Hacker News Reader

watsonon Om Malik has died

Or maybe even more if you do send it

watsonon Claude Opus 4.6

I've heard rumors this might be Sonnet 5 rebranded as Opus 4.6. But why? Profit? WDYT?

watsonon S.A.R.C.A.S.M: Slightly Annoying Rubik's Cube Automatic Solving Machine

This is one of the best arguments for purchasing a 3D printer

watsonon GPT-5

Yes MS owns 49% of OpenAI

watsonon Don't guess my language

MacOS has this feature under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Preferred Languages. Here you can have an ordered list of languages you wish apps and websites (I _think_ only works for Safari) to use. I don't know how widespread this is in other OS'es or browsers.

watsonon A proposal to add signals to JavaScript

> Promises are a nice success story, but without async/await it wasn't really necessary to standardize

One benefit of standardisation that's not tied to async/await is that the JavaScript engines has been able to do performance optimisations not otherwise possible which benefit Promise-heavy applications

watsonon “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

You most likely just don’t realize that your podcast app of choice actually gets its list of podcasts from Apple. That’s the authors point of Apple hosting it for free for everyone.

watsonon When Google Fiber abandons your city as a failed experiment (2019)

The ISP sets up rack-cabinets full of equipment in central buildings where the “last mile” fiber terminates, close to the neighborhoods that they service. Each ISP that provides service to the area needs to have their own equipment there. This is how they differentiate and how one ISP can do 1Gbps while another might be able to do 2Gbps. Simply because they have installed different equipment. The fiber itself can of course support much more

watsonon Google is deleting inactive accounts. Here's what that means

They want to close accounts with poor security (i.e. no 2FA enabled). These accounts has a higher risk of being compromised and used to get access to whatever they control

watsonon You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery

Matt Parker video on the subject: https://youtu.be/zYkmIxS4ksA

watsonon Company builds 500cc ‘one-stroke’ engine

I would assume so, yes. This is exactly how regular motors get started, unless you have one of those old-timy cranks you had to manually turn to get the motor running

watsonon ChatGPT January 9th Release Notes

When you enter a query ChatGPT will generate a response that slowly scrolls down the screen. I presume they mean to stop that.

watsonon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://wa.tson.dk

Static one page site built by hand. Nothing fancy, just a portfolio of sorts

Source: https://github.com/watson/wa.tson.dk

watsonon Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

Here's an official update from Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/128359184496275046...

watsonon Hyperdrive v10 – a peer-to-peer filesystem

Last I checked you can't update a torrent. So if Wikipedia changes even a single letter, you'd need to download all the data once more

watsonon Backport: A CLI to automate backporting of commits on a GitHub repo

I really love this tool - We use it to backport commits from master to our older release branches on the Kibana project. I can't emphasize enough how many hours this saves us every week.

It creates a PR for each backport you make and label them "backport", so you can easily see them all here: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+...

watsonon Airbnb will start designing houses in 2019

Interesting that the word "hotels" is not mentioned anywhere in the article ;)

watsonon LegoOS: Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation [pdf]

When I read the title, I honestly thought this was an official LEGO thing. This is exactly why it's important for a company like LEGO to protect its trademark.

I realize this is just an homage to LEGO and I'm sure they know and appreciate that. But they still need to defend their trademark. If they don't, anybody could just use their name for whatever they wanted - even things they DO NOT want to be associated with.

watsonon Volkswagen – detects when your tests are run in a CI server, and makes them pass

You're free to just depend on ci-info directly if that's all you need of course. The is-ci module does give you one added benefit however: It allows you to run this on the command line:

$ is-ci && echo "I'm running in a CI environment"

But of course that could technically be baked into ci-info. It's just more convenient to use with npx and to reason about if it's a self-contained module

watsonon Volkswagen – detects when your tests are run in a CI server, and makes them pass

Hi, co-creator of volkswagen here. Just some fun trivia about the project, which Kenneth and I obviously made as a joke years back when Volkswagen got caught cheating:

The Node module actually works. If you use it, it will make all your tests pass.

When writing the code, I put the logic for detecting if code is being run on a CI server into a separate node module called is-ci[1] (which the volkswagen module then depends on). That module (later split out into ci-info[2]) turned out to be so useful for actual work, that today it's being used by both React and the npm cli.

I only found this out recently. Imagine the surprise when a tiny part of a joke project you created years ago turns out to be one of your most popular open source projects :D

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-ci [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ci-info

watsonon Volkswagen – detects when your tests are run in a CI server, and makes them pass

Hi, co-creator of volkswagen, is-ci, and ci-info here. I extracted is-ci into its own module during the time I wrote volkswagen. It then turned out a lot of people wanted a module like that for actual useful things. But they wanted more info than simply "is this a CI server or not" (which was all that volkswagen cared about). So I made ci-info and moved the logic into that module and then made is-ci inherit from that, so to not have to duplicate the logic

watsonon Postmortem for Malicious Packages Published on July 12th, 2018

If I understand the npm incident report correctly, the answer is none:

> We determined that access tokens for approximately 4,500 accounts could have been obtained before we acted to close this vulnerability. However, we have not found evidence that any tokens were actually obtained or used to access any npmjs.com account during this window.

Source: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/175824896885/incident-report-npm...

watsonon Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data

I probably didn't give IPFS enough credit. What I should have said was that IPFS does way more than I need. Dat seems to hit the sweet spot for me

watsonon Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data

It's very similar to bittorrent but with a few key differences. For one, bittorrent doesn't allow you to update/add files in a dataset once you've shared the torrent. Dat does. Dat also has versioning built in.

IPFS seems to me to be a bit over-engineered whereas dat is a lot more simple/low level - something that suits my way of working really well.

watsonon Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data

One other crucial difference between dat and bittorrent is that dat allows you to update datasets. In bittorrent, you can't change/add files once you've shared your torrent

watsonon Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data

I'll try to answer your question, but it's been a while since I last looked at it, so I might get some/most of this wrong - so don't shoot me:

As far as I know git isn't good at storing binary data. Git depends on line breaks to be able to diff and make change sets. If you store a binary file in git and make an update to it - even though that update only changed 1 byte, the entire new version of the file is stored again. Dat uses Rabin fingerprinting to intelligently slice binary files into chunks that are less likely to change. That make dat a lot more efficient at storing, versioning, and syncing videos, images, and other large binary files.

watsonon Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data

Everything you put into dat is encrypted and unique key pairs are used for each shared item. Only the people you share the public key with can access the data. That doesn't address the expiry use-case, but it allows you to completely control who have access to what. Does that address your fine-grained permission needs?

Edit: The keys are very short (64 bytes), so they can easily be copy/pasted, tweeted and what have you :)

watsonon SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster

English is not my native language, but shouldn't the headline have read "SFO near miss would have triggered aviation disaster"? "Might" seems to indicate that something else happened afterwards as a possible result of the near miss

watsonon Elastic enters Application Performance Management space with Opbeat acquisition

One of our users open sourced a PHP integration he made to our API. But it only supports error monitoring unfortunately. Not our performance monitoring: https://opbeat.com/docs/articles/error-logging-in-php/

watsonon Elastic enters Application Performance Management space with Opbeat acquisition

Hi tophattom, I'm happy that you like our platform, and thanks for your feedback :)

1) With the new version of Opbeat which will be based on Elasticsearch, you have the ability to perform any custom query you like. That should hopefully take care of that part

2+3) I'm not 100% sure what the app development plan is. But I'll make sure to tell the right people :)