Hacker News Reader

Lex-2008on Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

These sites might be advertising things that usual ad networks would prefer to stay away from, like online casinos. Moreover, in some countries, it might be explicitly forbidden to advertise gambling.

Lex-2008on My favourite Git commit (2019)

I was bitten by too-short commit messages few times already, when someone asks me "why is it done this way?" - I check git history to find my own 3-year-old commit with message "it should be done this way"... Since then I try to write my commit messages so at least future me would get a hint why a change was necessary.

Lex-2008on Today's regional conflicts resemble the ones that produced World War II

> Communications between country leaders were fast and reliable

Maybe they were fast enough by 1939 standards, but it seems that in 1960s communication between Moscow and Washington was considered to be "not fast enough". Quoting Wikipedia article on Moscow–Washington hotline[1]:

> During the [1962 Cuban Missile Crisis], official diplomatic messages typically took six hours to deliver; unofficial channels, such as via television network correspondents, had to be used too as they were quicker. The experience of the crisis convinced both sides of the need for better communications.

> During the crisis, the United States took nearly twelve hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev's 3,000-word-initial settlement message – a dangerously long time. By the time Washington had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow%E2%80%93Washington_hotl...

Lex-2008on Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing

recently I learned that reading the article through archive.is shows the whole content: https://archive.is/Eea8R

Lex-2008on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

> some of these companies after success in China are working to sell and be competitive in the US and Europe.

Just out of curiosity: can't these companies be sued by the IP holding company when they try to sell outside of China, and be forbidden to sell their products in US and Europe?

Lex-2008on OpenZFS – add disks to existing RAIDZ

IIRC, the pool is effectively RAID0 over vdevs: if any single vdev dies - whole pool dies. Do i remember this correctly?

So if over the years I got, say, five disks of varying quality - I shouldn't add them to a pool as five individual vdevs :)

Lex-2008on Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

Oh, thanks for pointing me to it!

And thanks for the comment. Indeed, I was thinking about countries like Russia, where US three-letter agencies don't have extradition power, as far as I know (thinking about Snowden). Countries like mentioned in that thread, indeed, have more complicated relationships with US.

Lex-2008on Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

> if I'm to be spied by someone, I'd prefer my own government who is far more likely to act in my best interests than the three letter agencies of US.

I'm also aware of an opposite opinion: if I'm to be spied by someone, it's better to be a three letter agency overseas, since it's much harder for them to harm me, than a three letter agency in my home country, which can just knock at my door.

Lex-2008on FreeFileSync 12.5 Has Been Released

I'm not familiar with rclone and syncthing, but compared to rsync, it can, for example, detect renamed/moved files/dirs and read locked files on Windows (via Volume Shadow Copies). Also, you might have a look at "Which features make FreeFileSync unique?" question in their FAQ:

https://freefilesync.org/faq.php#features

Lex-2008on Russia temporarily disconnected from the global internet

probably this site is blocked in your country? Cached link: https://archive.is/M0mew

Lex-2008on Threads Surpasses 30M Signups

oh, indeed! For me it was showing just a Threads logo when I had "enhanced tracking protection" enabled in Firefox. After disabling it, I can read the website fine. Thanks!

Lex-2008on Threads Surpasses 30M Signups

non-geoblocked content, for people in EU: https://archive.is/TAIyP

Lex-2008on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

http://alexey.shpakovsky.ru/en/

Write ("leave notes") mostly for myself, but wonder if someone else might find it useful / interesting.

Lex-2008on Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English

ᚳᚫᚾ᛫ᛁ᛫ᚫᛞᛞ᛫ᚫ᛫ᛒᛁᛏ᛫ᚩᚠ᛫ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛏᚻᛖ᛫ᛗᛁᛉ?

Lex-2008on Why SQLite is so great for the edge

Haven't seen these links mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but in case you haven't seen them yet:

* SQLite is 35% Faster Than The Filesystem [1]

* Writing to files safely is hard [2], and SQLite goes to great details to ensure consistency in case of application, OS, or computer crash [3]

[1]: https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

[2]: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

[3]: https://sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html

Lex-2008on The HTTP QUERY Method specification

Things might've changed since then, but back in 2009 it was Chromium who disabled bzip2 compression after some ISPs were borking bzip2-compressed pages[1] (although it's mot entirely clear if it was indeed the reason for dropping bzip2), not the other way around. Later in 2016 this was mentioned as being the reason for limiting brotli compression to HTTPS only[2].

[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=14801 [2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452335...

So while I agree that it would be nice if everyone respected a "living standard", my hopes for middleboxes to comply are not high.

Lex-2008on Public Money, Public Code

that's true, but, to be fair, it might be easier to order an anti-hacker CIA background check for a contracted company of 100+ employees, than for a 10,000 pseudo-anonymous github users.

Lex-2008on Mastodon Has Already Won

According to Wikipedia[1], he was born in Russia and moved to Germany at the age of 11. I'll let others decide if it makes him German or Russian :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rochko

Lex-2008on Show HN: WasmGPT – “ChatGPT” in the browser, no WebGPU and no server needed

Nice stuff!

A bit of feedback, if I may:

* maybe it worth showing some feedback when AI is thinking/composing the answer vs. when it's already finished. Currently, on my machine words appear rather slowly, so it's not always clear if Assistant is done answering or not. Currently, I use CPU fan noise to check when it's done thinking :)

* also, scrolling the white text field to the bottom might be useful to see that text appeared.

* and it looks like it has some issues with non-latin symbols - try submitting some emoji or cyrillic text to it - black console at the bottom shows "Invalid UTF-8 leading byte 0x0000008d encountered when deserializing a UTF-8 string in wasm memory to a JS string!" message and user input (and AI output) appears garbled in the white field at the top.

Other than that, great stuff!

Lex-2008on Show HN: WasmGPT – “ChatGPT” in the browser, no WebGPU and no server needed

Can't reproduce. On my machine, it's a bit smarter:

  User: implement a python function that takes two numbers and return the sum
  Assistant: def sum(number1, number2):
      return number1 + number2

  Output: number1 + number2

(Not sure, what "Output:" line is supposed to mean). On the other hand:

  User: how do you add two numbers in JavaScript?
  Assistant: Add two numbers with a simple method.

Lex-2008on Marginalia: DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content

I did it! For every two numbers, calc.shpakovsky.ru has a static(-looking) webpage showing their sum (or difference, etc). Together with links to several other pages. The only limitation I know of is 4k URL length. Interestingly enough, major search engines are rather smart about it and cooled down their indexing efforts after some time. Guess, I'm not the first one to make such a website.

Lex-2008on When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets

Thanks for a nice writeup! Regarding "for a large company to do it would risk being sued by Adobe" - what do you know about "Pepper flash plugin", which was shipped with Chrome at some time? Back then I had an impression that it was an alternative implementation of flash player, but developed by Google.

Lex-2008on Push notifications are now supported cross-browser

same here: email and chat are allowed, others are blocked.

Lex-2008on Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

Happened to me over 10 years ago - rejection letter had this extra sentence at the end: "In addition, I really love your cover letter". The company back then had about 1000 employees, but it was for a position in a remote office which was probably very small.

Regarding "are they stupid enough to actually believe it" - I don't know, but what do people usually write in cover letters? When I wrote it - it was basically CV, just in text form instead of bullet points. But then _lying_ in cover letter is basically the same as lying on CV, no? Or, if companies tend to believe CVs, I would expect them to at least _pretend_ to believe cover letters, too.

Lex-2008on User interface design timeframes: from 0.1 seconds to 10 years (2009)

I think they do now? At least, on Google, I now get two similarly-looking buttons: "Reject all" and "Accept all" next to each other, with a small "More options" link underneath. Pretty close to what's shown here:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23035289/google-reject-al...

Lex-2008on Where are my Git UI features from the future?

I used `git gui` for that (not sure how "native" to git is it, though), and recently switched to `gitg` for both looking at tree and committing individual lines. Can't compare them with SourceTree, though, since haven't used that.

Also, when on command-line, I recently discovered `git add -i` for interactive mode (asks you about individual hunks and lets you "split" them), and `git add -e` (lets you edit the patch however you want).

Lex-2008on QBittorrent v4.5.0: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Legible Text

> On web, you don't have anything.

Well, you have at least prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature, but maybe you can also use System Colors: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value...