Hacker News Reader

udiaon Rocknix is an immutable Linux distribution for handheld gaming devices

Nice to see another alternative to the Linux gaming ecosystem. Bazzite also states handheld device support: https://bazzite.gg/

udiaon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2025)

Location: Edmonton, AB, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Case by case

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, PHP, Elixir, Golang, React, Vue, Svelte, PyTorch, Kafka, GraphQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MSSQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB), Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, GitHub Workflows, Azure, Cloudflare Workers, etc.

Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/2025/06/2025-06-02%20Alexander%20Wong%...

Email: alex@udia.ca

Website: https://udia.ca

Experienced SWE with over 10 years of working experience. Looking for opportunities to own full-stack features, drive platform modernization, or bridge ML/AI systems with robust engineering. Open to staff+ level roles or senior IC with leadership responsibility.

udiaon World Emulation via Neural Network

Very nice work. Seems very similar to the Oasis Minecraft simulator.

https://oasis.decart.ai/

udiaon Google lays off its Python team

Where does the source indicate Python team layoff?

udiaon Why every microwave sucks these days

Instant Pot died primarily due to private equity greed, not because of Instant Pot reliability.

In 2017, Cornell Capital bought the company for a total $500M of which $300M was financed by debt. Then 4 years later in 2021, it refinanced and added on debt, bringing the total debt to $535M. $245M was immediately paid out to shareholders as a dividend. Cornell Capital got paid back all the cash it invested in the company's acquisition, and then some. In 2023 due to high interest rates the company was no longer able to service its debt, costing the company ~$50M a year, and the company had to file Chapter 11.

udiaon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://udia.ca

Rambling, personal notes, links to other more worthy pages

udiaon Ask HN: What is the most pleasant, uncomplicated full stack to start with?

Phoenix framework and Elixir get a lot of love here if you are willing to dive into functional programming languages.

udiaon How to sell tickets fairly

How would you measure/trade time? Other than with the approximation of using money.

udiaon Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment

Would it be possible to build a business that were completely public and transparent?

Every dollar that was spent would be published publically. All source code would be made free and permissive, open source. Users would always own their own data and could frictionlessly share with each other.

There would be no advertisements. All analytics would require explicit opt in and be visible to the general public.

The app would be localized to all languages, using heuristics and machine learning to perform the bulk of the translations, with human verification.

The app would be an attention focuser, calendar, general search, peer-to-peer connecting, encrypted, public monstrosity. It would be subtle and discrete, running just out of reach of direct human interaction.

u0.vc

udiaon Time.gif (2017)

https://hookrace.net/time.gif returning 503 for me now

udiaon The Internet Archive Book Images has deleted their Flickr account

I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring.

udiaon API-0.core.keybaseapi.com has expired certificate

Observing network errors when attempting to send messages within Keybase.

udiaon Adafruit requires 2FA to prevent bots buying out Raspberry Pi

I agree, 2FA seems unrelated to stopping bots. It really seems like some form of rate limiting and captcha should have been used instead.

udiaon Ask HN: What book changed your life?

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life - Marshall B. Rosenberg

udiaon Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

The vast majority of NameCheap's employees are located in Ukraine https://www.namecheap.com/careers/

udiaon Google Search Is Dying

I don't see why Google does not trial offering a paid service where advertisements are stripped away from the search results. A new revenue model in addition to the existing ad supported approach where you pay for your search.

udiaon Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

This was my strategy for some time, but I switched to using a proper password manager (Bitwarden). If your algorithm is discovered you're in as much trouble as if you used the same password across multiple sites.

udiaon hiccupFX.js

https://github.com/fanfare/hiccupfx/

udiaon Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It for You All” (2007)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410868

udiaon Web Streams at the Edge

Nice to have a new offering for edge compute/streams! It would be useful to see how this compares with the different edge compute alternatives (particularly Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects) in terms of TCP Connection Time, Time To First Byte, Time To Last Byte, etc.

udiaon Gitly: A light and fast GitHub/GitLab alternative written in V lang (pre-alpha)

Good to see another open source git development platform. I am currently using sourcehut and am very happy with it.

https://sourcehut.org/

udiaon Launch YC: 3D Web; Training; Child privacy; Pregnancy; Life science; Desk rental

This is really cool but there are a few usability issues. I suggest to overly html DOM ontop of the canvas rather than having users enter form details within the experience as the only method of signing up. Other users who are trying to stand up can stand between my camera and the form itself, making it such that I can't see what the form is trying to ask me or what I am typing.

udiaon Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?

+1 for Supabase. Currently playing with Phoenix Framework and using Supabase's postgresql offering. Just needed to enable Session pooling and the CITEXT extension, but otherwise it all worked fine. Very price competitive with many of the other DBaaS.

udiaon Cwtch: Decentralized, privacy-preserving, multi-party messaging protocol

How does this compare with something like Matrix, which also does decentralized encrypted communications? https://matrix.org/

udiaon Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

I wrote a small Python script that will SSH into my remarkable paper tablet, copy all of the raw files to my desktop, and then convert the binaries to pdf. I use this tool on a daily basis to offline backup my handwritten notes.

https://github.com/awwong1/remarkable-cli

udiaon The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

I have had a lot of success with this course (Web Accessibility, by Google): https://www.udacity.com/course/web-accessibility--ud891

> In this course you’ll get hands-on experience making web applications accessible. You’ll understand when and why users need accessibility. Then you’ll dive into the "how": making a page work properly with screen readers, and managing input focus (e.g. the highlight you see when tabbing through a form.) You’ll understand what "semantics" and "semantic markup" mean for web pages and add ARIA markup to enable navigating the interface with a range of assistive devices. Finally, you’ll learn styling techniques that help users with partial vision navigate your pages easily and reliably.

udiaon Google Poly is shutting down

Make the source code publicly available under a permissive open source license so the community can run the software. Scrape/generate a read-only archive of the site and host the static files for the next ~2 years before finally dropping the domain.

udiaon CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

NoScript would be up there for me, or else Bitwarden.

udiaon Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

Having a Pixel 3 phone, I was annoyed that long-screenshots and call recording weren't available by default. Even when I rooted the stock ROM and disabled automatic updates, I would find that occasionally one morning my root setup would fail SafetyNet (where it was working the night prior). I addressed this by flashing the PixelDust rom on my phone. It now has stable root and I control all updates.

As mentioned in many other comments, it's nice to own your device and not have it broken by automatic updates pushed from some external entity (intentional or not).

A quick writeup for how to do this is available here: https://udia.ca/posts/2020/08/root_pixel_3_with_ota/

udiaon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2020)

  Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
  Remote: Yes (2 years of experience)
  Willing to relocate: Not preferred
  Technologies: React, PyTorch, Django, Phoenix Framework; JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Elixir (See Resume for more complete list.)
  Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/Alexander_Wong-Public_Resume.pdf
  Email: alex@udia.ca
  Website: https://udia.ca

I am a Software Developer with over 5 years of full stack web development and 2 years of academic machine learning experience. I aim to build and design products that creatively fuse machine learning with the modern web.

I am currently completing my Master's degree and have an expected work availability of January 2021.

Clickable:

Résumé/CV: https://media.udia.ca/Alexander_Wong-Public_Resume.pdf

Website: https://udia.ca