Of course, English also uses diacritics occasionally in some borrowed words: résumé, née, fiancée/fiancé. But these are also considered optional.

sudobash1··on DRM Panic QR code generator
There are mainstream distros that don't have config.gz. Fedora is one of them. But it keeps a copy of it's config next to the kernel. If you don't have /proc/config.gz try this:

grep CONFIG_DRM_PANIC_SCREEN_QR_CODE /boot/config-$(uname -r)

(Fedora is enabling the DRM panic screen QR code)

sudobash1··on DRM Panic QR code generator
I am disappointed to see that the QR code is completely replacing the panic messages. There is plenty of room on most monitors to have a stack trace on one side and the QR code on the other.

I probably won't be enabling this on my machines, but good on them for trying to improve on the Linux panic screen.

sudobash1··on ViscaCamLink – Camera control application for PTZ cameras
It looks like OpenIPC is a replacement firmware. I would assume this means (as long as you trust the OpenIPC authors) that you don't have to firewall them off from the Internet. You ordinarily only have to do that for the sketchy firmware that they come with. Open firmware shouldn't be "phoning home".
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