Hacker News Reader

jayknighton Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen

In a previous position, we used Adobe Connect a lot for online meetings, and the normal way of sharing presentations was to upload them to the room and control the presentation from there.

Webex has this as well, but I find that most people don't bother and just share their screen.

jayknighton Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

See also https://wikimap.toolforge.org/, which puts wikipedia articles on a map so you can explore that way.

Edit: others have pointed out https://wiki-map.com/, which is way better.

jayknighton Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

Yeah, But I didn't really want to read this article as I was waking up...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Ell_Persons

jayknighton Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

You can go to any article with location data, click the coordinates to go to the geohack page with links to all kinds of data about that location, which includes a link to "List of nearby articles" which takes you back to wikipedia's nearby search for that location. So from the White House page:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House ->

2. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=White_Hou... ->

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/38.89777...

jayknighton PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 out

Yeah, there was a new patch release in the works already. They just added this fix and got it out the door. Changelog: https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-8.php#8.5.12

jayknighton Dutch National Cyber Security Center is Offline because it uses PHP

php.net does run php, but one would assume they are already on the patched version.

https://github.com/php/web-php

jayknighton Fancy Curl Sites

>If you were just trying to download the original HTML version of this page, add -H "X-Original: true" to the curl command to have the server respond exactly how it would've to any non-curl HTTP client.

It seems like "Accept: text/html" would be more standard

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

... and then use `text/x-ansi` as the curl version, so other text-based clients could also fetch it:

wget -O - --header='Accept: text/x-ansi' nytpu.com/gemlog/2026-03-18

See: https://www.digipres.org/formats/sources/wikidata/formats/#q...

jayknighton Do dentists know what they're doing?

Who would you sue? The one that missed all of your serious cavities or the one who is exaggerating the tiny ones to make a buck?

jayknighton Show HN: Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard

There was something like this that came with an old Sound Blaster card back in the day that I spent quite a lot of time with. It had something like this, where you could pick individual strings with the number pad and change chords with the F buttons.

jayknighton Cloudflare acquires Deno

It probably depends on how much of the deno-specific api is being used, and then how similar that is to whatever you're going to switch to.

https://docs.deno.com/api/deno/

jayknighton ICANN Reveals 2026 Round Applications for New Generic Top-Level Domains

I suddenly feel the need to own at least one .fart domain.

jayknighton ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

Surely there are more bots than humans.

jayknighton I don't like passkeys

>Not even Google reliably lets you fall back to a password, according to the comments in this article.

I logged in with my google password (on my TV, the other method using my phone wasn't working for some reason) the other day even though I normally use a passkey from my phone or computer. It worked just fine.

jayknighton I don't like passkeys

Kind of, but I have some of my most important passwords and account recovery codes duplicated on paper in a secure place. If there was ever a service that only allowed passkey login (do those exist?), you can't print those out.

jayknighton I don't like passkeys

What services implement it like this? Don't services usually implement passkeys as a more secure alternative to a password, but password login is still available?

Some sites allow passkeys as an option for MFA, so that could be an issue if the passkey is your only MFA option and MFA is required. But I imagine email would pretty much always be a fallback.

jayknighton I don't like passkeys

Just make sure you don't lose the passkey to log into your email.

jayknighton XCancel service is suspended until further notice

Is he there again? I thought he did everything on his own service, whatever it's called.

jayknighton Λ Snap – An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study

Why build pine wood derby cars? Why paint pictures? Or take photographs? Why memorize poetry? Why build things with Legos?

Because it makes your brain think through problems, breaking them down to the point you can build a solution from the smallest pieces. AI may be a big part of the future, but we need to maintain our own human creativity and problem solving skills, and learning the tools that are available will help us to build and create useful things throughout our lives.

jayknighton λ Snap – An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study

The logo has a lambda in front, and I assume that's where the "Λ" came from in the title of the post. But I don't see it in any of the text on their site.

jayknighton LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices

If people really start not connecting them. TV makers will just start including a cellular modem.

jayknighton Just bury your trash: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

I bought 4 quite large heavy duty canvas bags in like 2005 and have been grocery shopping with them since then. I almost never buy more than will fit in those (actually, most trips I just take two of them).

jayknighton The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

Firefox on win11 here, scrolling the page is super choppy and it pegs my GPU at 100%.

jayknighton Google's Obedience to Trump's "Lake America" Order Follows a Depressing Pattern

Here is a thread about how OpenStreetMaps handled it: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/lake-ontario-lake-amer...

>So far, the Lake Ontario relation (1206310) as well as at least one other nearby feature has already had its name=* changed once, though it was swiftly reverted and changed to official_name:en-US=* instead, which is the current status quo as of this writing.

jayknighton Markdown Database Pattern

I've recently switched to SilverBullet[1] as my day-to-day note taking and task tracking app, because of it's very powerful ability to embed little queries and scripts directly in a page to build lists/tables/links that based on data from other pages. This looks like an interesting way to leverage markdown libraries in different ways. Nice!

[1] https://silverbullet.md/

jayknighton Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

Theremin was invented in 1920. I'm quite sure someone pretended to play a pretend guitar before that.

jayknighton Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

I her your point, but this is the theremin version of air guitar, so I think it fits.

jayknighton France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

I have had some success in just asking the spam callers to remove me from their list. I still get a fair number of calls, but they are mostly blocked by Google's filter (though they do get sent to voicemail, which results in lots of 4 second silent messages).

The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.

jayknighton Em dashes are amazing

Ah, so my constant interrupting myself is a sign of intelligence? That's great news.

But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.