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Wow, I’ll definitely steal the shuffling animation for https://FreeSolitaire.win/

Thanks for sharing!

palsecamon Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

Thanks :-)

Well yes, the very feature you described does exist! Sharing your result is available on game over, assuming you didn’t “cheat” (use hints) too much. It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/kMouvTL.png That uses the navigator.share() API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

palsecamon Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

Yeah I don’t want the ads to be intrusive. I don’t get many donations, no. In my experience, people will donate for a tool deemed useful (for business, etc.) but not much to something recreative.

As for traffic: word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from that. Also, although it’s far from being on top results on SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it that way.

palsecamon Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo (advertising revenue).

I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc.

Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now half the players are South Africans!

Feedback is welcome ;-)

palsecamon The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)

What’s your homepage URL, tho? (You don’t give it, and can’t find it on your HN profile.)

FTR, here is a complete Solitaire game in ~30 kB over-the-wire: https://FreeSolitaire.win/

Last time I checked, an update for Microsoft Solitaire was 30 megabytes…

palsecamon French court: refusing to disclose mobile passcode to law enforcement is a crime

Article 5 of the civil code, I guess:

« Il est défendu aux juges de prononcer par voie de disposition générale et réglementaire sur les causes qui leur sont soumises. »

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...

palsecamon Firefox's Optimized Zip Format

Another explication with (JS) code of the MS-DOS datetime encoding is at https://github.com/PaulCapron/pwa2uwp/blob/79ae42ea43e98eaf9...

https://github.com/PaulCapron/pwa2uwp/blob/master/src/zip.js in its entirety provides a simple intro, with code, to the ZIP format (archiving only, with no compression)

palsecamon The Web from 1989 to 1994

It depends on who you ask.

According to the W3C, it used to be that:

> a URI was either a URL or a URN.

But now, it’s complicated:

> the view became that an individual scheme does not need to be cast into one of a discrete set of URI types such as "URL", "URN" […]

> Further according to the contemporary view, the term "URL" does not refer to a formal partition of URI space; rather, URL is a useful but informal concept […]

> Thus as we noted, "http:" is a URI scheme. An http URI is a URL.

All the above citations from https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/

The WHATWG holds a different view:

> Standardize on the term URL. URI and IRI are just confusing. […] URL also easily wins the search result popularity contest.

From https://url.spec.whatwg.org/

This may be what the author of the article had in mind.

palsecamon Zip – How not to design a file format

Oh yes, the redbean source makes for a nice & adequate addition to the list.

BTW, jart, let me thank you here: redbean is boldly innovative, refreshlingly witty. An inspiring work of art from a true hacker!

palsecamon Zip – How not to design a file format

To get an idea on how to deal with ZIP files in code:

— in C, minimal-style library: https://github.com/richgel999/miniz, look especially at https://github.com/richgel999/miniz/blob/master/miniz_zip.h

— in JS, writing only and no compression: https://github.com/PaulCapron/pwa2uwp/blob/master/src/zip.js (255 lines including blanks & comments)

palsecamon HTTP Status Dogs (2011)

I myself use 418 as a reply to mean bots. Fun + makes filtering logs easier.

Nginx config snippet:

  # Nothing to hack around here, I’m just a teapot:
  location ~* \.(?:php|aspx?|jsp|dll|sql|bak)$ { 
      return 418; 
  }
  error_page 418 /418.html;

Example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php

palsecamon Fortnite’s cash cow is Playstation, not iOS, court documents reveal

Thanks for the reference! That looks like a great game indeed.

> Card game wasn't a good choice of words.

Well yes, it was: “Card Crawl is a solitaire-style dungeon crawler game played with a modified deck of standard cards.”

Funnily, it’s even advertised as a solitaire game ^^

palsecamon Fortnite’s cash cow is Playstation, not iOS, court documents reveal

> There's also a solo card game, the name escapes me, I spent hours on it.

Solitaire maybe? The classic Solitaire (Klondike Solitaire) is quite playable on phones, even in portrait mode. Self-plug: you can enjoy it in this mobile-first PWA (progressive web app) of mine: https://FreeSolitaire.win/

palsecamon A 1000-processor chip powered by an AA battery (2016)

http://www.GreenArrayChips.com/ by Chuck Moore, father of Forth.

palsecamon I’m A Teapot – HTTP status code 418

Me too, kind of.

I have nginx reply with a 418 page to bad bots requests. Funny easter egg. As a bonus, that makes nginx avoid checking the filesystem for inexistent files, and makes filtering logs easier.

Nginx config snippet:

  # Nothing to hack around here, I’m just a teapot:
  location ~* \.(?:php|aspx?|jsp|dll|sql|bak)$ { 
      return 418; 
  }
  error_page 418 /418.html;

Example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php

palsecamon Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

Indeed!

While such access is still hard on Android (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057673) or impossible on iOS, you on the other hand can easily call all the WinRT APIs from JavaScript if you distribute a PWA on the Microsoft Store.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-edge/windows-runtime. There are examples of what these APIs allow you to do on https://www.pwabuilder.com/windows.

BTW, you can use https://pwa2uwp.fragara.com/ to publish a PWA to the Microsoft Store, without needing Visual Studio or even a Windows machine.

palsecamon Google Play Store Now Open for Progressive Web Apps

> you have to upload a package, but all that package contains is the URL for the actual app, and name and icon for the store

Shameless plug: you can use https://pwa2uwp.fragara.com/ to create such a package (an appx package), using nothing but your browser and curl.

palsecamon Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet

Additional pointers:

– a more detailed post about Brotli: http://textslashplain.com/2015/09/10/brotli/

– a MSDN article on “compressing the Web”, explaining the difference between deflate and gzip, the limitations of browsers, and mentionning zopfli and brotli: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2014/10/21/http-...

palsecamon NSA announces plans for transitioning to quantum resistant algorithms

http://pqcrypto.org/

Also https://speakerdeck.com/veorq/quantum-computers-vs-computers... (slides 25-30)

palsecamon First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft's take on the modern browser

Side question: what is the difference between “evengreen” and “auto-updating”? Does the former mean something else or more than the latter?

palsecamon Fabrice Bellard [pdf]

"I don't see how a system can be both egalitarian and meritocratic."

Egalitarian: education is free for all, and richs and poors (normally) go to the same school, the one of their town, until at least 16. Egality of chance.

Meritocratic: but after 16, you go to the university or a grande école according to your abilities/ranks. The best can go to Polytechnique, the good can go to a grande école or a good university, the rest goes to the other universities (and it's still free for all).

It doesn't matter if your parents are poor and if you were born in the country and not in Paris, if you're great you can go to Polytechnique. And no matter how rich the parents, if you suck, you won't go to Polytechnique.

palsecamon Tarsnap critical security bug

Golang does that, right (++ is a statement, not an expression)?

palsecamon Tarsnap critical security bug

"No matter how secure Tarsnap's design is, however, you don't run the design on your computer — you run the code. For this reason, all of the source code to the Tarsnap client is available. You don't need to simply trust that Tarsnap does things right (and that it isn't a trojan planted by the US government): You can read the source code and check for yourself."

Last § of https://www.tarsnap.com/security.html

palsecamon A Gentle Introduction to Machine Fundamentals

You could change the HN title, to begin with ;-)

palsecamon [dead]

dup, sorry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116692. Deleted.

palsecamon "Loading..." Animated GIF Generator

Rounded corners generator: http://wigflip.com/cornershop/. You may also like the other wigflip utilities, see http://wigflip.com/.

Background gradients (if you make a 1-pixel wide button) and button generator: http://dabuttonfactory.com/ (self-plug).

palsecamon Ask HN: What was the last time a requested feature was implemented ?

http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.1.tar, it includes news.arc, the code running HN/NewMogul/etc and a "how-to-run-news" text file.

You need MzScheme 4 to run Arc.

See also http://arclanguage.org/install (installation instructions, but a bit out-of-date, it's for Arc 3.0) and http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254 (Arc 3.1 announcement).

palsecamon Ask HN: What was the last time a requested feature was implemented ?

My Arc REPL online uses Arc on the backend, see http://dabuttonfactory.com:8080 (the code is linked there), but it's just a tiny project.

But yes, there are not so many projects using it to my Arc-forum-user knowledge too.

palsecamon An Arc REPL online

> I'm just learning Lisp/Arc now, so this will be a very handy tool for me.

I'm very glad if it can help you learn! It's mainly for this purpose that I code this little thing (and to myself learn Arc doing it :-))

BTW, see also http://lotrepls.appspot.com/, the Lord of the REPLs by Google. You can program in Clojure and Scheme (and also in non-Lisp languages like Ruby) with it.

> put a hook on the "onkeypress" event of the arc textarea for the up and down arrows, so that you can scroll backwards and forwards through the command history

Yep, this is on the TODO list, I'll work on that. Thanks.

palsecamon An Arc REPL online

Check your mailbox.

For the others: tell me if you're also interested for the patch, but I'll maybe let dfranke test it a bit before to release it (the guy is good; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976).