Hacker News Reader

gryon I Bought $250k Worth of Physical Nickels

Curious to know how buying a pizza with tip in [Florida](https://floridianpress.com/2025/05/desantis-approves-law-all...) with [10 dimes pre-1964](https://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/series-detail.aspx?MVDet...) goes.

Joking aside, not a bad bet.

gryon You can't outrun a bad diet

Too much food is not the conclusion. It's the food itself.

gryon Ask HN: What's Wrong with WordPress?

You're not selling microservices to a small business. You're selling the CRUD. Monolith doesn't matter.

gryon Show HN: Free Certificate Monitoring via RSS

Fantastic. I love when someone stitches existing tools to solve a problem in a novel and elegant way.

gryon Waterway Map

Minnesota's has expansive rivers feeding the Mississippi[1] and it has one million acres designated to a canoe wilderness -- the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness -- bounded by the Canadian Quetico to the north[2].

They are navigable by canoe by design, yet they are flitting dots.

It gives me pause; what is this site trying to convey? It's a fantastic effort, yet for the water we have, it doesn't match.

[1] https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/watertrails/interactive_map/inde... [2] https://www.paddleplanner.com/tools/maps/bwcaqueticomap.aspx

gryon 1.56M dehumidifiers recalled due to fire and burn hazards

The Verge story dangerously links the "get your refund" call to action to the 2013 recall which does *not include* the 2023 recall models.

2013: https://greedehumidifierrecall.com/ProductEntry.aspx

2023: https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2023/Gree-Recalls-1-56-Million-...

EDIT: The story does include both links, but "four more people have died" doesn't read like a link containing the latest models.

gryon Tech CEO fired two engineers for having second full-time jobs

For background on this comment: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/equifax-fires-24-...

gryon Why the Government Isn't a Bigger Version of a Startup

This is captured in the Layers of Time diagram[1]. The tension fashion to nature is at diametric odds with time and responsibility; governance is squarely inbetwixt.

https://media.longnow.org/files/2/LayersOfTime-simplNEW.jpg

[1] http://longnow.org/about/

gryon Ask HN: What is the best IDE for python notebooks?

https://www.spyder-ide.org/

It's worth watching developments in Jupyter QtConsole [https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyter-qtconsole-4-4-81f2eaad5706].

gryon Stop hitting ESC in Vim

FWIW, Ctrl-[ is ESC's equivalent.

Ctrl-C escapes insert mode, and does not check for abbreviations. It has a different behavior.

    <Esc> or CTRL-[ End insert or Replace mode, go back to Normal mode.  Finish
                    abbreviation.
                    Note: If your <Esc> key is hard to hit on your keyboard, train
                    yourself to use CTRL-[.
                    If Esc doesn't work and you are using a Mac, try CTRL-Esc.
                    Or disable Listening under Accessibility preferences.
                                                    i_CTRL-C
    CTRL-C          Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode.  Do not check for
                    abbreviations.  Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand
                    event.

https://vimhelp.appspot.com/insert.txt.html

gryon Ask HN: Any CLI or GUI tool for getting relative paths between 2 folders?

realpath

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Real...

gryon Ask HN: Do you password protect your SSH keys?

Yup. You can add a key to your agent using `ssh-add` to enter it once until reboot or force a password reentry say every N hours.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-appleosx-bsd-ssh-ad...

gryon The physics of baking good pizza

Related: I highly recommend the Cooking Issues podcast with Dave Arnold [http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/].

gryon Firefox Master Password System Has Been Poorly Secured for the Past 9 Years

You can use a YubiKey for a portion of a master password. This is best used by manually typing "correct" and autocompleting the latter portion with plenty of entryop of the password/phrase "battery horse staple" from the key. This way, if someone steals the key, you've still got a secret.

You'll still need a password manager to store the unique passwords for your services.

https://www.yubico.com/support/knowledge-base/categories/art...

https://www.yubico.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Yubico_Whi...

EDIT: Explanation

gryon Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

I toyed with this idea just the same and expanding it to provide recipes with the peak fruits and vegetables.

Not only was collecting the data time intensive, but determining the feature ingredient(s) was a challenge.

gryon DevDocs API Documentation

Remapping `K` to devdocs.vim is quite handy.

https://github.com/rhysd/devdocs.vim

gryon Ask HN: Why do so many companies use public information for security questions?

In 2005, Bruce Schneier noted the purpose is to provide a fallback password[1] if the primary password was forgotten, but the reality is, security questions are a much less secure protocol than passwords themselves.

While on a personal level you can fix this by using a password manager and generating another random string as an answer, other cute and terrible implementations like United[2] (calling you guys out) obliterate it, making yet another, terrible, horrible, no-good secondary protocol.

Why companies use them is because the Powers That Be(TM) believe it to be a secure protocol. They localize the problem to themselves and since they haven't been exposed using their mother's maiden name, it's good enough. Also, everybody else uses security questions, even our competitors, so we have to be at least as secure as them, right? The key phrase is "at least". Then you are equivalent in policy and protocol; certainly not more secure. :D

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_...

[2] https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/account/enroll/default

gryon Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

It's never a technology problem. It's always a people problem.

gryon Stupid security things

…and more. https://twitter.com/PWTooStrong

gryon Password Rules Are Bullshit

I ran across something similar on United.

https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/account/enroll/default

Derp.

gryon My search for a MacBook Pro alternative

Also, Shortcat. https://shortcatapp.com/

gryon Show HN: TagSpaces – An open source personal data manager

Ponies aren't free. Review their contribution guidelines and create an issue. Just saying, lamenting a missing OS-specific feature is a big ask.

gryon A Javascript journey with only six characters

Previous HN context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11024511

gryon Ask HN: Is identity theft protection service worth it?

A credit freeze is another tool; it prevents potential creditors from extending credit since they won't be able to pull your file to verify your creditworthiness. Temporary unlocks can be done when you need to apply for a loan, etc.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/06/how-i-learned-to-stop-wor...

gryon Cryptpad: Zero Knowledge, Collaborative Real Time Editing

While the ideas and implementation are neat, this suffers from the chicken and egg problem[1]. You have to trust server's resources are not tampered with. Adding an event binding to tamper or siphon data before it's encrypted is simple.

[1] https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/b...

gryon Thousands of Delta passengers delayed by computer outage

https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems

gryon Ask HN: TDD-Oriented Resources for Learning iOS/Swift Programming?

How about Swift Koans?

https://github.com/mokagio/Swift-Koans

gryon NPM Package Hijacking From the Hijacker's Perspective

Even worse, `scp` the `~/.ssh/id_rsa` private key and known hosts file. The attack vector went tenfold.

gryon iTerm2 Version 3 Now in Beta

Thank you for this. I had not.

gryon Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake

Turning off chat doesn't necessarily suggest that is true. While `sticky_pool=atn2c06_chat-proxy&state=active` suggests the case, it's something to explore and see if there is a larger issue at hand.