Hacker News Reader

gardenerikon Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

In fact, there is EPC code, but it is rarely used and bank support is abysmal, at least in our country. But that can also be because we have some homegrown local standard for payment QR codes (and a new one in the works, lol).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code

gardenerikon Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Diacritics usually did not advance paper on typewriters, hence their name "dead keys".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key

gardenerikon AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

It was called just GPT-5 at that point in time.

gardenerikon Ask HN: One IP, multiple unrealistic locations worldwide hitting my website

Cloudflare actually does anycast for egress too, if that is what you meant: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-servers-dont-own-ips-...

gardenerikon Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature

> Currently, calibre users have a choice of commercial providers, or running models locally using LM Studio or Ollama.

The choice is yours. If you want local models, you can do that.

gardenerikon Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature

I agree with you that the push towards them is annoying. (Google's "Your phone has new exciting features.")

In this case, Calibre does not seem to introduce any said annoyances (probably because it is FOSS, so no pressure for adoption), but people are upset anyways.

There are many features I don't use in various software, but it never made me complain that a new icon/menu entry appeared.

gardenerikon Calibre adds AI "discussion" feature

I struggle to understand the pushback against AI features. As long as the feature isn't intrusive, it seems like a minor addition, and may even be useful to some people. LLMs are here to stay, there is no denying that at this point.

gardenerikon Show HN: I created a tool to generate handwritten signatures

These seem like a simple text rendered using some handwritten looking Google Fonts. Or is there something I am missing?

gardenerikon Duolingo for Geography

The icon reminds me pretty much of Kagi

gardenerikon Show HN: Later – Schedule URLs to open later

How does it compare to something like good old at[1] that spawns a browser?

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/at

gardenerikon I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me

Delta.Chat is really underappreciated, open-source and distributed. I recommend you at least look into it.

Signal, on the other hand, is a closed "opensource" ecosystem (you cannot run your own server or client), requires a phone number (still -_-) and the opensource part of it does not have great track record (I remember some periods where the server for example was not updated in the public repo).

But yeah, if you want the more popular option, Signal is the one.

gardenerikon Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp

Cannot find it now, but that's how it was discussed at the time when chatmail server became a thing. It is also how it is configured in chatmail:

https://github.com/chatmail/relay/blob/96a1dbac08441034c5990...

You obviously must trust that the server runs this configuration, but you can always run your own chatmail, or regular postfix. (If you don't need "federation" with other mail servers, you don't even need port 25 open).

However, you can also configure your app to delete messages from the server sooner.

gardenerikon Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp

I have not noticed that problem, the messages are delayed by a few seconds, but not noticeably. Only using chatmail / own postfix though, YMMV.

gardenerikon Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp

It is deleted from the server only, it stays on your devices, and is also synced to new device when you add one.

gardenerikon Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp

The UI was actually taken from Signal in the early days[0].

[0] https://support.delta.chat/t/list-of-all-known-client-projec...

gardenerikon We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash

It certainly looks like that. For such a technical article, there are just very vague descriptions of the failure modes. The code examples do not make much sense. I would expect more in depth dive into the problems, but all we got is this mostly generic stuff.

gardenerikon Starlink User Terminal Teardown

Is it a better idea to share private keys? In case of server breach, you will have a much harder time, won't you?

gardenerikon Kenney.nl: Free Game Assets

It is also stated on every asset page :)

gardenerikon Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

A much better solution would be to use Typst, but that still might not work in all situations.

gardenerikon Disappointed with the TVs at CES 2025

Oh, how I hate the new Samsung remotes!

They have very few buttons, which you can't tell apart in the dark (unless you remember the layout) and everything must be done through the UI which tries to upsell you some streaming service everywhere.

gardenerikon Hat Trick: AWS introduced same RCE vulnerability three times in four years

Interesting read. But I wonder, does pip not have some way to force installation from another index that would work as expected?

gardenerikon Coding Font Selection 'Tournament'

Unfortunately, it's missing a lot of commonly used paid fonts (Operator, ...), but I understand that it is mostly a licensing problem.

For the last couple of years, I am a Cartograph[1] lover. But Connary had changed the license pricing this year, making it a one of the more expensive coding fonts :(

[1] https://connary.com/fonts/cartograph/

gardenerikon Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

To save power and make the site small:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/