Hacker News Reader

tmslnzon Jupe: Off-grid shelters that pop up anywhere on Earth

You took the words from my mouth :) Selling tents to clueless SV customers with disposable cash, with a not-so-veiled promise they can rent them out on Airbnb.

It's the lime scooters of "housing": no permits, no safety, lawless, convenient, short-sighted.

The guru guy, and his tasteless leveraging of someone's personal tragedy to his own grift is incredibly out of touch – provided even that is not made up.

tmslnzon Johnny Decimal

We use a loose version of it in my small company.

It helps with two things: - 1. A little easier to be consistent across projects so not to reinvent the wheel every time - 2. The prefix increments as new folders are added during a project, painting a convenient picture of “progress” as things move along.

We tend to have: 10 to 19 reserved for admin stuff, like Admin, Incoming, Outgoing, Documentation, Meeting notes, etc.

Then anything from 20 onwards is ad-hoc per project

We also timestamp children of Incoming and Outgoing, with an ISO prefix. This is very useful to keep track of what was received and shared and when.

Overall the goal is to have as little protocol as possible to prevent total chaos. Anything more than that is usually too much to ask or doesn’t stick longer than a single project.

  10. Admin
  11. Incoming
    2023-10-12 sender, subject
  12. Outgoing
    2023-09-01 Estimate
  13. Documentation
  20. Design
  30. Production
  40. Blah

tmslnzon Ticketmaster for Raspberry Pi 4s

I say FruitMaster

tmslnzon Netlify acquires Gatsby

We use and swear by Opalstack.com, which is made by some of the same peeps that worked for the may-as-well-be-defunct Webfaction.

Full SSH access, generous limits, very active community.

tmslnzon Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

Their engineering prowess is also demonstrated by their website’s butter-smooth scrolling performance. /s

tmslnzon PhotoSync for iOS and Android

I was looking for discussions mentioning this app on HN, but didn’t find any. I am not affiliated with it, just thought I’d bring it to the community’s attention as I have been using for more than a year with my NAS, remotely over SFTP. It is a rare example of a very well thought through application, thoroughly executed: all it does is transfer photos to or from my devices and any thinkable destination. Highly configurable.

tmslnzon As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

Like I suppose many of us, I had a conversation with an artist friend about this very topic. They are concerned about it. Some of the generated results are impressive and surely can sufficiently replace some subset of the current human output.

But! Seeing DALL-E artwork from a bird’s eye view, I am more and more convinced that it’s just another tool, not a replacement: It is amazing good at producing unexpected results, and just like GPT3, it does so by regurgitating what is already out there, remixing it in somewhat interesting ways. This is an especially useful tool to quickly produce mood boards, or communicate an artistic intent. However it is not a replacement for the kind of thinking required to produce good artwork.

tmslnzon Meld for Macs

I was moved by the message on the last GH release for Meld macOS. So tragic and sad, and I will pray for your brother Youssef.

  Dedicated to Osama
  If you use this software, please pray for my brother.
  https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111375038/osama-abu-kwaik-was-a-refugee-born-to-an-orphan-who-died-in-christchurch-the-city-he-loved

https://github.com/yousseb/meld/releases/tag/osx-19

tmslnzon Meta-Perceptual Helmets

We must have met then. Hi! Cesar was studying with me in London (RCA) and Tokyo was our “school trip” that year.

tmslnzon Meta-Perceptual Helmets

Reminded me a lot of Animal Superpowers by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada (2007) https://chriswoebken.com/ANIMAL-SUPERPOWERS

Kenichi's Wide Eyes: https://web.archive.org/web/20180223030034/http://www.kenich...

And lastly, Meiwa Denki, a Japanese artist and performer who made some beautiful head+eye gear experiments on a similar vein, which I had the fortune to try in his Tokyo studio back in 2008… but can't find any online reference for :/

tmslnzon 25+ years of personal knowledge management

True, a for a good part it is that "maybe" that makes me (and others) do it, but I can see how it's akin to choosing not to make a choice. There's a tangible cost to this however… which is manifested quite clearly in this very comment thread.

All I am saying — to myself mostly — is that to learn to be OK with skipping a few beats when it comes to archiving digital artefacts is just as important as the archival strategy.

tmslnzon 25+ years of personal knowledge management

On the one hand, I find myself aligned with many ideas exposed here. On the other hand I fight myself constantly to avoid keeping too much around, or to prevent the archiving process from becoming more important than the archived material itself.

Unlike others I ended up consolidating everything into a big dumb set of folders on my NAS just because it’s cognitively easier to keep track of than a smattering of online services.

But then again… what is worth keeping, really? How often do we go back to old photos? How often do we need a 10y old bank statement? How hard is it to redownload some film or music?

tmslnzon 25+ years of personal knowledge management

The menu is not fixed for me, it scrolls with the rest. It’s just permanently “expanded” as a vertical stack, but perhaps that’s intentional. (iOS latest, iPhone 8)

tmslnzon Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password

Like many others in this thread, I have been using alias-to-subdomain remapping with Fastmail since time immemorial. Having this trick automated to some degree can be convenient for less geeky or fastidious users than I :)

Other than thinning my online identity to make any assumed attempts at correlation harder, in a couple of cases over the years I had the pleasure to "Gotcha!" companies selling (or losing) their users' email addresses. In other cases I also received unrelated spam on addresses as a result of undisclosed or less-publicised security breaches.

tmslnzon Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

I found NextDNS to be relatively convenient and easy to set up even for a lay audience. Definitely easier than a PiHole or a custom `dnsmasq` setup, and it offers mobile configuration client apps.

What I do not know is if it will work also when apps begin using DNS over HTTPS… I suppose not?

tmslnzon How I store my files

My approach these days:

1. Hot live data on my laptop.

2. Archive dir on NAS.

It’s either 1 or 2, no overlap.

Then:

1. Backup whole laptop to USB bootable drive “when I fancy”.

2. Backup home dir to NAS using duplicacy. This is accessible via SFTP, so it works no matter where I am.

3. Backup the Archive dir of the NAS to cheap cloud storage.

Ideally I should add an external drive for the NAS to backup #3 locally, too.

tmslnzon Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

Starting today "Everybody and their mum has a podcast" is more than just a figure of speech.

tmslnzon Leaked emails show crime app Citizen is testing on-demand security force

Giving a new, dystopian meaning to User Agent.

tmslnzon Moderna waiving Intellectual Property rights for the remainder of the pandemic (2020)

I’d expect them to give something closer to the equivalent of a recipe than just a “list of ingredients”, as other comments have highlighted too in this thread. If you ask me how to bake a cake and I just tell you “butter, eggs and cumin” that’s not quite the same as also giving you the timings, measurements, cooking temp, etc.

tmslnzon Moderna waiving Intellectual Property rights for the remainder of the pandemic (2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/world/vaccine-patents-us-...

Apparently it’s not as simple as temporarily waiving IP claims. On the one hand they don’t even own some of the rights being waived, and on the other hand they would need to do more than just waiving rights to truly support their stated goal of accelerating immunisation against COVID-19.

This leaves, for me, a weird taste of a PR exercise more than a true commitment to the message they sent out.

tmslnzon Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Robinhood

How convenient to let out a public statement that they exited the short… Gives them plausible deniability on claims of collusion with Robinhood by way of Citadel!

tmslnzon WhatsApp delays privacy changes following backlash

Facebook can manufacture the charisma on his behalf, though.

tmslnzon How Vivaldi browser is different from Google Chrome

You are not.

Choosy OSX as the main browser. This is just a proxy to launch browsers depending on urls, not an actual browser.

Chrome for Google Drive, Apps, whatever they call it today

Firefox for Whatsapp + Facebook and for websites where I need multiple identities via containers (e.g. company & personal Amazon)

Safari for everything else.

There some overlap, but the main goal is to not be logged onto Google or Facebook in my main browser.

I like to think my countermeasures work, but I am under no illusion that no one out there someone has a big fat fingerprint of mine.

I also use Next DNS and often route my connection to a Wireguard VPS.

Phew! Life's hard on the modern internet.

tmslnzon Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login

Many of us here are taking the opportunity to suggest Syncthing. I second that. We have been using it for years in our studio, moving much more data than it would ever be possible or practical with Dropbox and never had a bad surprise. We were also pleasantly surprised to see it working flawlessly behind a fairly thick NAT/Firewall when working from home. It's very stable, resilient and easy to set up for anyone lurking on HN.

However it is not as easy as Dropbox to set up for non-technical peeps, which is a bit of a shame as it hinders broader adoption.

tmslnzon Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login

Syncthing has been working very reliably for our agency, with multiple users reading/writing to shared projects, with a NAS elected as "master" (though ST doesn't care who's who). Frankly impressive for an OSS project.

However setting up and managing Syncthing is far from self-explanatory for a non-technical audience. It's OK in our case as we can hand-hold and onboard people in-house, but not ideal. Syncthing's usability would benefit immensely from an updated front-end UX, consistent across platforms.

Dropbox for all its recent dark patterns and upsells is still one of the most intuitive systems. Yes, the client UX has worsened, but the core service retains a very predictable behaviour. A folder is a folder. Shared with X and Y. When un-sharing or deleting a folder or file the options are clearly communicated. Compare this with Google Drive, where a "file" can become orphaned and keep existing in limbo, where it's invisible in the browser or filesystem, but it's discoverable by search. It drove us nuts multiple times making it very hard to track access to old documents without having to update settings one-by-one, etc. Google Drive feels like an afterthought to accompany the otherwise great Docs, Slides. and Sheets.

tmslnzon Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue

Not been to Mexico City, but I have been in many US cities (NYC, L.A., SF, San Diego, Salt Lake…) a variety of times during a 15 year span. One time I will never forget I was on the bus from the L.A. airport to downtown, and chit-chatting comes out that I was staying at hostel downtown. A couple of reactions were priceless, like I were a dead man walking.

It was perfectly fine in the end.

The thing is if you are showing bling in some form or simply being unaware, you are at risk _anywere_ in a city. Hell I got cash-robbed inside a Times Square restaurant when I was 18, thinking I was getting a good deal on a Sony ultra slim CD player with 30 seconds skip buffer.

tmslnzon Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

One could say that OS-level notifications could be considered a crude replacement of an aggregation tool like Trillian. We didn't have these back in the ICQ days and today it's easier (read: less painful) to listen on multiple messaging apps. Especially on mobile devices.