Hacker News Reader

uncharted9on What is your Bluesky handle?

Unrelated question: How is Bluesky different from early Twitter and how can we be sure that it won't devolve into same current Twitter (or X) after 10 years?

uncharted9on Ask HN: What is the cheapest ($/hour) H100 renting service with quick spin-up?

https://cloud.vast.ai/

Seeing H100 going for $2.138/hr

uncharted9on Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?

[Blocky](https://0xerr0r.github.io/blocky/latest/) + uBlock Origin with OISD blocklists (https://oisd.nl/) and Hagezi Blocklists (https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists)

uncharted9on Canvas Fingerprinting

Cover Your Tracks shows this kind of obfuscation strategy as "Randomized Fingerprint", but it only shows it for Brave, not for Librewolf when I tested it. Brave fingerprint is unique but it randomizes, while Firefox doesn't.

uncharted9on Canvas Fingerprinting

Unfortunately, it didn't pass the fingerprint test. You can see the results here: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/. On the other hand, Brave does pass it. I'd like to use Brave for all my browsing, but for some reason the devs haven't been able to get hardware-accelerated video decoding to work in their latest builds. That's why I've been using Librewolf for a very long time.

uncharted9on Show HN: I made a Bluesky video downloader that can download videos from Bluesky

Thanks for mentioning Cobalt. Looks really neat and supports all the places I might need to download videos from.

uncharted9on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

I think he was referring to the way colonizers commonly referred to the subjects of their colonies pejoratively as "savage natives". This applies to Native Americans, Africans, South Asians, etc. Racism was the norm in the old days.

uncharted9on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

This is such a common and dangerous rhetoric, which has been repeated millions of times in India today, that people are willing to believe that one community has wickedly tried to subjugate everyone by denying them the right to education. But this is completely false. The early government records of British India themselves attempt to record detailed demographic records of the communities that studied in the early 'modern' schools. And no, the Brahmins didn't have a monopoly.

This is similar to another popular narrative that no girl received an education until some sympathetic Englishman in partnership with a local woman allowed girls to go to school. What a load of BS.

uncharted9on Tell HN: Microsoft SecureBoot "Breaking" Changes, Today's Milestone

Does this affect Fedora and Ubuntu, which run fine with Windows dual-boot and secure boot enabled?

uncharted9on The Dying Web

Looks very tough considering how much complicated a modern browser is. There is Ladybird project but it's expected to be in Alpha stage by 2026.

uncharted9on So Who Is Building That 100k GPU Cluster for XAI?

Cool article from the perspective of setting up a data center, but the big question remains - Why?

If the goal is to create a bigger, faster, smarter version of OpenAI's GPT, then I'm not sure if this sounds even logical. The current crop of LLM models is just a Q&A hallucination filled chatbot which are way past their peak hype cycle. There is still no business model or killer product-market fit. I don't know what the investors are expecting, but they are more than willing to throw more than 6B dollars. So idk. °_°

uncharted9on Why CSV is still king

Excel will happily ignore if you use tabs as delimiter and show all the columns as a single column. Atleast LibreOffice tries to figure out and confirms the delimiter before opening CSV.

uncharted9on Why CSV is still king

It's 2024 and Excel still doesn't natively parse CSV with tabs as delimiters. When I send such csv files to my colleagues, they complain about not being able to open them directly in Excel. I wish Excel could pop up a window like LibreOffice does to confirm the delimiter before opening a csv file.

uncharted9on Four Stages of Competence

Reminds me of discussion I remember seeing on HN about how all the oil companies have a dozen or two guys who can just read the assignment for few hours and point out on map where the next drilling should be, and their predictions are almost always right; way better than any of their computer models and teams of analysts. These guys usually are in this field for more than 35-40 years and have gained a sense of "Unconscious Competence" that this article suggests

uncharted9on Ask HN: How many of you are fighting with Win11

Not affiliated with the original author, but this tool has made my life so much easier by being able to get rid of all the awful components of Windows 11.

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Also, check out this video to discover some of the insanely helpful tools that actually make Windows fun to use

https://youtu.be/4VhJSxMKIqM

uncharted9on Ask HN: How to Block YouTube at Home

I can help you in some way because I have experimented with blocking a lot of distracting sites for my own internet de-addiction journey.

You can set up NextDNS or Adguard DNS to block YouTube at the router, device, or browser level. Really a great service, and free up to 300k network queries per month. There is a single toggle for YouTube in the Parental Controls section of both of these public DNS services to block all related domains of YouTube on the website as well as mobile apps. They also allow custom user rules that support wildcards, and you can specify all second-level domains related to YouTube to block them. I can list some of them off the top of my head:

```

youtube.com

youtu.be

googlevideo.com

ytimg.com

youtubekids.com

youtube-nocookie.com

```

You can also edit the hosts file on your desktop (or on a rooted Android phone, if you've got one).

Currently, this is what I use, and it does a decent job of blocking YouTube on my desktop.

```

0.0.0.0 www.youtube.com

0.0.0.0 youtube.com

0.0.0.0 m.youtube.com

0.0.0.0 youtu.be

0.0.0.0 www.youtu.be

0.0.0.0 i.ytimg.com

0.0.0.0 accounts.youtube.com

0.0.0.0 gdata.youtube.com

0.0.0.0 uploads.gdata.youtube.com

0.0.0.0 www.youtube-nocookie.com

0.0.0.0 youtubekids.com

0.0.0.0 www.youtubekids.com

0.0.0.0 youtube-ui.l.google.com

0.0.0.0 youtube.googleapis.com

```

There is a nifty browser extension called [Unhook](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-hide-youtube...) that can remove lots of addictive elements from the YouTube.com website like recommendations, shorts, homepage feed, likes, comments, subscription feed etc., and allows you to only interact with bare minimum UI consisting just videos. It's highly customizable and you can turn on or off the options according to your needs.

On Android you can use this FOSS app called [NewPipe](https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/) to consume YouTube videos without the official app and without needing your Google Account. There is no feed here and you can turn off video recommendations and comments in it if you want.

uncharted9on Ask HN: Create a Simple Website/Blog?

I decided to build my blog and bought my domain just yesterday. Can you tell which theme you used for the blog. It looks pretty perfect for what I want for my use case.

uncharted9on Tell HN: It is now impossible to dismiss shorts from your Youtube feed

I block Shorts using uBlock Origin. Works really well. https://christitus.com/remove-youtube-shorts/

uncharted9on Speedometer 3.0: A shared browser benchmark for web application responsiveness

Ryzen 5600H + RX 5500M laptop, AC plugged in with power mode in Windows set to "Best performance", Windows 11 Home 23H2

Chromium (122.0.6261.112) without any extensions:16.7 ± 0.34

Brave Beta (122.0.6261.111): 12.8 ± 0.62

Brave Beta (122.0.6261.111) Private: 15.9 ± 0.58

Floorp (11.10.5 based on Firefox ESR 115): 7.40 ± 0.20

Floorp (11.10.5 based on Firefox ESR 115) Private: 7.91 ± 0.19

Librewolf (123.0-1): 8.41 ± 0.19

Librewolf (123.0-1) with uBlock Origin disabled: 8.86 ± 0.17

uncharted9on Ask HN: What new laptop would you get?

Can you share specs and places from where you sourced the parts.

uncharted9on Ask HN: What new laptop would you get?

Any suggestions for under $1000 (excluding tax)?

I've looked at Thinkpads and all the good ones are well over that price.

My priority is light weight and at least a 16GB/512GB combination. The only laptop I could find that meets this, based on suggestions in other comments, is the LG Gram.

uncharted9on Do literally anything

The caveat here is that either you have really good self-control and prevent yourself from sinking into time wormholes like social media (is Hacker News one?) and video platforms, or you artificially create barriers that prevent you from falling into these digital distractions.

I happen to use the latter method to get things done. I don't know what the real solution to this is, because since I'm the one who creates firewalls on all my devices, I also happen to know how to work around them and turn them off. With enough time spent with firewalls on, I have slowly started to forget that I can turn the firewall off. But the internal urge sometimes breaks this discipline and the end result is often hours spent on YouTube or Hacker News (like right now, typing this comment).

uncharted9on [dead]

There is hardly anything scientific about this paper, even if you ignore the atrocious English used here.

I wish this sophomore "researcher" had turned on the spell checker in his MS Word before submitting this garbage.

> J. Robert Openhymer,

uncharted9on What do you think of Hacker News' design?

Harmonic on Android is pretty slick and solves most of the UI issues, but yeah, tracking your replies is a lost game with HN.

uncharted9on Ask HN: Are there any websites for SQL puzzle games?

Thanks everyone who have commented all these sites. I wanted to brush up SQL for interviews and these will help a lot.

uncharted9on The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

I can't find your email address in your bio, and I don't know if you can message on HN. Can you update your bio.

uncharted9on Lost in the Discord Maze: Is There a Better Way to Build SaaS Communities?

I like the way EndeavourOS does this. Most of the technical discussion takes place on the Discourse board, and it really helps when searching for a bug or problem using search engines. Discourse has a pretty good tagging and threading system that I'd still prefer over any other alternative.

For casual conversation, shitposting, and even technical support, I've found Telegram to be in the perfect sweet spot. No shitty Electron desktop client, and the UI is just plain messaging, unlike that abomination called Discord.

uncharted9on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

This looks impressive. Much less clunky than the Syncthing's interface and doesn't look as buggy as KDE Connect on my first try. The real test would be moving my 95GB DCIM folder from Android to Windows. Let's see how that goes.

uncharted9on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

There is also Send.Vis.ee, which is a community fork of Firefox Send. It has always worked very well for me personally. There are many public instances available with varying file size limits and expiring conditions.

- Website: https://send.vis.ee/

- Source: https://github.com/timvisee/send

- List of instances at: https://github.com/timvisee/send-instances

uncharted9on How to Study (2023)

This is the correct way to approach the note-taking vs. paying attention debate. Most of the students (including me in my early undergrad days) come to classes with blank slates. This forces your brain to be in panic mode when encountering new information from the lecturer by either jotting ferociously or not paying attention because, of course, the lecture slides will be posted in Google Drive later, after the lecture is done.

For engineering classes, I would rather invest the entire time in the class to focus, ask questions, and read the content from the textbooks if it's standard stuff covered there. The ideal scenario is doing it before class, but even going through textbooks on the same day and creating notes based on them works fine for me. During my pre-undergrad days while preparing for entrance exams, my teachers would ask everyone to just listen to the whole topic while they used to explain on the whiteboard, and only at the very end, after the board was fully covered, would they give everyone 5–10 minutes to jot down the content in their notebooks. I really think that really balances all the classroom learning, but I have never experienced the same type of teaching philosophy elsewhere since then.

I also think that a particular type of learning style can't work across subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all. You can't study history the same way you do mathematics. Physics is very different from chemistry, and computer science is definitely different. A lot of universities (anything outside the top 10) in my country really got CS education all wrong. I see kids writing code in their notebooks. Mugging up random information. It's really jarring.