Hacker News Reader

toothbrushon Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust

Running the risk of being a dirty reposter and.. reposting. My little Spotify client is for macOS only, mostly only built for my own use, and a lot more minimal, visually. It's also native Swift though, so it's got that nice macOS feel. It's also pretty much 100% keyboard-driven (Vim keys, if that's something you like) and supports regex filters. It's just an open-source thing: https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue

toothbrushon Apps Getting Worse

I feel a bit bad plugging my own project (sorry not sorry i guess), but i wrote a macOS app to scratch my itch, because for years i've hated the Spotify interface (especially the queueing aspect).

Curious to know if anyone finds it usable!

https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue

toothbrushon How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities

Apologies, the original title is terrible. Matt Stoller writes very interesting pieces about markets and monopolies, and this one concerns Solarwinds specifically, which feels relevant given that's on the front page at the moment. The author gives a compelling narrative on why exactly security practices were so bad at Solarwinds, and how that related to runaway capitalism.

toothbrushon The Pasta King Trusted Us

> I would definitely encourage trying it (either picking up hitchhikers, or hitchhiking yourself, once the world gets back to normal.)

Totally agreed. That's one thing I find sad living in Australia: I barely see any (I don't think I recall seeing any in the past 2 years).

toothbrushon Mutt email client 25 years old

It's funny this should come up on HN today, because just this week out of nowhere i thought i'd try Mutt again (after having been a Mutt user since mid-2000s, but switching to mu4e for the last ±5 years).

What i used to do back in the day, and appeared to work fine when i tested this weekend, is so-called flowed mode. [1] I think it's a controversial feature, because it's a brittle hack, but anecdotally an email i sent this weekend as a test displayed fine on an iPhone.

And indeed, i'm totally with you on wanting to use/send text email but not look like a freak with weirdly broken 80-char lines in paragraphs.

1. https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2017/a-small-trick-for-sending...

toothbrushon ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS

> this site has a certain tenderness, thanks for sharing

Thank you so much for the kind words. It really means a lot to us.

> comments through Github is interesting in a brilliant way

Thank you! Honestly we're just cheap/lazy – we really wanted a super low-maintenance blogging platform, and static pages are amazing IMHO. This gave us "all" of both worlds, sort of.

toothbrushon ExSaaSperated: A blog about the struggle to start a sustainable SaaS

Hey Chris, thanks for visiting. Author here. We actually have several projects we've tried to launch with varying degrees of traction. One of them (https://vistaserv.net) made the rounds here a while ago, actually. We plan to write posts about several of these projects, pick apart what worked and didn't. And, if we come up with resources or techniques that worked well for us, we'll be posting about those, too. Stay tuned :)

toothbrushon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

My partner and i were laughing about making a retro community website, free of adverts, trying to recapture the spirit of the old Geocities era web. It got a bit out of hand and we came up with https://www.vistaserv.net.

I apologise if folks have already seen it, since it actually (surprisingly) got a bunch of traction here on HN over the weekend, but that has been our quarantine project, for what it's worth!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Wow, thank you for putting 2 and 2 together! We have been bothered by these weird spacing artefacts, but we never figured out that they correlated to line breaks in our source code! That's insane. This gives us a lead to investigate.

And here i was thinking HTML was a bit like LaTeX – mostly whitespace-agnostic! Just shows you what spending too long in academia will do to you.

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Oh wow, i've stumbled on your site before. It's a masterpiece, and was definitely an inspiration for the work we talk about in this blog post.

Super interesting, what you're saying about the OpenType Sanitizer – i'd wondered why it appears you can't use bitmapped fonts in browsers (although another commenter claims you can – i don't know either way).

I'll have a look at Bits'N'Picas, thanks for the heads up!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Wow, that's not great – thanks for the report!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

We were actually just talking about compiling something like FreeType to JavaScript, but then you'd find yourself re-implementing a browser with layout engine etc...

However, your other idea is great! You might enjoy https://paschke-images-test.s3.amazonaws.com/welcome.html ;)

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

That is amazing. I'm adding them to the business directory!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Thanks for the report! I wonder if that only works on macOS...

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Yep, we deliberately didn't convert the full set of glyphs from each of the fonts we support, mostly just because it was quite laborious (not to mention CPU time-consuming) to generate our relatively small range of weights, sizes, and font families as-is, so missing ligatures are a known issue.

If it's really illegible, i wonder if there isn't some other rendering bug happening – we admittedly didn't do much testing other than Chrome/Safari/Firefox on latest macOS. And i've seen some pretty weird glitches with this kind of custom font, e.g., https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/13. If something is truly that broken feel free to hit us up at webmaster@ with a screenshot, we'd appreciate the bug reports!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

That's fair enough, i think it's a matter of taste, really. For me, it evokes a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time. Not that it necessarily was, and definitely not that it was better – i was a kid back then, so that has definitely coloured my memory of it all.

I see this more as a "just because we can" art project, than anything else.

EDIT: it also occurs to me that i have tons of respect for the hours of effort that would've gone into making fonts back then be beautiful at such small DPI. I think it's a good example of constraints producing interesting/good/impressive art. But i should avoid waxing too philosophical!

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

We had noticed this early on indeed, but no idea what's going on. Thank you for reporting it — we didn't think of raising it against WebKit since we assumed they'd be Doing The Right Thing™.

toothbrushon Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

Hello! Co-founder here – wow, front page, that's flattering!

We have indeed still got a bunch of visual glitches we couldn't iron out, including the one ~saagarjha has reported to WebKit! We had assumed it was our font being broken, but i'm keen to follow that one.

Otherwise getting hinting right on all browsers in high-DPI has basically been impossible. Maybe we should simply recommend everyone use a Windows 98 User Agent ;)

toothbrushon Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

The last few weeks have been spent on a pretty obscure project, that's finally kinda sorta ready to show to the world.

We were making silly games in Visual Basic 6, because that struck us as a cool thing to do. However, it's hard to show them to your friends, when they all use macOS or Linux. Plus, we didn't want them to miss out on the nostalgic feeling of booting up Windows 98. So, after a lot of blood/sweat/tears and a physical copy of the MS Windows 95 Resource Kit book, we finally can ±roughly automatically install a Windows 98SE machine in QEMU, load it with our games and some settings, and then upload it to S3 to be "played" with copy.sh's v86 engine.

Without further ado: https://paschke-images-test.s3.amazonaws.com/welcome.html

toothbrushon The Case for Rooms

> Because cooking has turned into something social somehow ...

This comment boggles the mind. I would wager that probably for thousands of years, cooking has been a communal (if perhaps gendered, good riddance) affair, and only with the advent of the unemployed housewife of the 50s suddenly the kitchen is seen as this private affair.

But i guess i'm the wrong person to be commenting, because generally i'm no fan of all this extreme individualism :)

toothbrushon Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?

I have all my transactions in GnuCash (i keep thinking it'll be useful one day), but i've never bothered to learn to bend the reports to my will. Do you have to write code? Are there good examples anywhere? Because i find the default reports... Terribly clunky.

toothbrushon Criminals Are Tapping into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts

This is a good suggestion, thanks. I'll consider giving it a try.

> However, I think it's not that easy. 4 digit PIN, one account, I guess it gets flagged fast if someone tries to brute force it. You should try it, hm?

Their security page says 3 incorrect attempts means you need to call up their call centre. But as you point out, how hard would it be to socially engineer your way in.

toothbrushon Extramaze: Using Racket, PostgreSQL, AWS, but no ads or JavaScript (2018)

I've recently started a blog with a similar ethos: static hosting (for now it's on S3) with no Javascript or ads. However, i'd like to know who is visiting / whether my various publicity stunts are successful. I could self-host something like Piwik, but the maintenance headache and security/PII responsibility doesn't appeal to me.

What would other ethical webmasters here do? Only use HTTP access logs?

EDIT: to be clear: i could also write a bunch of tooling myself to parse access logs or report events to a backend, but that feels like a lot of work + reinventing the wheel + maintenance/security scare.

toothbrushon Criminals Are Tapping into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts

Slightly unrelated, but i'm fishing for suggestions.

I have a beef with my local Australian bank, the ING (of Dutch fame). Their login system consists of your "customer number" (printed on the back of your debit card) and a 4 digit numeric PIN. Yes, 4 digits. In 2019. To add a payee to your address book the only auth that happens is over SMS; to actually transfer money out of the account you can select any existing address book contact with no further verification.

I like their product offering (cheapest / best in class locally) but this is such a worry to me. I've repeatedly talked to their customer support about this issue (and their Twitter is full of complaints about this) but they keep giving canned responses and redirecting to their "Online Security Guarantee" https://www.ing.com.au/security.html. Any ideas how to get through to someone who understands what's going on, before I grudgingly take my business elsewhere?

toothbrushon Cathay Pacific flags data breach affecting 9.4M passengers

I'd love to endorse ING, but i must say, their security really worries me. I'm just putting this out there: you log in to internet banking with your "customer number" which is printed on your bank card, and then you have exactly 4-digit PIN you key in with their stupid on-screen keypad.

I love that they're relatively modern for Australian standards (fast payments, no fees ever, basically) so i'd love to endorse them, but i, too, am on the lookout for a replacement bank that has e.g. MFA with TOTP or a physical challenge-response box like my otherwise overpriced ABN bank account gave me back in 2002, in the Netherlands...

So i, too, am all ears for recommendations.

EDIT: and once you're in internet banking, you can willy nilly transfer cash out if you either use a "saved address" (someone you've paid before) or you'd need to hijack my mobile number. But $deity knows that's easy - just claim you own a number and get it ported over to a new service no-questions-asked. Facepalm, really.

toothbrushon Time to End Factory Farming?

I guess i don't have a hard time believing the parent. I can imagine some college-aged youngsters projecting machismo/signalling to their social group and not yet having the maturity to reflect on their actions, indeed especially in the context of changing social norms and how they'd be perceived 50 years down the line. In university i had numerous flatmates or friends-of-flatmates who, upon discovering i'm a vegetarian, would appear to take delight in smugly telling me about how they would eat an extra steak on my behalf, or perhaps explaining some graphic detail about animal cruelty. I learned to be unflappable and simply leave the conversation at that point so as not to reward them with an emotional reaction, but all i'm trying to say is, i can totally imagine what the parent poster talks about. Thankfully though, these days i am blessed to have friends and colleagues who are both more self-aware and creative in the ways they crack jokes :).

toothbrushon Motorola Razr V3 Cellphone: The trend-setter that shouldn't have existed

I owned 2 of those and still miss them. I tried buying one off eBay a while ago (wow, that's about 7 years ago now) but the battery just didn't last and very soon the screen got dead pixel lines and the antenna malfunctioned - I suspect maybe some components had been replaced with knock-offs or something, it was very un-Nokialike.

toothbrushon Taking back control of my digital life

I don't know if it's worth mentioning here, but i find one level of indirection enough. I have for the last n years paid for various email hosting providers (outsourcing the hassle of set-up, without going into the side discussion of how much hassle that is or not) but been able to switch effortlessly because i own my own domain. I've merely had to switch MX records when i wanted to switch, my emails are all still on my home computer (offlineimap, but i should really switch to whatever the kids these days are using) and my contacts were none the wiser.

toothbrushon Consider applying for grad school

At one point i was considering going for a research engineer position. That seems a bit rarer than a straight PhD program, but involves pretty much exactly what you describe. Pay of course won't be what you're used to in industry, but in my experience (several friends hold such positions) you have excellent job security and a very laid-back work life. I think you often are expected to already hold a PhD to guarantee that you'll actually be familiar enough with the things you're building out/for, though YMMV.

Source: i'm an escaped academic.

toothbrushon Is killing the boom the key to supersonic air travel?

So much this. Not to mention the reduced environmental impact. Flying is absolutely catastrophic in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris accord doesn't cover even a fraction of it! (because flying occurs in "international space" and so it doesn't appear on any country's "balance sheet"... atrocious.)