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eivarvon Upcoming Firefox update will decrease power usage on macOS by up to three times

They're mostly distributed on the App Store these days. The old distribution channels are still available, but installation using these trigger a warning.

eivarvon Ask HN: What have you automated that saved you a ton of time?

Not to my knowledge, no.

eivarvon Ask HN: What have you automated that saved you a ton of time?

Human context switching.

I'm being cheeky; I mean closing down and bringing up all relevant applications, their state (open windows, tabs, files...) and so on for working on a given task or project.

Sort of like a workspace manager for the OS. Releasing an open beta this fall.

There's a short, low-res demo that kinda illustrates the basic concept on https://cleave.app

eivarvon Ask HN: Do you backup your data when leaving a company?

I'm sure you could make a case for a few non-sensitive emails – but I think what you're talking about might be a civil or even a criminal offence (depending on where you live and the relevant jurisdiction), as the work and communications records are likely defined as your employer's property in some sort of binding document(contract/handbook/law).

There are of course exceptions to this, for instance in the case of whistle-blowing.

eivarvon Show HN: Cleave (coming soon) – Enabling human context switching

Author here, AMA!

Ever since solving a similar problem on the terminal a few years back [0], I kept wanting to explicitly change working context, keeping application states between whatever tasks I was working on.

Cleave attempts to solve this by allowing you save and load "context" in macOS, in a manner similar to how IDEs and text editors lets you manipulate "projects" and "workspaces". These actions are available via a global hotkey that triggers the command palette, or via the menu bar.

The Open Beta will be out this fall.

[0]: https://github.com/eivindarvesen/prm

eivarvon I thought I was being ‘blacklisted’, so I demanded to see colleagues’ emails

Well, TFA opens with "Blacklisting at work has been illegal in the UK since 2010", but I guess it'd be hard to argue that what's described is bona fide blacklisting.

eivarvon Ask HN: What's your toolchain for bootstrapping a new local environment?

Custom shell script that automates everything from UI settings to installation of applications and dependencies, preferences and dotfiles.

eivarvon Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?

I know - it really is a matter of definition.

Though the EU has said it will consider intention etc. there's really no way of knowing for certain until when and if it's settled in a court case.

eivarvon Show HN: Cleave (coming soon) – Enabling human context switching

Author here!

Ever since solving a similar problem on the terminal a few years back [0], I kept wanting to explicitly change working context, keeping application states between whatever tasks I was working on.

AMA! Open Beta will be out this autumn.

I'd also love any feedback on the (admittedly lacklustre) landing page.

[0]: https://github.com/eivindarvesen/prm

eivarvon Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?

Agreed re: using ES as primary storage (which it is NOT meant as) - as far as I can tell, it might even make you in breach of the GDPR [0].

TLDR: Lucene < 7.5 won't merge segments larger than 5GB (default) unless they accumulate 50% deletions.

Delivering a conference talk [1] later this year about it.

[0]: https://www.eivindarvesen.com/blog/2018/09/16/elasticsearch-...

[1]: https://2019.javazone.no/program/3f7cd8a7-a9ea-4874-a7dd-531...

eivarvon Building a hackable editor in the browser

Qt is decidedly not native, but can attempt a "native look-and-feel".

wxWidgets actually wraps native GUI widgets though...

eivarvon Ask HN: What are you all using to automate desktop setup and config?

Shell script that sets OS defaults, copies configs, sets up symlinks and installs software package managers.

eivarvon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I've thought a little about it, but as it won't exactly be trivial to implement (internal app states will depend on specific files with specific contents existing at specific paths, and so on) it's not on top of my TODO-list, at the moment.

eivarvon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I'm currently working on a macOS application that allows users to save and load their working context, by which I mean sets of open applications and their internal states.

It has helped me reduce information overload, and allowed me to switch between tasks more efficiently - and I hope other people will find value in this as well.

It's an idea I've been toying with and prototyping in different forms on and off for about four years now.

I'm finally releasing an open Beta this summer/fall, as soon as I implement delta updates and the license validator.

eivarvon Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM

The only way this would violate the DMCA is if you pirated the operating system.

eivarvon Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM

You may violate Apple's EULA by running macOS on non-Apple hardware, but it's not illegal (it's not a criminal offence).

eivarvon Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

    > For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved.

Funny you should say that – I'm currently working on an application that does just this (on macOS). Beta/MVP should hopefully be out this summer.

eivarvon Ask HN: Where are the GUI libraries that aren't bloated?

I've used Qt and wxWidgets[1], and found them both great.

They both also have bindings for many languages, and it certainly doesn't take fifty lines to create a dialog with a button using any of them.

[0]: https://www.qt.io

[1]: https://www.wxwidgets.org

eivarvon Ask HN: Show Us Your Personal Website/Blog?

https://eivindarvesen.com

Home-rolled CMS I made in PHP four years ago or so. Been meaning to update the design for some time now...

I blog sporadically about anything that interests me, but I've been meaning to get more focused and deliberate this year.

Excuses, excuses...

eivarvon Ask HN: Should Qt be considered in the place of electron?

Well, it brings the usual web security issues to the desktop, dragging with it much of the browsers' attack surface. Also, there's been a bunch of CVE – there's one [0] in particular that springs to mind.

    Accessibility is only achieved by the creator's intention.

That's a problem. Native widgets come with accessibility built in (to the extent accessibility is supported on the platform in question).

[0]: https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-b...

eivarvon Ask HN: Should Qt be considered in the place of electron?

Heck yes. I still don't get how so many creators of apps justify choosing Electron to themselves, what with all the downsides (resource usage, power consumption, accessibility, security, and so on).

Another GUI-framework I've enjoyed using is wxWidgets, which provides a thin abstraction to a platform's native widgets. Has a bunch of language bindings, and a pretty liberal license as well.

eivarvon Ask HN: What does success for a technical book look like?

I don't think you should be afraid of linking to your book.

For anyone interested, it's "Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers" [0], and seems pretty good.

Also: Packt Publishing has a 5$/5€ sale right now.

[0]: https://handsonbughunting.com/

eivarvon The New Brave Is 22% Faster

    What am I missing?

They replaced Muon (their Electron-fork) with straight Chromium. Brave is now 22% faster than it used to be, if I read TFA correctly.

eivarvon Ask HN: Your most useful purchase of under $100 in 2018?

Can you recommend any specific RTL-SDR dongle?

eivarvon Brave 0.55 released

I can't find the Github-issue atm, but I'm guessing it was motivated by security (there's been a bunch of RCE-exploits in Electron), technical debt, and performance (Muon was an Electron-fork, and Electron is more than just Chromium).

eivarvon Another Week with Bad Software

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...

eivarvon Elasticsearch and GDPR

I don't know about a feature request, but I guess you could at least try to supply a patch to Lucene's merge policy. Then again, I don't know how likely it is to be accepted.

I was thinking one way would be to hook into Elasticsearch's events and trigger some custom script upon deletion that would find relevent documents across nodes and overwrite them in the segment-files or some such, but as I haven't had the chance to look that deeply into it yet I don't know how pratical this solution would be.

eivarvon Elasticsearch and GDPR

Author here; I'd love to get some discussion around the topic, as I'm sure someone else must have thought about this, or comparable issues with other systems.

eivarvon Elasticsearch and GDPR

Author here; I'd love to get some discussion around the topic, as I'm sure someone else must have thought about this, or comparable issues with other systems.