Hacker News Reader

leetrouton Norway makes shithouses great again

Thank you - I did not understand what was going on / what the tie back was.

leetrouton GridSnap – an open-source Divvy-style window snapper for macOS

$80 for a window manager (or $24 / year) ... yeesh. Maybe I will try it when I get fed up with rectangle.

leetrouton Show HN: A 3D Configurator for Macropads

Yea, it's advertising their 1-shot hosting like everyone else is doing lately:

https://ngrok.com/ship

leetrouton DuckDB Ducklake

Thank you!

leetrouton DuckDB Ducklake

It says receive the link in two minutes but it's been over 4 hours and nothing over here. Just tried again.

leetrouton Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits

Fascinating read. Thank you for the link. It's wild to think about how different some people's lives are compared to our own. I couldn't imagine doing that to my child.

leetrouton Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

This question has a ton of varied answers across the internet. The best bang for your buck is a good set of binoculars and a tripod for them. It's really neat how much you can see with just those... clearing up fuzzy spots with naked eyes by revealing clusters of stars.

From there, if you have found out that you enjoy being outside using the binoculars, can see what you expected... then buy a compact scope

see https://telescopicwatch.com/different-types-of-telescopes/

I have two sets of cheap (<$100) binoculars, a cheap refractor from amazon (gskyer, $300), a very nice celestron c8 and a small meade MCT. I bought them in that order as I developed my interests. I use two different eye pieces, both plossals, one with about an inch of eye relief with no eyecup and one with a bit less relief and an eyecup. I use the binoculars more than all the others combined and if I were starting over I would buy a really nice set with a tripod.

For planets and nebulae I use the c8 with an equitorial mount. This is _fantastic_ for general objects in the night sky since once it's aligned it's a single knob to turn to keep up with things as the earth is rotating. For the moon and large planets and tracking things like space craft launching or starlink sats I use the refractor with the standard azimuth tripod. It makes it very easy to manually "point and shoot" objects with irregular travel paths.

So yea... go buy some binoculars.

leetrouton Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

In addition to the sibling:

https://www.astrospheric.com/

https://observingwindow.com/

https://clearskys.app/

leetrouton Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

Awesome! Thank you for sharing!

For iOS stargazers that don't already know (we've all been there) xasteria is a great option for your phone to compliment this (it also uses 7Timer!).

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xasteria-astronomy-weather/id9...

leetrouton Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields

Just a few tokens away from a flutter port

leetrouton U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982

Good summary about the physical and statutory limits

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/less-300-million-barr...

leetrouton Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery

> If it were true, I expect it would be a national security concern, and quickly remedied

I dunno... things happen that expose these risks and lead times for replacement equipment can push out to 2-3 years.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/09/02/u-s-bulk-power-equipm...

leetrouton No Sloptober

Feel like "No Slop November" would be a better name (and easier to succeed in the US since we've got a holiday break.

leetrouton The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

He accidentally got caught.

leetrouton Cartesian – AI 3D Modeling for Design

Is the site owners are here: that background and scroll effect is terrible.

leetrouton Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

Can we put "Automattic" I. The title? I had no idea who this was. (Yes it is comfortable under my rock)

leetrouton Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time

> If they can do it in mining and construction, why can't transportation...

Because supply side. Can't have our oil barons losing out.

leetrouton An overview of how our family is prepared

This is the way. And I have no shame when I warm up a can of ravioli in the microwave at coworking.

Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.

It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.

leetrouton I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again

Counter point: How many paid auth providers force you to create an entirely new deployment and then use a lambda to migrate within their own system? Especially for something as seemingly simple like adding another metadata field?

I think they allow export because they drew some interesting lines around their own mutability concerns.

I also would never use cognito again.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/co...

leetrouton AWS billing bug causes 1000x increase in token prices

We got hit with this as well. Minor heart attack.

Second billing issue in the past couple weeks... wonder what is going on? AI code? Rapid product additions?

leetrouton Starbase, LA

It's in the comments here tho.

leetrouton Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

Promnesia was a prior attempt at this

https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

leetrouton The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

Glad this one is getting the "second chance" bump back to the front page. It's great content and it's timely. It's a great video.

If you're not inclined to watch the video I'll save you a click to the youtube description and add a bit more detail than the earlier sibling for the devices shown:

Simulacra

"Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you."

https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra

---

Biscuit Ultra

"Wardriving Platform: A Full WiFi & BLE Security Toolkit. A headless wireless security research platform controlled entirely from your phone via Bluetooth. The platform supports dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth Low Energy scanning and attacks, wardriving with GPS mapping, packet capture, and much more"

https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra

---

Rayhunter

"Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well."

https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter

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OUI Spy

"ESP32-S3 multi-mode surveillance-detection board"

• Foxhunter — single-target RSSI-proximity tracker for radio direction finding

• Detector — multi-target BLE scanner with OUI filtering + web config portal

• PCAP — raw 2.4GHz Wi-Fi packet capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch)

• BLE Sniff — raw Bluetooth LE advertising capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch)

• Flock-You — Flock cam detection with GPS wardriving, JSON/CSV/KML export

https://colonelpanic.tech/

https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

maybe they are easy but "everyone has to have them" doesn't change the amount of time and money invested in getting them. The real compensation under that is stagnating with inflation. NC is particularly bad because state law forbids collective bargaining and they are at the whim of the legislature (which stalled a budget for 1000 days).

The signal of supply and demand the cost (and debt) of an advanced degree is not reflected in the marginal salary bump over bachelors degree given the rising costs of tuition. From same site you used 46.7% of public university masters degree completions used debt so basically half.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_332.45.a...

leetrouton Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma

My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.

Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.

Remember to breathe.

leetrouton How Kubernetes Probes Work

many times i have said a company could be built to just make better google documentation.

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

Sure, $62.5k for a 10 month contract is $75k over 12 (62.5/10 == 75/12) but my point about purchasing power remains.

As the other commenter called out it's low considering to get to this salary at 15 years of experience you also have to have a master's degree. Master degree holders have a median salary $95k in the US so this is off the mark by a considerable amount.

leetrouton Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

> When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

NC teacher salaries are terrible on their own but they are also outpaced by inflation.

The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.

So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.

leetrouton Seven books I keep close because I love them

I use the New Living Translation (NLT) for casual reading and was unaware of the LSB. I'll have to get a copy, thanks.

Here's a brief comparison (Titus 1)

LSB: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Titus%201&versi...

NLT: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=titus%201&versi...