Hacker News Reader

commandersakion Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies Against Quantum Vulnerabilities [pdf]

Quantum Cryptanalysis feels like the Y2K problem all over again.

commandersakion U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years

Eh it's all accounted for.

commandersakion Jami – free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, and private communication software

These guys left a pamphlet in my letterbox last year trying to get me to use their software.

commandersakion U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years

Meh, boom and bust cycles.

commandersakion Microsoft plan 100% native Windows 11 apps in major shift away from web wrappers

Show courage, start with Teams.

commandersakion DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding

Vultr is pretty cool, but I was paying $10/mo for a 2 v-cores/2gb/55gb. I got a 'root server' with netcup and I'm now paying $11/mo for 4 cores/8gb/256gb nvm-e. Unfortunately the placement isn't what I hoped as it's in Virginia. I would've liked Singapore but the cost would be twice as much.

commandersakion Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)

Yes, I feel like it'll be a degrade in quality if they do this with any of their current line up. If they want to make a Macbook Ultra or whatever with it, that's fine -- I would have no interest in it.

commandersakion My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

I have a magic keyboard for my studio, bloody expensive, but I just love the ergonomics and feel compared to my two TKL (really nice) mechanical keyboards.

commandersakion My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

Things may change. Macbook Neo keyboard is straight-forward to replace.

commandersakion Go Naming Conventions: A Practical Guide

'x' is an operator

commandersakion 'Project Hail Mary' Crosses $300M in Sales to Become Amazon/MGM's Highest-Gross

I haven't been to a cinema in 15 years, but I went to view yesterday with Gold seating. Didn't even know you could get alcohol served to your seat these days.

Lovely movie, it was a lot of fun.

commandersakion Linux is an interpreter

At least it isn't AI slop!

commandersakion Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)

I just want to give a perspective of someone that uses the 'eternal history' in bash per Eli Bandersky [1] and reluctance to use something like atuin (without/ignoring shared history).

First, as for speed and responsiveness, if there is a degradation, it is imperceptible to me. I wouldn't have a clue that my interactive shell is slowing down because it is logging a command to ~/.persistent_history.

My persistent_history is 4MB and has been migrated from machine to machine as I've upgraded, it's never felt slow to edit with (neo)vim or search with system supplied grep.

Eli's way of doing it also includes the timestamps for all commands, so it's easy to trace back when I had run the command, and duplicates are suppressed. In fact my longest persistent_history goes back to 2019-07-04, so I've been using it for quite some time now.

But the larger point I wanted to make is that I wouldn't feel comfortable switching this, in my opinion, quite efficient setup to displace it with an sqlite database. That would require a special tool to drill through the history and search rendering simple unix utilities useless. As Eli suggested, if your history gets too big, simply rotate the file and carry on. I have the alias phgrep to grep ~/.persistent_history, but I can easily have another alias to grep ~/.persistent_history*.

[1]: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...

commandersakion Swift 6.3

It would be extremely unlikely that you would replicate the name as a local variable if it was in a dict, but regardless a dict doesn't have that limitation. The namespace thing is atrocious and bad design -- no straightforward way to iterate over them, merging/updating them is awful, collides with keyword methods (keys, items, etc.), and so on; thankfully more modern argument parsing libraries didn't repeat this mistake. It's just a shame this ended up in the standard library, but then Python standard library has never really been any good, e.g. logging and urllib1234567.

commandersakion A Year with the Framework 13

I much prefer the parts pairing that is required by Apple. Parts pairing is a mitigation to theft, but in my opinion should be a stronger anti-theft measure. I don't think Apple goes far enough with this. At the moment, a locked part, that is a part that has been taken from a mac with the activation lock still enabled, should render unusable on another mac, or at least show up in the parts setting as marked lost or stolen, and should at render as completely inferior to that of a genuine or authenticated part.

This doesn't hinder repairability, as you will find with the Macbook Neo. It just thwarts a secondary market for stolen Macbooks and/or parts.

commandersakion Swift 6.3

Yeah, so what happens when you have an option with a '-' in it that isn't valid as a variable name (I know what happens). It's just stupid.

commandersakion Swift 6.3

Plus Swift goes directly against the Zen of Python

The Zen of Python is how we got crap like argparse where arguments are placed in the namespace instead of a dict.

commandersakion Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)

My favourite trick is either commenting out a whole command or placing a comment at the end of a command to make it easier to find in my persistent history (thanks eliben) [0], using the # character.

I tried this in zsh and it wasn't the default behaviour which immediately made me nope from the shell altogether, among all the other quirks. I've just been using bash for far too long to switch to something different.

[0] https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...

commandersakion Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)

I've been a (n)vim user for 20+ years now, but I hate vi-mode in the shell. However if I feel that I need to do a complex command, I just do ctrl-x+e to open up in neovim (with EDITOR=nvim set). I find it a good middle ground.

commandersakion A Year with the Framework 13

I have a Framework 13 2nd gen (I think), Intel. I forget the specs now and haven't opened it up for the last 2 years now.

The battery life when I first got it, was at best 4-5 hours of moderate usage, and then slumped to 3-4 hours; running Linux of course.

My one also had hinge issues where the screen would fall flat 180 degrees from a 90 degree position when picking it up which was just really annoying. There is a new hinge kit that costs $40, but they want $35 shipping for it.

The keyboard is mostly good, but it still annoys me that there isn't an half-sized inverted-T arrow keys like the Macbooks; I was mostly banking on a 3rd party creating this type of replaceable keyboard but it just never happened.

I think the display panel is of very average quality as well, maybe the newer generations are better.

The other annoying thing was the fan noise. It's just so loud, but it only does turn on when heavy compute is happening, and not randomly like a lot of the PC laptops out there.

Despite all these deficiencies, I think I mostly just miss using a Mac and being fully in the ecosystem. Linux just doesn't really do it for me, and I don't think I can ever really use Windows again even though it has WSL2. I just find Apple products so much better to use, despite the software quality degrading. Plus the accessibility tools which I lean heavily on outclass the competition by a large margin.

commandersakion Apple Just Lost Me

Those features also have a shrinking user base over time, so they get less resources and attention.

commandersakion Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew

This thread invigorated my interest in Nix to manage my Mac environment.

I already have a Brewfile in my dotfiles stored in git, but wanted a way to setup all the little things on my Mac like trackpad settings, dock settings, file associations, etc. nix-darwin is the obvious solution.

Gave the task to ChatGPT and it came back saying it's a good way to get started, but then offered a middle-ground of an idempotent script to set things up. So I investigated the latter, and after a couple of minutes I now have a setupmac() function in my .bash_profile (yeah I use bash) which mostly consists of a bunch of 'defaults' commands and a few other things, and now continue with brew for managing software and setupmac() to setup everything else, and of course manually manage my dotfiles for ghostty/nvim.

I wish I had this earlier, because I just set myself up on 3 different Macs in the last week or so. I'm also glad I don't need to learn a new language and tooling for something pretty simple. Everything is a bit disjointed and not as automated as a proper nix setup and doesn't have that fidelity that nix has, but it's straight-forward, compact in that it sits in my brain easily, and easy to execute.

commandersakion Forget my iPhone password: how to get into a Locked iPhone

Yeah I'm sceptical of this.

commandersakion The future of version control

Is there any FOSS tool that gives a 4-pane merge, or even 3-pane so long as the third pane would show the resulting change. That would be so handy.

commandersakion HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)

At least in Amazon AU when you "chat now" you immediately say you want to speak to a specialist and everything is smooth sailing.

commandersakion HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)

I think in the consumer electronics space this is where Apple shines and is heavily underrated. People balk at the prices of their products, but if you've ever used their support, they are easy to access and approach, in-store, over the phone, or live chat -- for any of their product and services -- and always try to get to the bottom of your issue. Oftentimes I end up solving the problem myself as I troubleshoot with them, or find a bug that requires an engineer to track on their backend that doesn't get fixed until 2 or 3 major releases later, but at least it's been flagged.

This type of support cannot be had with any of the PC vendors it seems.

commandersakion Show HN: Codala, a social network built on scanning barcodes

I'll be candid: reeks of a gimmick. I think people will see it as such.

commandersakion Apple announces new Mac sales record following MacBook Neo launch

No Touch ID though.

commandersakion The Cult of Costco

Costco related, but not about the topic:

Was recently verbally assaulted at a Costco Fuel station. Had some of it recorded by dash cam, but the other bit of assault was only near a bowser. Anyways shaken up I contacted Costco about it by email, and within 2 days they were able to get a/v evidence of the entire thing, very likely banning the member that abused me, and encouraging me to take it to the cops and press charges, and they would back me up and be on my side. I think had it been any other petrol station, they wouldn't give a shit.

commandersakion macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal

Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?

Not OP, but accessibility tools on mac put other desktop OSes to shame.