Hacker News Reader

fishywangon Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons in New Cars

They should just copy Mazda's design, a screen that's not touch enabled and do not need to be put within arm's reach (so it can be put further away, and thus closer to driver's point of view when driving, that driver just need to glance slightly to the side to see the screen).

Then physical buttons/controls for common things (volume, wiper, etc.), and a general knob for navigating things on the screen.

fishywangon datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated

The naive time thing in python really is (was) a nightmare. I once noticed that a db library we use when storing a timestamp in the db would calculate that timestamp from 1970-01-01 00:00:00 at _local time_ instead of utc and had to patch that to make sure we never store a wrong timestamp in our db (luckily all our production servers run on UTC as the local timezone).

Glad that it's finally being addressed at the language level.

fishywangon Almost no one pays a 6% real-estate commission except Americans

My understanding is that in a common American setup, the commission seller paid is split by seller's and buyer's agents half/half.

fishywangon Apple to support RCS messaging standard next year

dupe to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38293082?

fishywangon Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App

https://github.com/fishy/url2epub

https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle

fishywangon Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App

I wrote a telegram bot (because share with remarkable does not work on mobile) to auto generated epub out of url and upload to remarkable cloud, until remarkable keep changing their cloud API and I finally cannot make uploading epub to their cloud work any more.

fishywangon FTX "insurance fund" calculated by multiplying trading volume by random number

That screenshot is already a diff view, which means this is already from either a commit or a PR.

fishywangon Ági Szabados Does Not Need to Apologize to Me

John Scalzi also has DRM removed from his every book on Google Play Books (and some other ebook platforms supporting this). I always respect him for that.

(And also for someone who is not native in English, I found his book easier to read compare to some other other authors.)

fishywangon I think I kind of hate lazy loading

I wrote some code to convert links to epub, and those lazy loading images used in some websites used to be a huge pita to find the correct image file to be packed into the epub file, until I figured out a common enough way to handle them: https://b.yuxuan.org/lazy-loading-image-url2epub

fishywangon Google, Meta, Amazon hiring low-paid H1B workers after US layoffs

Right, visas that are tied to jobs give the employers too much power over the employees.

But do you know what other American thing that's also tied to jobs? Health insurance. American health insurance is also modern slavery.

fishywangon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

I wrote a service (Google Cloud Run as the backend, with Telegram bot as the frontend) to generate readable ePub from URLs and send directly to e-ink readers. It was originally wrote for reMarkable 2 (using reMarkable cloud), I recently added support for Kindle (by using the send-to-kindle emails). The code is at https://github.com/fishy/url2epub and I blogged about the recently added kindle support at https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle.

I'm open to suggestions on what other e-ink platforms to add, as long as they have a reasonable cloud API. I'm also looking for a good e-ink platform to move to personally, as it becomes apparent that reMarkable really doesn't want third parties to use their proprietary cloud "API".

fishywangon Autospam and Naive Bayes

s/this/gui/, sometimes gboard makes bizarre auto corrections.

fishywangon Autospam and Naive Bayes

Had been using popfile for years before gmail and it had always been great.

I think that's also my earliest encounter with the conception of "local web ui", while everything else at the time needs some this for configurations. It's also truly cross platform as it's written in perl.

fishywangon Guam: The America that Americans forget

I visited Guam back in 2014 to empty my UA miles as China-Guam used to be a sweet spot for UA miles redemption back then.

I actually got trouble entering Guam because back then I was on L1 visa, which only allows me to enter the US for work, and my employer does not have any office at Guam and I don't have a connection from Guam to US mainland. After being held at the airport for hours (I believe they called my hotel for verification) they finally stamped a parole on my passport and let me in.

fishywangon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://b.yuxuan.org

mostly go related

fishywangon Future ultra-precise timing links to geosynchronous satellites

Randall Monroe in one of the footnotes of What If? 2 mentioned that one light-nanosecond is very close to one foot (11.8 in vs. 12 in), and "propose" that we should just redefine foot as the same as light-nanosecond.

fishywangon Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant

Because all international airports are "borders", and previously the warranty-less searches were permitted with something like "within 50 miles of a border", the majority people living in the US should say thank fuck.

fishywangon Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

It's probably only me but isn't Markdown's main "selling point"/feature the raw files are human readable?

Looking at the screenshots, the only thing the "rendering" provides seem to be: 1) syntax highlights on code blocks; and 2) don't need to count the ordered bullets?

I guess if you need to verify that your markdown can be rendered (e.g no syntax errors), this would be helpful, but for that use case maybe a markdown linter is better?

fishywangon Western Digital cloud services down for 4 days

does that mean it could fly if it's free? (for example, a lot of OSS license has similar disclaimer)

I don't know wd's case in particular, but just curious:

1. would it fly if the cloud service is also free (no additional subscription fee)?

2. or is it that even if the cloud service itself is "free", they only allow people with wd hardware products to use it, so it's considered part of those hardware products, so it's not really free and is still covered by that directive?

fishywangon Disney begins laying off 7k employees

Since you mentioned Cars, there's an interesting thing I noticed when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was in theatres. At that time, when I try to search the movie on IMDb, typing "three" (and I have to emphasize that I typed "three" not "3"), IMDb's first search suggestion was "Cars 3" instead of that Oscar winning movie that was playing im theatres at the time. I'm pretty convinced that Disney payed IMDb for that placement or something like that.

fishywangon Show HN: Terminal Based Wikipedia

Looks nice but a few things are a bit confusing:

1. I'm not sure what's the difference between -i and -s, they seem to work the same for a few examples I tried

2. It renders every paragraph in a different color, which seems... unnecessary

3. There's a [-] at the beginning of every paragraph which I'm not sure what it is for (seems to suggest that it is to fold the paragraph but I don't really see how to actually fold it).

fishywangon Tweetbot is back down again

>Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years.

That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.

fishywangon NIST is announcing that SHA-1 should be phased out by Dec. 31, 2030

>SHA-1 was already known to be broken at the time Git chose it

Please pardon my ignorance but could you elaborate on what time (e.g. the year) are you referring to?

fishywangon AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

The apple apologists in this thread is weird.

Sure the timing of this tweet is weird, as people pointed out, that the change actually happened a few weeks ago (there were tweets about it then, but those are mainly in Chinese). But protesting via airdrop has been happening in China for months before this change.

Even if we give Apple the benefit of doubt, that they actually planned this change long time ago unrelated to any protests (spams maybe), and the plan is to roll it out to a market for testing before roll out to all markets, with the protests they _should_ change the market for the test. Not changing the plan (that's _assuming_ they really have good intention aka fight spams behind it) will make themselves look bad and they have no one else to blame.

fishywangon AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

Nothing in the original tweet suggested it to be in response to this _particular_ protest either.

There have been protests via airdrop in china for months.

fishywangon Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

that was for tax reasons.

fishywangon Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

while this is certainly great (at least in the us standard), it's still different from "John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it."?

fishywangon reMarkable 2

I actually use my reMarkable 2 mainly for reading. I'm not big on note taking (I did use it to draw graphs for presentations occasionally, though). I picked it over other e-ink readers mainly because:

1. It's big enough for PDFs. 2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

fishywangon Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

I'm not sure about mutt but I used neomutt with Google oauth just fine (the setup is not particularly easy per se, but not too bad either).

fishywangon A Cheap 2.5GbE PoE Unmanaged Switch

what personal data is transferred in plaintext nowadays?

really the whole "trusted/privileged network" thing is outdated. your life will be much easier if you don't trust any network.