Hacker News Reader

vollmondon Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

Aw, I miss Flex. It made so much sense to me.

vollmondon When should we require that firmware be free?

How do you reliably (eg legally-definable) differentiate between "stopped supporting" and "haven't released an update in a while because it works fine and there are no major bugs"?

vollmondon Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)

> Where can you see this dependency list? Tried to look everywhere in the jsfiddle UI but don't find it

"Resources" in the left side menu

vollmondon Car Crash Deaths Involving Cannabis on the Rise

So as cannabis use becomes more legal, more people who have crashes have used cannabis in the past. What an awful title.

vollmondon The Pen, Mightier (2011)

There's a lot of overlap, too. Also with fancy headphones: https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalheadpens/

vollmondon 25 Gbit/s at home, part 1

I've been trying to find my paper copy all week so I can reread it. Might just give up and read it on his site: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

vollmondon 25 Gbit/s at home, part 1

> Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"

- Charlie Stross, "Accelerando"

vollmondon The Reason Java Is Still Popular

I'd say Maven is more than a dependency manager, though. It's a full build manager, with dependency management as one (major) feature. The dependency management part itself isn't very complicated, other than the verbosity of XML as the structure.

I have spent a long time as a Java dev using Maven, and the past few years floating around some other projects (C#, PHP, Python, a tiny bit of NodeJS) and continually find myself wishing to have Maven back, so I suppose YMMV.

vollmondon Unity signs “multi-million dollar” contract to help U.S. government with defense

> It’s simple to sit there behind the desk reading articles and history when you’re not one making the decisions, good or bad.

We are participants in those decisions, on both sides. We are part of the targets of those decisions (eg domestic spying, provision of military equipment to local and regional police forces), as well as tacit supporters of those decisions (or do you think an American civilian can travel the world without being blamed for those mistakes? I have heard of a lot of Canadian flags being added to travel luggage...).

Our tax money pays to kill children in deserts. Our tax money pays to destabilize governments. Our parents and children and brothers and sisters who ARE veterans directly participate in executing those bad decisions. And then many of them commit suicide. My father shot himself three years ago, near his 50th anniversary of shipping out to Vietnam, because of the mistakes he was part of there and later which stayed with him for so many decades. I don't think our second-guessing of those decisions taken in our name is at all inappropriate.

> Yeah, a lot of mistakes have been made. Many of them will continue to be made.

There must be a threshold of "too many" or "too heinous" mistakes at which point one stops trying to improve an organization and instead withdraws support, right? Otherwise it may as well be a religion.

vollmondon Let's Encrypt swag is here and I love it

You prompted me to go look - interesting that there are different sizes available per item (even between the tshirts). Wonder if some are sold out and they're just not showing?

vollmondon Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

The US has no requirement to carry your ID. I'm not sure there's any base requirement to have ID.

You only need your driver's license if you're driving, and ID in general is only required for certain activities that directly require identification or use the ID to confirm other information (eg age when buying alcohol).

vollmondon A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

We have a 5yo and 8yo. Most of the time, the question for whether they can handle something is less "are they capable?" and more "will someone call CPS?"

vollmondon We lost 54k GitHub stars

The dialog clearly warns you that if you have something to delete, it will be deleted, but it doesn't let you know if there is anything to delete.

That's not in itself a huge problem, but in this case it was compounded with the fact that the generic repo he was acting on is named inconsistently for users vs organizations, and he had just done it on his user account. If I'm reading correctly, a user's profile readme repo is `<user>/<user>`, while for organizations it is `<org>/.github`, and, crucially, `<org>/<org>` is almost always going to be the core project for that org.

So yes, the warning says you will lose all stars on the project, but in the moment it would have seemed (to a fallible human brain who was in a user-space context) that this was the right repo, whereas a "you will lose 54k stars" message would have broken the user out of that space.

vollmondon We lost 54k GitHub stars

There is a difference between using UI tweaks (color/size/motion) to call out information, and actually displaying that information.

Right? As in, "this will affect 0 stars" vs "this will affect 54,000 stars" is an informational difference. Calling out "this will affect all stars" (without specifying a number) doesn't break a user out of doing it to the wrong repo, since that message is the same in both cases.

vollmondon We lost 54k GitHub stars

The other thing they could do is make user/organization structure for that profile readme the same - as he mentioned, he had just done it on his personal account, which is of the form `<user>/<user>`, so doing `httpie/httpie` for the organization made contextual/autopilot sense in the moment.

vollmondon Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

Ignoring one-off bash scripts as needed, the standout examples of mine are a simple site for doing a specific type of date math in a bookmarkable fashion [0], as well as a webapp for my D&D 3.5 characters (pre-DNDBeyond days) [1]. As far as I know I am the sole user of both.

0: https://day1of.com/

1: https://github.com/imnotpete/character-builder

vollmondon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://imnotpete.com/

I used to run a couple blogs, but after 5+ years of not updating I replaced it with a basic calling card site. Just hard-coded HTML with a black-and-white Bootstrap on it.

vollmondon Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

I'm about 3 years out of date on Java, but if I were spinning up a new project it would be:

* Latest JDK

* Spring Boot

* JQuery/Bootstrap

* Eclipse (with Vim keybindings plugin)

Caveats:

* If it was a personal project or only a very small team, I'd start with Kotlin

* I haven't tried IntelliJ in quite a while and would give it a shot to see if I wanted to switch off Eclipse now

vollmondon An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

I use a Keebio Iris [0] which is similar to a stripped-down ErgoDox. Careful part selection (especially keycaps) could have one for <$150, though you do have to solder it together yourself. I enjoyed the experience.

[0] https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard

vollmondon Ask HN: Does anyone else think this 2FA everywhere is getting out of hand?

I find Steam to be the least-onerous (phone-based) 2FA tool I use - it pops up automatically when needed, and the codes are only 5 characters with a mix of letters and numbers, which I somehow find much easier to remember and type.

Granted, I don't know if those features involve security sacrifices, and I'm sure I'd get annoyed if I needed a separate app for every tool, but the user experience is more pleasant there for me.

vollmondon Auto accidents and “isolation and disruption”

Right, but they're general police (eg, they also handle non-traffic enforcement such as drugs), right?

I believe GP's point was not about "specific enforcement of traffic laws by police" but "law enforcement agencies who are specifically charged with traffic".

vollmondon Open Source Spectral warping wavetable synth

The synth is free. Paid levels seem to be mostly for skins/presets/support. There are more wavetables in the paid version, though I don't know enough about wavetable synthesis to know how much that matters.

vollmondon Open Source Spectral warping wavetable synth

Vital and Helm are easily the most-recommended free synths I've seen in a couple years of learning music production. I think this might be the first negative/"meh" response I've seen to Vital.

What are your preferred free synth plugins?

vollmondon Playdate Software Development Kit is now available for free to all

RC car racing using the crank as a steering wheel (like a pistol-style RC control)

Riffing off your skateboard, other balance games like tightrope walking

Something where you're a hamster in a hamster ball

vollmondon Show HN: Check if your website violates GDPR

Hmm. My site itself is hosted in the US, so it catches my site as one of the violations. Does GDPR differentiate between first-party and third-party servers in this case?

vollmondon Nerdle = Like Wordle but with Equations

[sweardle](https://sweardle.com/): 4 letter words

vollmondon Bittersweet Symfony: Devs accidentally turn off CSRF protection in PHP framework

Now that you mention it, I can't think of any other concept I eventually researched and learned about just because of frameworks complaining (Spring framework in my case).

vollmondon Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

99% of the phone calls I get from unknown numbers are some combination of scam/robo/or just immediate hang up. The only exceptions tend to be businesses responding to my initial contact (eg, trying to get a plumber out to my house), in which case I will answer unknown numbers for a day or two until we connect. Otherwise nope.

This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.

vollmondon Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up

I would assume there's a floor on the size of waterway it starts with. I have the same situation (well, less so) in that my backyard is 3 blocks from a named creek on the map, but it started me several miles away on the larger creek that my local one flows into.

Edit: also seems to generalize your location - pretty sure it's just figuring out the town I clicked in, then going from there.

vollmondon Tinyssh

I haven't seen the "words of code" metric before, and some cursory web searching doesn't reveal much. Is there a standard? Just split on the given language's punctuation/delimiters?