Hacker News Reader

vincon Git tips and tricks

I watched the FOSDEM talk yesterday, and I laughed hard when I heard "Who use git blame -L? Does anybody know what that does?" because it suddenly looked like the beginning of a git wat session. But it was really informative, I learned a lot of new things! Thanks

vincon The Retro Web – Database, Docs, BIOS, Drivers, etc. for old PC Hardware

I used the database to identify some of my old hardware from pictures, it's pretty neat!

vincon An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

This happened to me. I wrote an Android app many years ago for my own need and after a month or two it was done. I have nothing to change, it works exactly as I want. But at some point Google decided that it didn't keep up and needed to be removed from the store. I'm not complaining, I can still install it with `adb` but nobody else can anymore. I'm not sure I can still build the binary though, probably not.

vincon My failed attempt at using a closet as an office

I'm also using a shed as one of my home office, it was a great excuse to finally experiment with solar power!

vincon My failed attempt at using a closet as an office

Indeed, you could be in a meeting with a headphone and they would have no way to know if it's okay to enter the room without that.

vincon I Love Ruby

I started with PHP many years ago for my side projects while at the university, then I switched to Python, but when I graduated there were only PHP jobs available so I took one because I had to. I was not happy with PHP, it was a pain to use it. I never want to hear again about WordPress or Drupal.

I discovered the Ruby community at its peak around that time and fell in love with it! I started a new project at work with Rails and all my next jobs were Ruby jobs.

I experimented with Node when it came out but I think I'm burn out with everything related to JavaScript at this point. And the Ruby community, while still great, seems to be dying out locally. Meanwhile I've been doing some Rust side projects for almost a decade, and it looks like this will be my next language. Time will tell.

I still love Ruby though, I wish it was more popular, it's such a nice language.

vincon Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

More than I can count, but here are the big ones:

http://moros.cc - A hobby operating system, with a shell, an editor, a lisp interpreter, and many other little things

https://geodate.org - A lunisolar calendar with decimal time (centidays and dimidays)

https://github.com/vinc/geodate - An implementation of the calendar + time

https://github.com/vinc/geocal - A tool to visualize the calendar + time

https://github.com/vinc/littlewing - A chess engine written in Rust (and another one before that in C++)

https://vinc.cc/software/ - A more complete list, on my personal website

I'm good at scratching my own itches but less good at finding projects that could be useful to other people.

vincon Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?

I had to replace the USB module on my FP3 because it couldn't charge my battery anymore. At first I tried to replace the battery but that didn't work, and I was afraid that the issue would be from the motherboard, but no I just needed to change that module. Great experience!

vincon Committing to Rust for Kernel Code

I've been writing a little hobby operating system for the past 3 years in Rust and my impression is that the language is fine for low level code. The language improved a lot over the past decade and I think it's ready to be used more.

I've heard good things about Zig but I've never tried it so I can't compare unfortunately.

vincon The laptop that won't die

The proxy can also be hosted on a cheap virtual machine somewhere.

Personally I have a small proxy that convert HTTPS and Gemini to HTTP/0.9 with an option to use a readability library to keep only the content of the articles I'm browsing and not show anything else.

vincon The laptop that won't die

My personal laptop is a Thinkpad T440p from 2013 with a modern SSD. I use mostly the command line and a web browser on ArchLinux. For my usage it is just as fast as my modern work laptop!

I also have a Thinkpad X200 from 2008 and this one feel its age a bit so I use it to run my hobby operating system that only have a command line interface and no web browser.

I like that both of them are compatible with Libreboot+SeaBIOS and I'm sad that this isn't the case for new models anymore. This together with the ability to disassemble them so easily make them perfect for me.

I'm a bit worried about 10 years from now when I'll have to find a new computing platform.

vincon Loading up on cheap cores with updated Milan Epycs

I have a rack with a few old Dell PowerEdge R710 with dual Intel Xeon X5650 processors (6 cores 12 threads per CPU). I use them to test the changes on my chess engine in winter and they help keeping the house warm. They are very cheap.

The slightly more recent Dell PowerEdge R720 can have CPUs with more cores and use a bit less electricity and noise but they are much more expensive where I live.

I've been on the lookout for a more modern platform with more cores per $100 but couldn't find any yet.

vincon Archive your old projects

I start my projects in `~/tmp/<project>` and when I feel like I'm getting somewhere with them they graduate to `~/src/<project>` and get published on GitHub (and a few mirrors for the most important ones). Anything on `~/src` need to be backed up but things in `~/tmp` can be lost without missing them.

When I start working on a new feature for a project I create a PR on GitHub and document my research and then the implementation with screenshots.

I also have a text file on my computer where I write a few lines everyday about what I'm doing. From time to time I send it to myself by email.

It's relatively simple and low effort but has proven to be very helpful many times.

vincon Tumble Forth

You bring an interesting point for Collapse OS. For Dusk OS it seems to be imagined for a period where old stuff will still be available, so there will be plenty of old computer screens or TVs around.

I wonder how much power a teleprinter consume? Or a modern version of it?

vincon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://geonde.com/

https://github.com/vinc/geonde.com/

I've been looking into carbon aware computing recently and I wanted an API to get the carbon intensity of the electricity grid in Europe. Then I needed weather data so I reused a piece of code I built a decade ago to get forecasts from the GFS, and another one to get real time data from airports around the world. And finally I needed another API to get the latitude and longitude of a city so I reused yet another old piece of code I wrote a long time ago.

After a month of coding it looks like I got the beginning of an environmental platform for green computing. But it's definitely half baked. And there are good alternatives for each API that exists already.

I found a domain for it and made a landing page, and who knows, it might be useful to other people.

vincon Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?

Same thing for me.

I started to hear it at night when the room was quiet 7 years ago, and then progressively all the time. The first year was hard, I saw a few specialists who told me there was nothing to do about it. In the end I accepted it and now it doesn't bother me anymore.

The more you are upset about it and the worse it is.

I only wish I could be able to hear the silence again, but there are worst things in life. My hypothesis is that it was always there but somehow the filter I had for it stopped working. A bit like eye floaters.

vincon Show HN: Speech Meter – Improve Your English Pronunciation

As a French native who learned English by reading books and later spent a couple of years in English speaking countries, I'd really like to have a tool to help me fix my pronunciation.

So with that in mind I tried your tool and I was enthusiastic about seeing a score for each words, but then what? I tried a few sentences manually (the random button doesn't work) and for example it seems that I have an issue with the pronunciation of "to" where I always get around 50%, but there's no way to know what's wrong. As it is I'd stop using the tool after about a minute.

I'd suggest adding something to hear the correct US/UK pronunciation of the words.

vincon Where does my computer get the time from?

Do you have a link for what you are doing now? Seems interesting!

vincon Meta Quest 3

Ah, I heard about Wander before but when I looked into it I wasn't sure you could really see all the pictures from anywhere on Google Street View. Thanks!

vincon Meta Quest 3

I miss the Google Cardboard I used to revisit places I traveled to, is there an app that really give access to Google Street View on the Quest 2?

vincon Homebrew Website Club

Same thing, I don't want to use Zoom when a good open source alternative exists

vincon Bioregions 2023

You don't get the sort of uncanny valley I'm describing that way but indeed it's better for the reasons you cited.

vincon Bioregions 2023

Years ago I used such a map to travel to a few faraway places with a similar climate to discover ecosystems that felt close to my own and yet so weirdly different. A bit like an uncanny valley without the revulsion because it was a beautiful experience.

vincon Finish your projects

I found that a good solution is to have an handful of ongoing projects so we can pause the current one when the motivation is low, have a little break, then see which one can be resumed after that. There's less pressure, it's more healthy, and over the years it adds up.

vincon It's A(door)able

It's the first frame, I read the comments and still I don't understand. The game is too stressful for me, I give up haha

vincon It's A(door)able

I don't understand how to play, I seem to lose right after I get the key every time..

vincon Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

Perfect timing with Bing API increasing its pricing prohibitively!

vincon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Lots of things over the last decade or two. I can count almost one hundred repos on GitHub, but most of them are not very popular with other people, my projects seem to only scratch my own itches..

I have my own lunisolar calendar and decimal time (with centidays and dimidays) so I produced a lot of code for that on various devices. I also wrote two chess engines and a hobby operating system.

And countless web apps, like one to read the daily/monthly top of HN and Reddit, another to host my pictures (on a cool domain hack), one to manage the batch jobs on my chess engine cluster in a rack at home that helps keeping the house warm in winter, and lately my own frontend to Bing API because I was growing dissatisfied with DuckDuckGo.

vincon The Vowel Space [video]

The video has a link to the following page where you can listen to the sounds of the vowels on the chart at the bottom: https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-vowel-space/

vincon DuckDuckGo removed the ability to filter search results

Not the OP but I just checked my 3 months history and I'm at 800, 469, and 682 searches on DuckDuckGo and 466, 535, and 482 on Google. I feel like I'm a heavy search engine user and I'd have guessed more than this.

I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.

For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.