Hacker News Reader

mweston Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made

Unrolled version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html

Great story!

mweston Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

For drone, I have a lot of stuff from Cryochamber:

https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/

Looking at my current most-played list, I'd suggest:

https://starcadian.bandcamp.com/album/saturdaze

https://future80s.bandcamp.com/album/trans-am

https://nightvision2.bandcamp.com/album/runaway !!

https://neondroid.bandcamp.com/album/no-more-sunset-2017-ep

mweston Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Must agree with you here (even though I do like me some Lana del Rey). Majority of Bandcamp music in my collection is retro/synth/new wave, and some "drone" which is nice to have on as white noise while working.

mweston Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

I've seen that before, thanks. Wish I could find a similar tool to download (or stream) my bought and paid for collection, at the quality I set!

mweston Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Bandcamp is definitely my favourite platform for buying music. No DRM, flac format available if that's your thing. Artists can put up both digital and physical merch.

Wish they had a more fully-featured experience for streaming music on PC. Downloading to play in foobar is a bit of a faff sometimes!

mweston A Year-Long Undercover Plot to Blow Up Eve Online's Most Notorious Space Station

One of the things about Eve Online that's fascinated me is how "open" they make the game for third party developers.

Why bother with a spreadsheet, when you can dial it up a level and use their data export and your favourite "Big Data" analysis tools to look for interesting opportunities?

Maybe you enjoy blowing up space ships, but can't think of an in-game method to fund your habit? Build a tool other Eve players will use (and pay for with Isk) instead.

https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources

https://github.com/devfleet/awesome-eve

https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tweetfleet-slack-invites/

mweston Hetzner DIY Private Networking with Tinc

You can achieve something similar with Hetzner's recently introduced "vSwitch feature". Works across their different DCs, which is nice. Some docs here: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Vswitch/en

I've been using ZeroTier to give a common backplane to my Hetzner servers, DO droplets and AWS instances.

mweston Meteor showers from space

Mars has a lot of dust in the atmopshere, which makes Martian astronomy more difficult. The Spirit rover did manage to capture an image of a comet though. There's some more detail on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy_on_Mars#Comets_and_m...

If you're interested in the concept of "alien astronomy" from other planets, I've used these "planetarium" style tools to play around with what it'd look like:

Light: http://stellarium.org/ Medium: https://celestia.space/ Heavy: http://spaceengine.org/

mweston Meteor showers from space

We took a drive out to the Minninglow dark sky site in the Peak District (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_District) in the small hours of this morning. It was quite amazing to witness the streaks of the Perseid meteor shower! We counted 30 over the course of an hour. No telescope required. The peak is meant to be tomorrow night. I highly recommend trying to catch it if you can.

I found the "MeteorActive" and "Clear Outside" iOS apps quite useful for picking the right time for the best view.

mweston Usenet – A worldwide distributed discussion system

I recently started reading Usenet again using the free https://news.solani.org/ service.

Once I'd caught up on a.s.r, I couldn't really find any other groups other than alt.comp.lang.* that were worth reading.

Any HN suggestions?

mweston There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it seems they still are

It only searches the URL, title and tags of the page though. It doesn't return results based on the content, which I believ e is what OP is after.

mweston Show HN: Ping.gy – An app to connect with people within 1km from you

Reminds me of Jodel and the now-defunct Yik Yak.

Yik Yak took the "cells" or "herds" approach. Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak

I'm not sure how you're going to avoid the same issues that Yik Yak faced.

"Ambient social networking" isn't new, but it's never taken off. Some reading:

https://www.quora.com/Why-have-almost-all-location-based-mes...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/23/location-vs-communication/

mweston A Year Away from Mac OS

I ran FreeBSD on my home and work desktops (and most of my servers) for almost 10 years. I use a Mac these days, but I still have a soft spot for FreeBSD on the desktop.

For Dropbox on FreeBSD, I found just installing the CLI (pkg install dropbox-api-command) and then calling "dropbox-api sync" in cron ever 10 minutes was good enough.

mweston DOSBox x86 system emulator

If you're a fan of DOSBox, you might like this: http://www.doshaven.eu/

I love the fact that people are still making games for DOS. I've been playing a bit of this: http://www.doshaven.eu/game/ptakovina/ (from 2017!)

mweston Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

I did wonder if it was a Sagan reference: "... I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

mweston Can I buy a GPU yet?

Need something similar for DRAM prices!

mweston Practical Unix Manuals: mdoc

Unix System Laboratories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_System_Laboratories

mweston Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

I've found https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole really useful, although it only meets 1/3 of your requirements. I'm hoping someone will add a nice GUI and re-transmission.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14649727

mweston Designers Using Ikea Products as Platform

I was expecting/hoping for something more like the 'LackRack': https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Or at least http://www.ikeahackers.net/ :-)

mweston Savaged by Systemd: An Erotic Unix Encounter

If you've run out of BOFH stories to read, and want to take it to the next level...!

mweston Ask HN: What are some of the better Hacker News apps?

Also very happy with premii. Mostly due to the offline caching, but also the clean and simple layout, and integration with Pocket.

mweston Old usenet maps

Ever taken a look at the ASCII/ANSI art from the likes of ACiD and iCE from that era? :-)

Some galleries/samples here:

http://www.acid.org/

http://www.ice.org/

Bit of a nostalgia trip if you ever dialled into a BBS.

mweston Old usenet maps

Couldn't find any social media links for them, but they are on LinkedIn if you do a bit of Google searching.

mweston FEATURE: A struggle within MIT’s IT department over its future (2016)

Covered previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232724

I do wonder how they are doing now though. Seems a really sad state of affairs.

See also:

By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637850

mweston Smog in our brains

You need decent ventilation in your bathroom. If the room stays too damp (steam after a shower, etc.), you'll end up with mold, some of which can definitely be neurotoxic.

mweston Launch HN: Solve (YC S17) – We Save International Travelers Hours of Time

This is much less of a pain since EU roaming charges ended on 15 June 2017.

"Roaming charges end on 15 June 2017. Europeans travelling within the EU countries will Roam Like at Home and pay domestic prices for roaming calls, SMS and data."

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/policies/roami...

Happily using my UK SIM and data plan while traveling through several EU countries.

mweston How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001

Thanks for taking the time to write this! Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's been some time since I've even thought of mod_perl... A graph of whimsy: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201701/apache...

mweston Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

To organise/track papers:

I’m currently using Mendeley[1]. Previously, I used Papers[2]. Unfortunately, the latest version of Papers (3.x) is terrible compared to how slick the old version (2.x) was. I’ve tried ReadCube[3], but somehow I find Mendeley easier to work with. I used EndNote[4] before I discovered Papers, and wouldn’t recommend it. I keep all my .pdf files in Dropbox.

Discussions/recommendations for papers:

In-person, well run, reading groups still seem to work best. Although I’ve seen good discussions on /r/maths and /r/physics on Reddit. ResearchGate[5] is useful for finding recent papers, while Mendeley is good for more historical connections.

Reading papers:

I’ve tried a Kindle, but having to convert with Calibre adds too much friction to the process, and the result still isn’t that easy to work with. Reading for long periods of time on a laptop or desktop monitor is painful. An iPad with a Retina display comes close, but old school paper printout still wins the day. You can carry paper anywhere and scribble annotations on it with ease. I also find being able to have multiple pages “in view” at the same time is sometimes helpful for understanding. Not easily (cheaply) done with iPads or laptops.

[1] https://www.mendeley.com/

[2] http://papersapp.com/

[3] https://www.readcube.com/

[4] http://endnote.com/

[5] https://www.researchgate.net/

mweston Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014)

Flaws uncovered in the software researchers use to analyze fM.R.I. data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12378791

Wonder whether or not the software followed "best practices"...

mweston Flaws uncovered in the software researchers use to analyze fM.R.I. data

Whoops. Certainly an interesting contrasting article to the recent:

Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377385