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awalGarg

965 karma · joined February 25, 2015

awalgarg.me
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awalGarg··on Data breach at shipping giant Ceva Logistics
Full title: A data breach at shipping giant Ceva Logistics is rippling across banks, retailers, Steam gamers, and beyond
awalGarg··on Scrcpy v4.0
Yep. And the author of scrcpy is also one of the developers of VLC media player - another piece of software that just works.
awalGarg··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
> > If I know the answer to all these questions, wiring it together takes me LESS time than passing it to Claude Code.

> That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet.

That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing code yet.

awalGarg··on Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates
> I can assure you that the core utils have all already went through static analysers doing more checks than the Rust compiler.

I'd be very interested in reading more about this. Could you please explain what are these checks and how they are qualitatively and quantitatively better than the default rustc checks?

Please note that this is about checks on the codebase itself - not system/integration tests which are of course already applicable against alternative implementations.

awalGarg··on Indian Sign Painting: A typeface designer's take on the craft
Sounds like a reasonable theory but do you have an actual example? The one you gave:

> For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

does not apply to Indian languages because most of them have daily-use-words with the /æ/ sound.

awalGarg··on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI
The headline already rubbed me the wrong way, but seeing this made me immediately cancel my Duolingo subscription. I encourage others to do the same.
awalGarg··on F-Droid Awarded Open Technology Fund's FOSS Sustainability Grant
To add insult to the injury, they claim that most people should stick to Play Store - a malware repository controlled by an ad distribution company - for better privacy. We're supposed to take this seriously.
awalGarg··on Our structure
I understand why the other comments would be flagged, but this one is legibly reasoned and I've vouched for it.

It is obvious that historical advancement of technology has caused widespread cultural changes, and a sizable percentage of them are considered negative by a large portion of the population. To state that commercially viable AI could cause such effects as well does not seem necessarily unhinged to me, but in fact worthy of discourse on this forum.

awalGarg··on Debugging tricks in the browser
You can just hit F8 and the debugger will pause at the next instruction. Works in both Chrome/FF.
awalGarg··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone
Can you release the kernel sources? Thanks.
awalGarg··on Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox
Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!
awalGarg··on Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop
I'm always amazed reading that this isn't already the case in the US. In India, every charge requires SMS based 2fa. Starting a bank mandate (ECS/NACH) for automatic transfers needs me to physically sign a paper. It can be revoked any time by the user without any involvement of the receiving party, and can be done online as well.
awalGarg··on Fish Shell 3.2
As someone with a teeny tiny commit in this release and a maintained personal fork, I feel compelled to say that the biggest benefit of fish over bash/zsh for me is not just the OOTB completions UX etc., but also how much more approachable it is to hacking. I would never even bother reading the source code of bash again, let alone try to patch it, because I have 0 confidence that something completely unrelated is not gonna break.
awalGarg··on Ask HN: Cool stuff that's still completely unregulated?
I am not sure why this comment was marked dead without any responses, and hence I am "vouch"-ing for it. Can someone point to laws related to license plate tracking?

It seems to me that having a huge database of known locations of vehicles could be used to do some cool (but likely immoral) things, specially coupled with the fact that several state agencies all over the world make it free and easy to retrieve licensing and ownership information for vehicles. It'd also be relatively much easier to do compared to facial recognition.

awalGarg··on Show HN: Resumegen – A single-page LaTeX resume generator
tl;dr: it is a big form where you enter your personal details. The form is slidinated (pagination with slides).

At the end, you get a button to copy some latex, which you are instructed to paste in some website which applies a template and you get a preview back. You can get a PDF as well. Example here https://l.awalgarg.me/oobqng33.pdf.

Seems handy I guess for getting a starting point.

I made this but with markdown a while ago, https://github.com/awalgarg/cv-maker.

awalGarg··on Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
Asking purely out of curiosity: Are you actually based in India? (The domain is on the Indian TLD and the address in whois records lists an Indian city).

Here in India, cyber law enforcement is a joke, and if some legal issue comes up with this site, I'd be curious to see how it works out.

And, just a hypothetical follow up question: how would it work out if the site was not even DMCA compliant?

awalGarg··on SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim
I have similar concerns. Also, these scripts pretty much never have an accompanying "uninstall" or "reset system state" scripts.

For parent: check out http://github.com/awalGarg/curl-tap-sh (disclaimer: I am the author, and it was on HN's frontpage already a while ago)

awalGarg··on Show HN: CakeResume – Drag and drop resume snippets to build a unique resume
Shameless self plug:

I wrote https://github.com/awalGarg/cv-maker/ which generates the resume in markdown. From there, you can convert it with pandoc to basically whatever you want. It is not much polished yet, though.

awalGarg··on Show HN: CakeResume – Drag and drop resume snippets to build a unique resume
When I click "Try Now", I get a modal to signup. Is there something specific about this tool that requires signing-up first? Why can't we access it as is? (I understand some reasons, but I feel they don't apply when you are doing a "Show HN" of the beta version).

Otherwise looks nice, atleast in the images.

awalGarg··on ReMarkable Paper Tablet
Hi. I am a paper guy too. Until this thing hits the market wide, gets lots of positive reviews and has its costs reduced, does anyone have tips for managing lots of real paper? I feel like some organization tricks could help ease dealing with paper problems.

I use paper to sketch out thoughts and draw diagrams, and I don't want unlimited papers. 5 pages a day is enough for me. I wish I could say I read books - I don't. So I only have to manage papers on which I write things and refer to them quickly whenever possible. It works fine, but if someone has tips to help, please share. Thanks.

awalGarg··on The Joy of Linux Desktop Environments
One not-so-unrelated thing I really love about linux is that the "configuration" for just about every application is stored in plain-text files, mostly in the user's home directory. Which means we can use git to version control them (like many many people do - the dotfiles trend).

You can have a log of configuration changes for your system, you can have various profiles with branches, etc. Want to switch to a different profile? Just `git checkout <branch-name>`, done! Want to revert some change, or see how your PC looked like 2 months ago? `git log` and `git checkout` your way through!

I currently have all my configurations[1] in a dotfiles directory representing the home directory (same directory structure etc.) and symlinks to them in the actual home directory. Very easy to manage.

[1]: https://github.com/awalGarg/dotfiles

awalGarg··on Nyancat on the touchbar
So... just about the touchbar and not this particular project:

The touchbar is on the keyboard, almost perpendicularly (and many times at an obtuse angle) opposite to the screen. So I have to move my head up and down all the time. This is not an issue with the regular keyboard because it has physical buttons which don't change their meaning, so I have memorized the layout and I can use my muscle memory.

To avoid moving human head up and down, maybe they should have put it adjacent below or above the screen, you know. And while they were at it, maybe they should have just merged it into the screen seamlessly... Oh, and while they were at that, they could make the entire screen a touch-screen instead of just a small bar. Just imagine... a touchscreen laptop. Now that would be amazing, right?

awalGarg··on Async/await support in Firefox
Note that async functions always return native promises. So if you like your fast or sugary promise libraries, you can't make async functions return those promises. You are stuck with the native promises, which, as of now, are pretty slow in almost all engines in comparison to the heavily optimized promise library bluebird.

I guess we should just hope that engines will optimize their own promise implementations. This might not matter much in front-end apps, but absolutely does for Node apps.

Other than that, I believe it is time JS gets: 1. An actually useful try/catch (with pattern matching on the catched errors) 2. Standard stack traces across all engines

Those two will really help async/await.

awalGarg··on How does Google know where I am?
From the comments section of the top-voted answer:

> Something you didn't mention: when a Google-car goes around taking pictures for StreetView it also maps the location and all wifi networks name. So taking a new router with a new network name from a different ISP might work, but only until they come near your house to update their pictures... > - Bakuriu

I am not sure how this makes me feel :-|

awalGarg··on Show HN: Your personal Hacker News comment statistics
Whoops! Fixed: https://github.com/awalGarg/hn-personal-stats/commit/d629a7d...

Thanks.

awalGarg··on RE:DOM – Tiny DOM library
There is hyperscript which is a bit more "mature": https://github.com/dominictarr/hyperscript#example

There is virtual-hyperscript which ports the above to virtual-dom: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/tree/master/virtual...

I made a similar-ish "library" about an year ago: https://gist.github.com/awalGarg/8a0e18c6fe87456d885f

And there are all sorts of similar DSLs you can find on npm/github for JS. In a bit less time, you can write your own. In even lesser time, you can just do what you used to do prior to all this. This does however seem like a pretty popular idea in the JS community which keeps getting "discovered" every now and then.

awalGarg··on The One Second Dash
I have been using fish as my primary shell for a while and it is pretty good. The development pace is pretty good, happens on Github, bugs are fixed pretty quickly and PRs merged in ASAP. I do recommend having a POSIX compliant shell installed alongside for when it is needed. The interactive shell experience with fish is amazing though.
awalGarg··on From Chrome Apps to the Web
> > Websites with hardware access?

> the alternative? [...] install a native app which aren't nearly as well sandboxed right now (Windows, Mac, Linux).

err, the sandboxing works because web APIs don't already expose things which are suggested to be exposed here. Exposing them will break that "sandbox", to a certain (major) degree, atleast.

awalGarg··on Return True to Win
You can save one character by doing this:

(x=0)=>_=>++x

the underscore is another variable but a single variable does not require parenthesis. So instead of two chars for the two parens, you use a single char for a single letter variable. JS FTW ;)

awalGarg··on Thoughts on Uber’s List of Postgres Limitations
The site is powered by Wordpress, which, to the best of my knowledge, can work only with MySQL. Now that is very meta.
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