conesus

> Most of the blacksmiths in the 19th century drank themselves to death after the industrial revolution

This is hyperbolic and a dramatic oversimplification and does not accurately describe the reality of the transition from blacksmithing to more advanced roles like machining, toolmaking, and working in factories. The 19th century was a time of interchangeable parts (think the North's advantage in the Civil War) and that requires a ton of mechanical expertise and precision.

Many blacksmiths not only made the transition to machining, but there weren't enough blackmsiths to fill the bevy of new jobs that were available. Education expanded to fill those roles. Traditional blacksmithing didn’t vanish either, even specialized roles like farriery and ornamental ironwork also expanded.

I run NewsBlur[0] and I’ve been battling this issue of NewsBlur fetching 403s across the web for months now. My users are revolting and asking for refunds. I’ve tried emailing dozens of site owners and publishers and only two of them have done the work of whitelisting their RSS feed. It’s maddening and is having a real negative effect on NewsBlur.

NewsBlur is an open-source RSS news reader (full source available at [1]), something we should all agree is necessary to support the open web! But Cloudflare blocking all of my feed fetchers is bizarre behavior. And we’re on the verified bots list for years, but it hasn’t made a difference.

Let me know what I can do. NewsBlur publishes a list of IPs that it uses for feed fetching that I've shared with Cloudflare but it hasn't made a difference.

I'm hoping Cloudflare uses the IP address list that I publish and adds them to their allowlist so NewsBlur can keep fetching (and archiving) millions of feeds.

[0]: https://newsblur.com

[1]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

GPT-4o uses BPE (byte pair encoding). They released `tiktoken` which allows you to count tokens in strings in python.

    pip install tiktoken
    >>> import tiktoken
    >>> encoding = tiktoken.encoding_for_model("gpt-4o")
    >>> print(encoding.encode("hello marcellus"))
    [24912, 2674, 10936, 385]

    The universe may
    be as great as they say.
    But it wouldn't be missed
    if it didn't exist.

— Piet Hein

How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural.

Apple still sells the iPhone SE 3. Rumor has it that the next iPhone SE will lose the home screen button but retain the same size. The camera isn't as powerful as the iPhone 13/14/15 lines but I find that it does fine in low light and takes the same exceptionally beautiful photos in good lighting. It has portrait mode as well.

It's not that much of a trade-off in terms of features or capability and it has the small size you'd expect.

We’re in SF. Those are real testimonials. And while those are renderings the actual devices look identical. Lots of photos on X showing they look like you’d expect. As much as a photo on Apple’s website looks like the real thing.

You can see around the lenses and have decent awareness of what’s going on. I can see my partner and interact with her on the edges. I can also drink tea and see where everything is. It’s nowhere near complete isolation.

So far the boot loader is unlocked and you can flash on top of it, although I don’t know why you’d want to since you’d have to rebuild an entire OS but it would be possible. Our waveforms were easy to get right so it’s not as simple as driving the eink displays with OSS drivers.

To add a book you can use a mobile app or text directly since we’re manually buying the books for now. Once we have a book marketplace it’ll be self serve on the mobile apps. We are planning side loading capabilities so you can use the mass storage device, but there’s a bit of preprocessing we’re doing to the epubs that we’ll have to replicate for self serve epubs. To get around that you can email an epub to add@solreader.com and we deliver it directly to your device. Handy!

The lenses that ship with these limited editions will be dust and moisture resistant. But if they drop in a tub all bets are off. That may change one day.

> Is the system able to adjust to the strength of your eyesight?

There is a per-eye diopter adjustment, ranging from 0 to -5.75, so you have quite a bit of focal adjustment.

> What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers?

Not having to hold a book is huge, IMO. I didn't realize it until I started wearing my Sol Reader regularly, but it's basically as much work as watching TV while capturing the words of a book.

Also, the lack of light output means I can read in the middle of the night. There's dark mode and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.

Hey HN, I helped build the Sol Reader glasses and would love to answer any questions. It helps that I've spent months using the glasses and can attest to the increased amount of reading these glasses have unlocked. I have a 2 year old and making time for reading books is hard, but now I've found chunks of phone time being replaced with Sol time, esp. in the middle of the night when I don't want to have a light on that wakes my partner.

One note on the screen resolution, the screenshot linked on this thread is from our SDL2 simulator. The actual page feels more like paper, with warm eink artifacts and slight character bleed. No one who puts these glasses on talks about the resolution, instead they all have this huge smile on their face.

You can use hackersmacker.org, a browser extension I built, to highlight HN authors while reading on the web. And if the people you follow also use it, you’ll see friend-of-friends and foe-of-a-friends.

Nice work and glad to hear that! If you ever want to chat RSS, please reach out.

NewsBlur tries to handle this case by comparing stories and if they match up to a certain percentage of the content, considers them duplicates.

Here's the code that does the work:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/apps/rss_...

Hacker Smacker (https://hackersmacker.org) is a browser extension I built to help with exactly this problem. It shows a colored or next every commenters name, signifying whether you friended them or foe’d them. And so it lets you read Hacker News natively and allows you to quickly scroll through comments, highlighting, commenters who you like, and filtering commenters who you previously have marked that you don’t like.

Makes quick work of comment threads. And if the people you’re following, also use hackers smacker, then their friends and foes will also be shown as side-by-side orbs.

Beep (YC S14) did this and made a gorgeous, inexpensive volume dial that lives on top of your speakers and speaks wifi. Unfortunately the company shut down but it was great while it lasted.

It looks like there isn’t market demand for this without the associated speaker business or intelligent assistant.

I’m interested to know which led ics are you buying. WS2813? What about the controller, are you DIY or off the shelf?

I’ve been using SP105E as a controller but it doesn’t have smooth fades and it takes too long to write my own firmware on a custom board to achieve that for a one off.

In case anybody's interested, here's what the "hack" looks like:

    nbset:PRIMARY> show dbs
    READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA   0.000GB
    admin                           0.000GB
    local                          16.471GB
    newsblur                        0.718GB
    
    nbset:PRIMARY> use READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA
    switched to db READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA
    
    nbset:PRIMARY> show collections
    README
    system.profile
    
    nbset:PRIMARY> db.README.find()
    { "_id" : ObjectId("60d3e112ac48d82047aab95d"), "content" : "All your data is a backed up. You must pay 0.03 BTC to XXXXXXFTHISGUYXXXXXXX 48 hours for recover it. After 48 hours expiration we will leaked and exposed all your data. In case of refusal to pay, we will contact the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR and notify them that you store user data in an open form and is not safe. Under the rules of the law, you face a heavy fine or arrest and your base dump will be dropped from our server! You can buy bitcoin here, does not take much time to buy https://localbitcoins.com or https://buy.moonpay.io/ After paying write to me in the mail with your DB IP: FTHISGUY@recoverme.one and you will receive a link to download your database dump." }

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening.

This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and soon ML models).

About two hours before this happened, I switched the MongoDB cluster over to the new servers. When I did that, I shut down the original primary in order to delete it in a few days when all was well. (Thank goodness I did that! It'll come in handy a few hours from now).

Turns out the ufw firewall I enabled and diligently kept on a strict allowlist with only my internal servers didn't work on a new server because of Docker. When I containerized MongoDB, Docker helpfully inserted an allow rule into iptables, opening up MongoDB to the world. So while my firewall was "active", doing a `sudo iptables -L | grep 27017` showed that MongoDB was open the world. More info on SO[1].

To be honest, I'm a bit surprised it took over 3 hours from when I flipped the switch to when a script kiddie dropped NewsBlur's MongoDB collections, and ransomed about 250GB of data. I am now running a snapshot on that old primary, just in case it reconnects to a network and deletes everything. Once done, I'll boot it up, secondary it out, and be back in business. Let's hope my assumptions hold.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30383845/what-is-the-bes...

    The universe may
    be as great as they say,
    but it wouldn’t be missed
    if it didn’t exist.”

-Piet Hein

Accessible how? It should be no more or less accessible than the main website. Feel free to reach me at samuel@newsblur.com

The saved story feature does a great job of that, since it also allows you to filter saved stories by feed and by tag, so saved stories are easy to find again.

Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB.

Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.

Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.

Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com

It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader.

Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.

It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.

[0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-s...

I built the Turn Touch remote[1] to basically bring back the old Apple Remote features. Music and video control for your laptop.

[1]: turntouch.com

I should have specified. I don't expect any set number of hours, since all of the work will be done remote. I care much more about a long-term relationship and big features being steadily built over time. So whatever rate that works out to, where some months are in the $150/hr range and some are in the $50/hr range, I'm happy so long as features as being steadily built.

NewsBlur (YC S12) | Remote Android Engineer | Remote | Part Time

I'm looking for an Android developer to help build the next version of the NewsBlur Android app. NewsBlur is a popular RSS news reader with apps on the web, iOS, and Android as well as a thriving third-party developer scene and integration into over a dozen news readers.

Are you or somebody you know looking for a part time Android development gig that gives you schedule and feature autonomy? The next version of the NewsBlur Android app is ready to be built and I'm looking for somebody excited to work on a popular news reader to join the team.

My budget is $2-3k / month and there's plenty of great features to build. You can inspect the code base right now and see if you're a good fit: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur (check clients/Android for the Java source).

Email me at samuel@newsblur.com. We can start immediately!

The Wood Book that’s part of this site was a huge help to me when I did my woodworking tech projects. The best wood book, IMO (and others in this thread) is Understanding Wood. That book is next level and is my go to for any wood reference or question.

If anybody is interested in what it takes to CNC a lot of mahogany and rosewood into a shippable tech product, I wrote up a four part series a couple years ago: https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...