HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

spapas82

2,104 karma · joined March 2, 2016

blog: https://spapas.github.io/

github: https://github.com/spapas

meet.hn/city/gr-Athens

submissionscomments
spapas82··on I'm Archiving Picocrypt
This was really huge. I actually had to pass it to an LLM to get an abstract ....

I didn't know about picocrypt but I already have two options for safely encrypting files: 7zip with its AES-256 (simple) and veracrypt with various algorithms (more involved but allows you to mount the encrypted vols). Actually these are already mentioned in the tool's readmy, great work: https://github.com/Picocrypt/Picocrypt?tab=readme-ov-file#co...

spapas82··on Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
This great for english, but is there something similar for other languages? Could this be trained somehow to support other languages?
spapas82··on Perfume reviews
I also have a favourite sandalwood aftershave (Proraso red) but cannot find this scent in a perfume :(
spapas82··on My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs
This is interesting, I like the way jetbrains is using the local models for auto completion.

Do you know if there's a similar solution for vscode?

spapas82··on Perfume reviews
Yes what i had written is mainly true for designer perfumes not niche. However I'm not very much into the niche fragrances because of sampling difficulty and prices.
spapas82··on Perfume reviews
Have tried a bunch of Montale and mancera. Yes they have some unique perfumes, and some are potent. Unfortunately didn't find anything that it clicked to me.
spapas82··on Perfume reviews
I used to try and buy a lot of perfumes some years ago. Unfortunately I concluded that it isn't really worth it since beyond some classics (Fahrenheit , terre d Hermes, declaration, narcisso for him, dior home, ysl m7, armani code, zv this is him, ck eternity, chanel egoiste platinum and of course aventus) there aren't many truly unique scents. Most perfumes try to copy another existing, mass appealing one.

Also male perfume nowadays is either too weak or too sweet (or too expensive if you go the niche route). So either I'll wear a perfume that will smell for 30 minutes and nobody will notice or I'll bite the bullet and wear a club perfume that will suffocate people (and not even smell good).

spapas82··on Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit
I had also recorded some of my projects with an Arduino starter kit here https://github.com/spapas/arduino-projects
spapas82··on Helix Editor 25.07
Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim).

I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete the character under the cursor or "d" to wait for the motion before deleting anything. When this does not happen I get confused and angry. I think this would be a problem with most people that are using vim; it's very difficult to change your habits especially since you can't ever escape from vim because of its ubiquity.

Thankfully, some good people have released evil-helix, a soft fork of Helix which introduces Vim keybindings https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix ; I tried it and it works great so I'll totally recommend it to people that have my problems.

As a final notice, helix (and evil-helix) works great in Windows (cmd). No need to install rust or anything. Get the .exe and you're gtg.

spapas82··on Happy 20th Birthday, Django
I'm a really happy Django user for 15 years and hopefully I'll still use it for at least another 15!

Django has a lot of beloved features but I think one of the most important is it's stability through the years: I actually have production apps that started on Django 1.4 and python 2.6 and now are updated and with with Django 5 and python 3.13.

All this without too much effort on my side or paying companies to support my projects.

So thank you Django people for the hard work!

spapas82··on More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related, get > half the votes/comments
I'm also very tired of such articles. Each article with the same content and unfortunately more or less the same comments.

Would it be possible for the moderators to penalize such articles so they can't easily gain traction similar to articles about politics?

spapas82··on Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell
Well done for supporting windows cmd (through clink) ; most shell tools don't take care about us windows cmd users !
spapas82··on Marble Blast
This would be really great if

A. Was playable on mobile

B. Could use the phone's gyroscope for controlling the ball

spapas82··on uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust
I don't use uv for my (django) projects because my pip/venv workflow is good enough and had never failed me in 15 years.

However I really like installing uv globally on my Windows systems and then using uvx to run stuff without caring about venvs and putting stuff to path.

spapas82··on Rocknix is an immutable Linux distribution for handheld gaming devices
I have an anbernic rg35xx h - it's a great device; totally recommend it. It plays games up to ps1 with easy, it also works good in most psp games, maybe with a little frameskip on more resource intensive games.

Very good controllers and firm design. Great value for its price!

spapas82··on Show HN: Somo – a human friendly alternative to netstat
I use netstat -nap instead !
spapas82··on HeidiSQL Available Also for Linux
Heidi is the best gui for mysql/mariadb. It's really great and I don't change it with anything when i need to work on mysql servers.

Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.

I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!

spapas82··on Ask HN: Openrouter Free Models
I asked on IRC and found my asnwer: https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq#how-are-rate-limits-calculate...

> For free models, rate limits are determined by the credits that you have purchased. If you have purchased at least 10 credits, your free model rate limit will be 1000 requests per day. Otherwise, you will be rate limited to 50 free model API requests per day.

spapas82··on Lazarus Release 4.0
I remember some years ago that I was able to make this less than 1mb. It needed a little tweaking like upx but nothing very complex.

Lazarus should have been the golden standard for creating desktop apps. Every other solution I've tried is subpar either in licensing or costs in general, executable size and resource usage, non native components, extra dependencies etc

spapas82··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment.

The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.

I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.

spapas82··on Stardock Software
The fact that this company builds both sucessful professional apps (fences, windows blinds) and great games (sins of a solar empire) makes it something of a singularity
spapas82··on Plain – a web framework for building products with Python
I took a peek at the docs https://plainframework.com/docs/ and the packages/functionality mentioned there.

Everything, and I mean everything is already either in core Django or in a great and properly supported django package that's been used in years and has been proven to be reliable.

I really can't understand the purpose of this package. Taking a peek at the about as mentioned by some others:

> You can think of Plain as a "what if?" > What if you didn't have to worry about deprecation policies?

The fact that Django has deprecation policies and they are so religiously followed allows me (and others) to have 10+ years old projects running in Django 5.1 and being ready for 5.2 without any problems or baggage!

> What if there were no committees?

A committee is a good thing. It ensures two things: a. It's not possible to commercialize the project. b. It makes sure that it will do what's best for most users. Some decisions may no be good for a particular user but it would be best for most users (considering my previous comment; I want to keep my 10+ years old project properly supported).

> What if you could change anything without consequence?

See previous comments. You can change anything without consequence when you have a clean slate, not when you need to support current stuff.

> What if Django wasn't originally built for a newspaper circa 2003?

This really doesn't relevant. Django is a general purpose framework.

> What if you had a clean slate, but a proven head start?

See the previous comments.

> working through years of incremental progress and committees, with a very real possibility of some things never happening, is just not for me.

Please see my previous answers. Also, about changing stuff, that's the purpose of packages, ain't it? Django has a lot of escape hatches to change its behavior from the defaults. And of course if you wanted to do something not supported you could try to do a PR so as to open another escape hatch so Django will keep the default behavior but you'll be able to implement your thingie.

Concluding, I really don't like this project forking Django because all this effort could be put to better use and definitely not try to split the community. Especially the community of a real Open Source project like Django.

spapas82··on Show HN: I built website for sharing Drum Patterns
I had built something similar (but much less refined) for greek rhythms https://boombox-agw.pages.dev/
spapas82··on France rejects backdoor mandate
Yes, if you care about forward secrecy then pgp is not a good solution.

> Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain markets than violate their security

You still need to rely on a third party's goodwill to keep that promise. Also even if they are willing to keep the promise it is possible that they won't be able.

spapas82··on Rocky Linux from CIQ – Hardened
> Red Hat (not IBM) made the decision to end CentOS Linux and move their focus toward CentOS Stream.

The fact is that Red Hat killed centos a little after it was acquired by IBM. Who decided this is not something that we'll learn (or even care anyway).

spapas82··on France rejects backdoor mandate
> provision that would have forced messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to allow hidden access to private conversations.

The fact that this could have been possible is the reason why the pgp/gpg way (you manage your certificate and you choose whose certificates to trust) is still the only way to have true encrypted communications.

Using centralised services to encrypt important data is a joke.

spapas82··on Microsoft Fails to Support MS SQL Server for Django
What's even more outrageous is that the work has already been done, there's a PR with Django 5.1 support that works great. So the only thing missing 5 minutes of somebody's time deciding to step up and merge it. And still the issue lurks there for months and these people will make time for it on q3?

What kind of "team" is this, where nobody has 5 minutes to merge? Are they robots or they are mocking us?

spapas82··on Microsoft Fails to Support MS SQL Server for Django
I'd like to answer for myself (I'm the one that opened the issue and reposted here for some show-and-shame in case MS reconsiders and starts supporting the project):

We have a 10+ years old desktop project (.exe) in C# that uses MS SQL Server as a Database and we need to change it to be a proper web-app. We are heavy Django users and now we have stumbled upon a wall. Unfortunately because of the complexity of the project it's not feasible to change the DB.

spapas82··on The Lost Art of Logarithms
One of the best uses of logarithms is how they can be used to quickly calculate db (as in decibel) gains and losses mentally. See this older comment for more details

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32550539

spapas82··on Show HN: I kept forgetting the little things, so I made an app to help (free)
Hey cool app! One important feature (at least for me) would be to be able to enable reminders on specific days or times. For example I wanted to enable the "break every 30 minutes" timer only on weekdays from 9 to 5.
← PreviousPage 3 of 23Next →