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open-parenon Why HN is the way it is, and why we hope it will stay that way

I agree. It's a great metaphor. I'm also going to start using flamebait more frequently, where previously I just lumped it under the more generic "clickbait" (a flamebait headline is a clickbait headline but a clickbait headline is not a flamebait headline).

open-parenon Algebraic data types: things I wish someone had explained about FP (2019)

Discussed previously

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21571938 (November 19, 2019 — 242 points, 112 comments)

open-parenon πfs – A data-free filesystem

Previous discussions

PiFS – The Data-Free Filesystem (February 20, 2021 — 1 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208704

Πfs: Never worry about data again (October 25, 2019 — 3 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359338

The π Filesystem for FUSE: Store Your Data in π (February 21, 2019 — 1 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19223032

pifs - Avoid disk space usage by saving your files in the digits of Pi (December 14, 2018 — 3 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18687275

πfs – A data-free filesystem (March 14, 2017 — 285 points, 105 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691

Πfs: Stores your data in π (January 6, 2016 — 2 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856108

Πfs: Never worry about data again (January 5, 2016 — 5 points, 1 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847693

open-parenon Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

Thanks Brendan. I'll give it a try next time I need to make a video call.

open-parenon Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

Free is great, free is what they advertise. However, I don't personally like Brave Rewards because I am not bullish on crypto and I don't think most of BAT goes to creators, because Brave Rewards market usage is really, really small, so it gets used speculatively. My perfect world solution is that they either

a) advertise that Brave Rewards is required ("Brave Talk is free, ad-supported), or

b) have a payment tier between premium and free that allows me to pay-per-call or something, without the premium features.

open-parenon Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

To start a call, there is a requirement that you are

1) Using the Brave Browser

2) Have Brave Rewards (their crypto-and-ads service) turned on.

Not loving that.

Edit: the first one is fine (although a little strange that it is a requirement here but not for their other products, like Brave Search). I'm irked by the second one.

open-parenon Brave Search beta

No worries. Congrats on the launch.

open-parenon Brave Search beta

If that's all that's offered, why does DDG's obscure shebangs work on Brave Search?

https://search.brave.com/search?q=!hn+brave+search

open-parenon Brave Search beta

I think they copied DuckDuckGo's bangs.

It's nowhere in the documentation, and the UI never indicates it, but bang searches (like `!stackoverflow parse html with regex`) work in Brave Search exactly as they do in DuckDuckGo.

Preliminary testing of mine suggests that they just copied DuckDuckGo's list directly–I tried a few obscure ones from DDG, like `!ldss` or `!uib`, and they work in Brave Search.

@w0ts0n any details you are willing to share?

open-parenon Brave Search beta

I found the announcement blog post. Brave Search is a rebranding of Tailcat's product, which Brave acquired in March.

https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/

open-parenon Brave Search beta

Apparently, they have their own search index, which they say covers ~95% of queries, and if the results aren't in the index, it will then get it from Google or Bing.

I'd love some more details on how this works. They probably aren't scraping the whole web. Are they just mirroring Bing and Google indexes? They seem to have their own page ranking algorithm that they're hoping to get trained.

open-parenon Missouri Has Declared Federal Gun Laws Invalid

The Utah legislature has been attempting to do the same thing recently. After eliminating the requirement for concealed carry licenses, they've propose an amendment[1] to the state's constitution that "declares Utah a Second Amendment Sanctuary State". The only reason it hasn't happened is because the governor won't let the legislature include it in the special legislative sessions they've been having

[1] Full bill text: https://le.utah.gov/~2021X1/bills/static/SR0902.html

open-parenon NixOS 21.05

If nix-env is a big ol' footgun, are there any plans to make home-manager a part of the OS itself, instead of just a community project?

open-parenon System76 Launch Keyboard

Maybe that was the case in the past, but I don't think that's true anymore. Using this[0] page, it will register as many keys as I can mash without triggering a global hotkey.

[0]: http://gadzikowski.com/nkeyrollover.html

open-parenon HTML Sanitizer API

  > (new Sanitizer()).sanitizeToString(`<sc<script>ript>alert('XSS')</sc</script>ript>`)
  "ript&gt;alert('XSS')ript&gt;"

open-parenon Vugu: Vue-like frontends in pure Go, HTML, and CSS

Previously discussed when the project was a few months old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20449427

open-parenon An open letter in support of RMS being reinstated by the FSF

My comment was more a direct response to the parent comment's question 'If anyone can give me an example of some political belief that is not justified in being "unacceptable"…', but my scenario only fits a wider definition "being silenced by political correctness". Every American probably has a different definition of what "political correctness is a problem in our country" means. The classic definition from right-leaning Americans is "the fight on how to say and do things in the most inclusive way possible is getting in the way of actually doing the things." But me being silenced by my in-laws fits under the umbrella of political correctness if you define it as "the ardor of your support for the 'correct' political thinking burns others". That concept currently goes by other names currently. I call it culture wars and general tribalism. I think the political correctness fight of a decade ago has shifted and evolved into the broader tribalism of today. So "political correctness" as you described it doesn't fit, but I think it fits with how I think the survey respondents interpreted it.

open-parenon An open letter in support of RMS being reinstated by the FSF

Sure. During dinner with my in-laws (siblings and parents), my MIL brought up the now-removed phrase from the manifesto on BlackLivesMatter.com that says "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another...". She and the rest of the table interpreted it as "BLM wants to abolish the family as a societal unit." I suggested the alternate, "unacceptable" interpretation that they are expanding the definition of family to include non-blood relatives and encourage caring communities. This was not received well, and I ended up getting texts about the incorrectness of my belief even after we had left that day. So now I am scared to share my political beliefs for fear of being called out, even when I share something that I view as reasonable and "possibly acceptable". But maybe you're looking for a bigger example.

open-parenon The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now

I've been looking at NUCs recently, but I can't decide how much compute power I should aim for. What NUC did you buy?

open-parenon Flutter 2

Congrats to the Flutter and Dart teams! This is a huge accomplishment.

However, I worry about accessibility story for Flutter applications. Am I naïve? Should screen-reader support be a concern for the kind of complex visual applications that Flutter is built for?

open-parenon Night.fm

I think this is the first time I've seen Svelte in the wild (outside of NYT)

open-parenon Yeti Foods is a Facebook-Free business

The Yeti Cheese company, a small, plant-based cheese company, not the well-known Yeti Coolers company

open-parenon A tour through melonDS's JIT recompiler Part 1

I thought this was a neat overview of how this specific JIT recompiler works. It also starts with why an emulator would want to opt for JIT'ing instructions instead of direct interpretation, which I was unaware of.

open-parenon The V Programming Language

I know the launch was mired in controversy, but work has gone on since them. Christine Dodrill occassionally takes a look at it after writing about it at launch and I like her updates. Here's[0] her most recent look at the project, from June

[0]: https://christine.website/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17

open-parenon GitHub Public Roadmap

More direct link to the roadmap: https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1

open-parenon New inline assembly syntax available in Rust nightly

I'm new to Rust, so there may be precedent that I don't know, and I'm kinda spoiled because I'm a front-end dev mainly, where the rule is "don't break the web", but doesn't changing the syntax of a macro like that break backwards compatibility?

open-parenon Hermes – a Nix/Guix-like package manager for Linux

Pre-built binaries are provided on the releases page[0] of the repo. It's not a single-binary program, so they're all together in a .tar.gz.

The author has a page[1] on the comparison to Nix/Guix. The gist of it is that "these simplifications range from less code, fewer commands, no C++, no monads, no lazy functional programming, no glibc."

[0]: https://github.com/andrewchambers/hermes/releases [1]: https://github.com/andrewchambers/hermes/blob/master/doc/com...

open-parenon Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

I've been testing out nix and I haven't found out how to install packages in a declarative way yet. Using "nix-env -iA <whatever>` seems really imperative. How are you doing that? Do you use something like home-manager, or do you just define a default.nix and then nix-shell it whenever you need something?

open-parenon Windows Package Manager Preview

At least having the package repo in a git repo removes the biggest problem (IMO) with Chocolatey, that a package owner would abandon it then never update it. Now, a package can be updated by anyone through a PR. However, whoever maintains the git repo (Kevin Larkin and some others) is likely to be overwhelmed quickly.

open-parenon Windows Package Manager Preview

This[1] is the repository from which it pulls. It sounds like third-party repos are a planned feature. Basically, every package is a yaml file like this:

  Id: string # publisher.package format
  Publisher: string # the name of the publisher
  Name: string # the name of the application
  Version: string # version numbering format
  License: string # the open source license or copyright
  InstallerType: string # enumeration of supported installer types (exe, msi, msix)
  Installers:
    - Arch: string # enumeration of supported architectures
      URL: string # path to download installation file
      Sha256: string # SHA256 calculated from installer
  # ManifestVersion: 0.1.0

Doesn't look like there is field for dependencies of a package, but this is also a 0.1.0 release.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs