HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gvx

424 karma · joined May 17, 2017

submissionscomments
gvx··on Show HN: Live-updating version of the 'What a week, huh?' meme
What a fun little project! I thought it was going to be the 30 Rock one!
gvx··on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
One who thinks "open source" means blindly copy/pasting code snippets found online.
gvx··on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
Everyone knows investing in cybersecurity is just wasteful spending!
gvx··on Show HN: Ldump – serialize any Lua data
You could take a look at SELÖVE, a (severely out of date) fork of LÖVE that is intended to make it safe to run arbitrary .love games. (It used to be on bitbucket, but it looks like it's gone? I'm not sure if I have the repo locally :/)

Running arbitrary code was such a problem that I just completely ruled it out for bitser. Instead of serializing functions, you can register safe functions as resources. This doesn't solve the upvalue problem, though.

gvx··on Show HN: Ldump – serialize any Lua data
Cool to see you were inspired by Ser!
gvx··on Estimates of plant CO2 uptake rise by nearly one third
Not exactly. The headline is a bit misleading imho: the article doesn't say that CO2 uptake by plants is up by 31%, rather that new estimates of the CO2 uptake by plants is 31% higher than previous estimates. That doesn't preclude a temporary collapse of carbon absorption (related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell).
gvx··on Parasitic worms 'manipulate' mantises onto asphalt roads, say researchers
^ That kind of shallow understanding of health is a large part of what makes RFK Jr. so dangerous.
gvx··on Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?
It's very possible that if you showed me the MapHub UI eight years ago, I'd have intuited that I'd need to save manually---I can't tell for sure. I am definitely aware that the way I engage with software nowadays is very different than when I started using computers in the early 2000s, and I don't doubt it is still evolving due to the changing conventions in UI and functionality.
gvx··on Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?
I work with files every day, and I'm not sure I would have realised I'd needed to save manually with the original MapHub UI either. A web-based interface that looks like that, I expect it to be transparent. If it'd had three icons (the classic blank page, open folder and floppy disk) in the top left, then I'd assume it would need manual saving. (I'm not saying that's what you need to do, just analysing my own intuitions)
gvx··on TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$
With that name I'd expect a tiny implementation of JavaScript.
gvx··on Is English a “creole Language”?
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/
gvx··on You'll regret using natural keys
Anything that needs to be read over the phone should probably be written out using something like the NATO phonetic alphabet, split into smaller chunks if needed: "The code? It's kilo eight niner; one three mike; delta echo lima."
gvx··on JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
Yeah, other details are missing too. For example backgroundStyle:

> cover fills the entire width and height of the node.

Does that work like the CSS background-size: cover; or background-size: 100% 100%;?

> ratio maintains the aspect ratio of the background image.

Does that mean CSS cover? contain? Something else?

gvx··on Password may not contain: select, insert, update, delete, drop
That is correct.

The client sends the encrypted (via HTTPS) but not hashed password to the server, both for changing your password and checking your password. So the server receives the password in plaintext but shouldn't store it.

Whatever the client sends to the server, an attacker can send too.

gvx··on Lowercase letters save data
> What if you actually needed to differentiate jack from Jack?

Especially if Jack's your uncle and he's on a horse...

gvx··on Lowercase letters save data
CONVERTING EVERYTHING TO UPPERCASE SHOULD HAVE THE SAME EFFECT ON COMPRESSION STOP IT EVEN MAKES YOUR WEBSITE LOOK LIKE A TELEGRAM STOP
gvx··on Ask HN: When LLMs make stuff up, call it 'confabulating', not 'hallucinating'
In terms of communicating with laypeople, I don't think this is a hill worth dying on. "Confabulating" is not a term I think that many people outside of the field of psychology are familiar with in the first place.

If you do want to use another term for laypeople, I think "bullshitting" or "BSing" would have connotations that are more relevant than "hallucinating".

gvx··on SQL reserved words – An empirical list
This might work in the short term, but I don't recommend it as a general technique.

This sort of an approach often causes there to be hidden bugs, which do not generate errors now, but will cause some problem down the line.

It also has a tendency to lead to cargo cult programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming), which is less immediately problematic, but is still not great, especially for whoever needs to maintain that code.

gvx··on Show HN: Host a Website in the URL
Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/gvx/base116676
gvx··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Honestly, most apps don't need a full name. Just a preferred name is enough.

If you really need a full name, it'll be because you need it for a specific institution, like government or bank. In that case, you probably need the ability to provide a separate full name for each institution.

gvx··on mCaptcha: Open-source proof-of-work captcha for websites
I had the same idea. If you look at the sitekeys you can click "View deployment".

It's just a "I'm not a robot" checkbox. If you click it, it does some POW stuff in the background and that's it.

It's more of a rate limiter than a CAPTCHA provider like others have said, but given how cheap CAPTCHA-solving services are currently, I don't know if there's much of a difference in practice anyway.

gvx··on The Fall of Stack Overflow
> I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.

It already has, and not for the better. SO is currently awash with nonsensical answers that are clearly the result of feeding the question into ChatGPT. Not to mention questions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-bui...

gvx··on The Fall of Stack Overflow
How I usually try to answer these kinds of questions is "Shooting yourself is generally not a good idea, for these reasons. If you really want to do it, you can try loading your gun and pulling the trigger again, but a better alternative might be to take off your shoe by untying your shoelaces and carefully pulling on your shoe, following the curve of your foot."

But it's hard! On the one hand, you don't want to teach people to do the wrong thing (especially not on SO, where answers are often copied wholesale and pasted into production code), but also not answering the question as asked usually doesn't help the OP at all.

If it's not clear what they're trying to achieve I usually leave a comment asking for clarification rather than answering, though.

gvx··on Private key redaction: Ur doin it rong (2020)
IMO, if you're writing documentation, you should be aware that any sample text or code will be copy/pasted by someone and will end up in production there.
gvx··on Private key redaction: Ur doin it rong (2020)
The simplest thing I can think of is by generating keys that follow the exact right structure but some invariant like n = p * q is broken. Of course that relies on the assumption that implementations do some basic sanity checks like that. I don't know if that's a fair assumption to make.
gvx··on A 1.5GB string
I assumed the "Safety Buffer" is really more of a "Safety Factor", and is equivalent to 1 + what you or I would call a Safety Buffer.
gvx··on Show HN: Generate styled web pages with just Python
I think what they mean is that methods like add_header and add_text actually take raw HTML as an argument, which means that if you want to add arbitrary text, you actually need to do

    import html

    ...

    card.add_text(html.escape(my_text))
gvx··on 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
I killed so many instances of svchost.exe back in the day! Never ran into anything bad that a reboot wouldn't fix. I remember figuring out by trial-and-error which instances were safe to kill by looking at their memory usage.

There was something exciting about stripping Windows XP to its bare essentials, and also it seemed necessary at the time, if you wanted to run it smoothly on an ageing laptop that was basically obsolete when it was new. Especially if you wanted to run such RAM and CPU hogs like The Sims 2! (Not to mention the 40 GiB disk space that just filled up so fast with save games and expansion packs.)

I wonder if Windows 10 still lets you use an alternative to explorer.exe for its desktop shell? I used to write my own little launchers and spotlight-esque programs.

gvx··on Miami advances plan to move homeless onto island
"Concentration camp" isn't Nazi terminology. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment):

> The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.

> The term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".

Now I only know about this particular plan what TFA says, but I don't think it's a reach to be concerned about this becoming an internment camp if implemented.

gvx··on The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)
Yeah, in Dutch it's "apenstaartje" (little monkey's tail), although the last decades, it's becoming far more common to use the English "at".
Page 1 of 6Next →