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ahnickon Show HN: Tweek – Fast to-do weekly calendar app

Have you tried Google Tasks? You can enter a task with or without a date. For those that have dates they will show up on your Google Calendar, you can set recurring tasks that occur every so often, and it sends notifications.

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

iOS holds >58% of the US mobile market as of July 2020.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

Apple owns the majority of the US mobile market, so as a US consumer I could choose to go with Android, but then I won't be a part of the blue bubble crowd with all my friends. Also, Google has much the same policies with the Google Play store, so there really isn't a choice. It's a duopoly of bad implicit choices. Apple is able to charge 30%, because they can exploit their market position.

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

Apple curates and still bad actor apps make it onto the app store. It's not like Apple has a 100% pure record here. There is also no reason to think that Apple is the only company in the world capable of carrying out curation. If Epic Games, had their own app store I doubt they would want to allow apps on their app store that violated their users' privacy and other malicious activities just as much as Apple. Maybe you personally would never feel comfortable trusting Epic Games, but why should others even be denied the option?

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

2 things here:

1) Amazon has been running there own app store successfully and that has worked out well enough for them that they continue to do so and a lot of Kindle Fire owners seem to enjoy that experience.

2) Few companies are Amazon though and the ability to operate 3rd party software outside of the purview of Google's own store is severely hamstrung for most others. This has also been called out by Epic Games previously.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/21/21229943/epic-games-fortn...

Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.

So even Google may eventually face legal issues regarding their anti-competitive app store practices. If big tech is forced to legitimately compete with other app stores, then continuing to charge a 30% fee will become untenable.

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

Then your parents can still use Apple's app store in such a world and pay a premium. In fact, in such a world your parent's would probably benefit too, because Apple would actually face competition and would reduce their 30% to a more reasonable level.

ahnickon Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]

It's not about Epic or any single company. It is really about consumers. Allowing multiple app store choices on mobile devices would lead to competition and really highlight the fact that 30% is far too much to be asking as a tax for the app store.

ahnickon A new funding model for open source software

The root of the problem is that open-source donations are made on a per-project basis. To support a project via GitHub Sponsors or OpenCollective, you must create hyet another auto-renewing monthly subscription for each project you want to support.

I don't think the author's description of GitHub Sponsors is exactly correct. Technically, the sponsorship is at the user/organization level, so if you make a donation it goes to the organization/user, which may have MULTIPLE projects going on. This is the way I have set it up for our company Plyint (https://github.com/sponsors/plyint).

Although I would very much like GitHub to implement a pool of organizations/users, which is maybe what the author meant?

ahnickon OCaml: Add support to iOS/Mac ARM64

On GH I can see the files that are changed and make/read comments that are inline on the files as well. This has been sufficient for my needs. What is it that Fisheye/Crucible brings to the table that you think would be desirable on GH?

ahnickon I couldn't buy a car because my email address was 'invalid'

I've had similar problems with financial or medical institutions systems handling the .family TLD. My workaround is to have a .org TLD that is similar to my .family TLD and then forward incoming email to the same name mapped onto the .family TLD. It'd be nice if I didn't have to do this, but unfortunately there are quite a few systems with shoddy email validation logic.

ahnickon Ansible-Defined Homelab

While rather easy to do, Synology provides so much more “out of the box”. My own NAS ran well on Debian 10 for a few years, until I started getting random disconnects on drives and various other “stability” issues. Synology costs more up front, but after initial configuration it’s more or less just a box in the corner you forget about. Mine just sits there, automatically installing software updates whenever they’re available.

Does your synology utilize BTRFS? If so, what is your experience with it? I'm currently using a FreeNAS box that runs on ZFS that has been very reliable for me over the years. I can't really see giving up the power/reliability of ZFS to move to a synology setup, but I like to keep tabs on BTRFS progress.

ahnickon Data structures and algorithms I actually used while working at tech companies

One algorithm I keep coming back to is Aho-Corasick, which locates all occurrences of a set of keywords in a string of text in linear time. (https://github.com/ahnick/ahocorasick) It's been useful anytime I needed to locate patterns in a group and I didn't want to be looping back over the group repeatedly.

ahnickon Passbolt: Self hostable, open source, password manager for teams

As a small dev team we needed something similar to passbolt, but that would primarily be used for sharing API keys and other application secrets for our code base. (Although we use it for other passwords as well) A lot of the existing tools are fairly complex to setup and are not tied to identity management systems. (i.e. You have to setup and maintain separate user accounts)

Since, we were on Keybase already for employee identity and chat, we created an extension to encpass.sh to use Keybase for our secret storage. (https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/extensions/...) It has been working really well so far, as when we add someone to a Keybase team, that person immediately has access to that team's secrets. No extra setup required.

ahnickon Starlink WiFi Router FCC Approved

Who else is hoping to run a bonded internet connection with their existing ISP and Starlink? :)

ahnickon Show HN: Primo – all-in-one IDE, CMS, component library, static site generator

Reminds me of TinaCMS (https://github.com/tinacms/tinacms), but built on top Svelte instead of React+Gatsy. The choice of Svelte is really exciting to me. Can't wait for the source to drop.

ahnickon Show HN: Primo – all-in-one IDE, CMS, component library, static site generator

You may also want to take a look at Peregrine CMS if you are looking for a good head-optional API driven CMS. (http://www.peregrine-cms.com/)

ahnickon 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments

Yeah, that's my thinking as well. Maybe congress will pass a nationwide extension on home mortgages for some determined duration of the pandemic? Rent is less clear. Maybe something similar for the landlords and in return there is a moratorium on evictions?

ahnickon 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments

So the payments get deferred, but if families aren't earning any money (e.g. lost job or furloughed) for these missed months, how will they catch back up? Where does the extra money come from?

ahnickon KeePassXC 2.6.0 Released

I haven't run into that before, but I'll describe how I bootstrapped my setup in case that might help resolve your issue.

  (1) Setup Resilio sync on my NAS
  (2) Shared the folder holding the kdb file via Resilio Sync
  (3) Entered the code into the Resilio Sync mobile app
  (4) Performed an initial sync of the folder to my phone
  (5) Downloaded Strongbox and pointed it to the kdb file under the "Sync" location in Files on iOS

ahnickon KeePassXC 2.6.0 Released

I used to be of this mindset as well. (Two different files, so I wouldn't overwrite or lose a password just in case I synced the wrong direction)

I gave this up though as Resilio will detect conflicts and prevent overwriting in case that did happen and I make automated nightly backups of my password file, so I can restore the file if I ever did "lose" a password. I've been running with my current setup and haven't had to restore yet.

ahnickon KeePassXC 2.6.0 Released

With the later versions of iOS supporting "Files" now, Strongbox points to the file that is stored within the "Sync" (Resilio) location. What this means is that Strongbox is actively reading/writing to that file within the "Sync" location on iOS. Whenever I open the Resilio Sync app it will either push the changes I made on mobile to the server or pull down the file from the server and overwrite the file on iOS, depending on which is the newer file.

Also, I don't use Resilio's proxy servers either, so all of this is 100% running on my own infra. I have Wireguard setup on my home network, so if I am away from home, I can "VPN" in on my phone and then open the Resilio Sync app to sync up remotely.

ahnickon KeePassXC 2.6.0 Released

Not OP, but I use Resilio Sync (aka Bittorent Sync) and it has been working great for sometime now. Just open the app and the latest kdb file gets pulled down. I use the Strongbox app on iOS which supports kdb.

ahnickon Help Message for Shell Scripts

Thanks, this worked well on Mac.

ahnickon Help Message for Shell Scripts

pandoc is not installed on macOS out-of-the-box though right? The user would have to pull via homebrew or something?

ahnickon Help Message for Shell Scripts

Ah interesting, is there any workaround for Mac? Otherwise, I may just have to fallback to stripping the man page formatting and sending it to less.

ahnickon Help Message for Shell Scripts

No, I think the readability of the help documentation itself is largely the same whether it is placed in the header or in a dedicated function. When I'm viewing the shell script code though, often I want to jump right in and see the actual code, not look at the help documentation.

By having the help documentation in a function in the middle or towards the end of the file, I don't have to page down through the help documentation to get to the code that is actually doing things. If I'm really interested in the help documentation, then I'd prefer to look at the nicely formatted version output by the script (<script> --help or whatever) rather than looking in the actual script code anyway.

Admittedly, this may be more of a subjective personal preference item.

ahnickon Help Message for Shell Scripts

I like the idea of combining the header with the help documentation to reduce the number of areas to maintain in smaller scripts. For larger scripts though, I think I'd still prefer to have a separate function, so that the help documentation doesn't overwhelm the initial viewing of the actual code.

I also like to feed a heredoc directly into man, which allows you to achieve nicer formatting for the help documentation. Something like this...

  man -l - << EOF
  .\" Manpage for encpass.sh.
  .\" Email contact@plyint.com to correct errors or typos.
  .TH man 8 "06 March 2020" "1.0" "encpass.sh man page"
  .SH NAME
  encpass.sh \- Use encrypted passwords in shell scripts
  ...
  EOF

See encpass.sh for a working example of this -> https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/encpass.sh

ahnickon Linear – A fast issue tracker

I haven't noticed JIRA cloud being that slow, but maybe that's because the team is small.

Did you start to experience performance issues as team size increased? Did you have a lot of issues or data held in the issues? Or was there another issue that you think led to the slowness?

I'm interested in your insights as we went with JIRA initially, since it was pretty much the gold standard and we thought it would scale nicely as we added team members, but if it is not going to do so, then it may not be worth the JIRA premium.

ahnickon Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin

My understanding of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV is that they have just increased the blocksize the clients can handle. Is there something more to them than that?

ahnickon Show HN: Aviary.sh – A tiny Bash alternative to Ansible

Does this save time in writing your own personal automation or make that personal automation less error prone? How would you compare it to just writing your own bash scripts or using something like Bashible (https://github.com/mig1984/bashible)?