Hacker News Reader

szatkuson Annoying website features I face as a blind person

It should be easy to detect. You usually don't mix different alphabets in a single word.

szatkuson Barbados introduces plan to allow visitors to work remotely there for a year

I don't know about tax laws on Barbados, but usually you need to pay income tax in a country where you spend more than half of a year. Just the fact that you rent a flat for a year is enough for an revenue authority to start an investigation.

szatkuson Stopping phishing campaigns with Bash

Depends what you want to achive. With wire transfers there's usually (always?) info about amount and last few digits of the account you're transfering money to on your 2FA provider.

szatkuson Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?

VerbalExpressions

Not for short regular expressions, but if you need to write longer ones you probably would want to use it.

szatkuson Snapdragon chip flaws put 1B Android phones at risk of data theft

Is it USA thing or something more common? Seems like technical people around me change firmware with no problem. I only heard that some phones have limits, after which you can't reflash a firmware.

szatkuson Surviving Django, if you care about databases

Yes, it's the most popular driver for PostgreSQL in Python.

szatkuson Take Gitlab to the command line with GLab, an open-source Gitlab CLI tool

You can install gitlab-runner package on your own machine and register the instance in the Gitlab. It will be seen in the Gitlab panel next to all other runners.

szatkuson Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions?

Thanks.

Fun fact: I've just typed a random problem into Duck and selected the first result from StackOverflow. The top answer is at 238 right now. Then I checked it in archive.org at random points at time and it seems that reputation growth was slow, but almost linear. Amazing. And I was wondering why SO posts I stumbled upon had so many upvotes, when the fresh questions and answers rarely have more than just couple of upvotes :)

szatkuson Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

Do you have any rule of thumb for that? Like, I have 1000 LOCs, how many lines of spec I could except for that code?

szatkuson Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

Seems like modern Python or TypeScript are close to sweet spot for typed code. You don't need to set types for everything, but just enough to get checks from a compiler in most important places (at least for TS, tooling for Python is still lacking). Java is slowly going there too, but from another direction.

szatkuson Have we let the LED indicator light go too far?

Seems like at least one company solved this problem. I have Asus TUF monitor (I don't remember exact model, but they should be similar) and LED indicator is almost unnoticable at night, but enough to see if the monitor is on.

[0] https://www.pcomp3000.pl/images/produkty/Monitory_32/VG32VQ/... (I couldn't find higher resolution image, the indicator is on the bottom right)

szatkuson Mpv drops GNOME support (reverted later)

It's quite a challenge to find a GPU that could run GNOME smoothly. I remember that few years ago there was a flag that magically fixed the issue (at least on Intel iGPU), but they removed in one update. Then I switched to KDE and turned out that it wasn't the integrated graphics that was bad, but GNOME.

I wonder what's wrong. There are only like a few simple animations in GNOME. C'mon, I could run Compiz smoothly on some old GeForce FX with more flashy effects enabled.

szatkuson Unit Testing Is Overrated

I usually test whatever subset of code could be tested with less than about a dozen of test cases. If it's larger then test logical parts of it with mocks in the leaves. For small projects it could be usually a single controller with only some mocks on the edge of the system (database, external APIs etc.). Refactoring the code where there is one test suite per class could be a nightmare.

szatkuson Windows98 Running in the Browser

Non-NT Windows didn't support memory protection. That's the main reason why it was much more stable. Programming on Windows 98 was a nightmare. If you, for example, went too far with your `i++` you could've crashed the system.

szatkuson Windows98 Running in the Browser

Only if you use just a mouse. Usually I'll just hit a windows key, type a keyword related to whatever I'm looking for and it's there.

szatkuson “Adobe Flash is no longer supported in Safari”

Thanks, I was wondering why Mozilla stopped developing Shumway few years ago.

szatkuson CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

For lazies: super-symmetry.

szatkuson TSMC officially begins 5 nm production

Probably he based his opinion on speed of progress. In 2006 you could buy Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. Modern processor at 4.5GHz would be maybe just 3 times faster in normal, every day, single thread use which seems like a lot, but isn't too much if you think that CPUs 14 years before Core 2 Duo were clocked at 33MHz and IPC slightly below 1.

My dad uses a computer with C2Q CPU and it's still fast enough for everyday use.

Edit: to be clear, he's still wrong, we had quite untrivial IPC increase during all these years. I just wanted to point out that he's comment probably was based on empirical data.

szatkuson TSMC officially begins 5 nm production

TSMC 7nm and Intel 7nm are completely different things. At this point it's unknown how Intel's 7nm process is going to better/worse than TSMC counter-part. For sure 10nm was a disaster, but the next one doesn't have to be.

Recently TSMC uses names like N7 and N5 for their processes, because they're no more related to actual nanometers on chips. Same for Intel, but they stick to their traditional naming.

szatkuson Async Python is not faster

You should add that you mean just databases. I've just looked at your profile and as I understand it's your focus.

I built a service that was making a lot of requests. Much enough that at some point we've run out of 65k connections limit for basic Linux polling (we needed to switch to kpoll). Some time after that we've ran out of other resources and switching from threads to threads+greenlets really solved our problem.

szatkuson Async Python is not faster

CPU can do billions of operations every second. When you have 200ms for every request that overhead is not that large, you're still blocked by I/O.

szatkuson Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years

After 9 years and many failed deliveries I think they would figure this out.

szatkuson An History of Nvidia Stream Multiprocessor

That was AMD. They wanted to merge with Nvidia for their graphics IP, but didn't want to accept the condition, so they bought ATI eventually.

szatkuson An History of Nvidia Stream Multiprocessor

> Since Intel proved that there is still room for miniaturization with the 7nm of Ice Lake, there is little doubt Nvidia will leverage it to shrink its SM even more and double performance again.

Intel calls their process 10nm and it's weird to mention it since it was a total disaster.

szatkuson Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

Last year I played Final Fantasy XV coop with my friend. This game is a part of Nvidia's The Way It's Meant to Played, there's even Nvidia logo on the start screen. I had a lot of crashes on my GTX 960. Almost no problem on Radeon (although multiplayer is quite bugged-ridden there).

Sometimes official support tells nothing about runtime quality.

szatkuson The Decline of Usability

I always just press a CTRL key on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu.

szatkuson New iPhone SE

$399 isn't really entry-level.