Hacker News Reader

pisipisipision Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Making AppletForge, a modern JavaCard/GlobalPlatform developer experience for secure elements, with the ease of use of GlobalPlatformPro gp.jar and all the modern DX expectations of anno 2026. https://github.com/martinpaljak/JCardEngine/wiki

pisipisipision Google's Antigravity bait and switch

I can replace everything, except google earth / streetview.

pisipisipision I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

My experience in a “product company” - Pre-sales solutions engineer - the original problem solver. Professional services - post-sales firefighter :)

pisipisipision TODOs aren't for doing

Amsterdam.

pisipisipision TODOs aren't for doing

I add and grep for the following:

- FIXME: this is clearly broken/wrong and highest priority

- XXX: this is “ugly” or assumes wrong things, probably higher than next

- TODO: at some point, implement a whole different approach/category/branch

- NOTE: code comment with a higher importance than just random comment

NOTE: I work a lot with old/unmaintained codebases where “code is truth”, so there is no “jira ticket creation” but amending things as you read.

pisipisipision Show HN: Keypub.sh – OAuth for the terminal using SSH keys

Why? What is wrong with fido?

pisipisipision Visual explanation of SAML authentication (2020)

Visual explanation of HTML shopping.

pisipisipision Google Maps has become an eyesore

There are alternatives for mapping apps, but no competitors for street view and discovering local photos (if you need a map/streetview for NY or SF it doesn’t matter what you use). True, even photos has become “spammy” in contested areas. But is indispensable if you want to discover local areas in regions like Turkmenistan for example

pisipisipision Choosing happiness

Ikigai

pisipisipision Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner

Thanks! This looks like an awesome text editor and has the very understandable navigation I miss from b-liner!

pisipisipision Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner

I wish someone re-created Varatek B-liner ... https://www.mind-mapping.org/index.php?title=B-liner_2002

pisipisipision Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables

Less than one FTE per month?

pisipisipision The Smart Modem

Smstools and smsd might be another option

pisipisipision Typora 1.0

Who is behind the app? Company? Person? Impossible to find anything than a "hi@" e-mail. The Github repository has no people-members, commiters have no real location...

pisipisipision Miller CLI – Like Awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for CSV, TSV and JSON

He is dead now. RIP

pisipisipision How often should I rotate my SSH keys?

There is sekey app for macs, use it. There are also yubikeys which can be used for SSH and OpenSSH knows how to use fido keys, so even more to choose from.

pisipisipision Estonian Electronic Identity Card: Security Flaws in Key Management

Getting asked as an expert "can this id card thing be trusted?" my answer has been "for communicating with the government you inherently don't trust, the method or security of an authentication device does not really matter" (filing your taxes or logging to services being the scope). Some claiming encryption privacy issues ... Well, for any meaningful opsec you should not be using the id card for encrypting messages about overthrowing the same government issuing the encryption devices in the first place, if government reading your messages is a threat in your model.

pisipisipision Estonian Electronic Identity Card: Security Flaws in Key Management

This shows the issues in process and attitude. Even in the case of ROCA, you do not really break the crypto part itself, you wiggle around the implementation and procedure issues to bypass it.

pisipisipision Estonian Electronic Identity Card: Security Flaws in Key Management

He is a well-known researcher in Estonia, with his scope of work both known as well as appreciated (at least by the non-politicians). Of course some have the "too big to fail", thus "you don't talk about Vo..." attitude, but those want to turn technical argumentation into political "agreement" and it is hard to debate a 0 to become 1. You can't argue with computers, "lets agree this 0 is as good as 1, even better and greater!"

pisipisipision Convert Markdown to a Mind Map

Reminds me a neat Windows program from beginning of the century: https://www.mind-mapping.org/index.php?title=B-liner_2002

pisipisipision Chronologic Versioning: No more arbitrary version updates and regressions

Calver?

pisipisipision Free Public Transport in Estonia

Idea of free public transport (for rural areas: to add mobility to shrinking (age) and city-moving population) is interesting, to combat the otherwise natural process of urbanization and centralization.

Same for the cities that actually have meaningful public transit needs and solutions (Tallinn, maybe Tartu and Pärnu). Implementation as a "FREE stuff, vote for me" is total fail - bad timetables, pointless long routes etc.

Flexible and on-demand transportation is required for rural areas (right now money gets wasted on subsidies rather than real problem) and for dense areas different approaches than just throwing money at a sub-optimal solution (maybe "use a bicycle" would be better than "success if you don't take a car but take stinking and smoking bus instead").

pisipisipision Using a Yubikey as smartcard for SSH public key authentication

As a 10+ year smart card crypto specialist I absolutely LOVE sekey

pisipisipision Introducing Red Planet Labs with $5M in funding

"better serverless?"

pisipisipision Modernizing Transport Security

Until some random IoT device from 2016 without updated firmware requires some weird old configuration to access it ...

pisipisipision Estonia sues Gemalto for €152M over ID card flaws

The problem is mandatory blind trust in single entity, be it Gemalto or Oberthur or NSA^H^HIST. Same issue with CA-s.

pisipisipision Estonia sues Gemalto for €152M over ID card flaws

The contract has been renewed several times, IIRC 2006 and 2010 Reference: (in Estonian) https://tehnika.postimees.ee/4358415/gemalto-kaebus-politsei...

pisipisipision GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts in the State of Washington

The key is generated inside the card, but the key generation is initiated via your computer (but in fact, initiated by the card management system). So no, you can not intercept any keys in that process.

pisipisipision Flaw crippling millions of crypto keys is worse than first disclosed

https://www.dnielectronico.es/PortalDNIe/PRF1_Cons02.action?...

Googling suggests that they might be another user of the ~~infected~~ infineon SLE78 platform.

pisipisipision Why I don't like smartcards, HSMs, YubiKeys, etc.

HN is nice indeed, but the awesome work would be more effective with less HN ;)

I have been thinking for a long time about opening a webshop for "pre-verified cards" that would come with an open source SDK and as much docs as possible. Maybe that would help (but would still only ship to "western world").