Hacker News: Contortion

New comment by Contortion in "Show HN: Marelleo, an open-source story box I built for my kids using ESP32"

Contortion — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 15:29:29 +0000

What are you talking about? "I hate him"? He literally learnt how to build an interactive electronic toy for his children and then put in the effort to share it online. You didn't even take the time to read it because he talks about the Toniebox at the very start of article.

So he used AI to do the write up? He also references paying in Euros so English is probably not his first language. I think you need to calm down and critically examine your priorities.

New comment by Contortion in "Attention is all you have"

Contortion — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:20:14 +0000

On the other hand, the article was exactly what I expected from the title.

New comment by Contortion in "CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela"

Contortion — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:38:36 +0000

The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it, all you can do is view the route. That's a fine solution when you're immediately looking to go somewhere, but it's not great when you're trying to plot a route between two places in advance.

I've been using CoMaps for a few months and only just discovered that if you choose another location on the map once you've got an initial route and select Route To/From, it then updates the current routing.

New comment by Contortion in "11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey"

Contortion — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:18:09 +0000

I think you underestimate the amount of effort people are willing to put in to being juvenile or perverse.

New comment by Contortion in "Asus Bike Booster"

Contortion — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:26:27 +0000

Also an owner of a non-electric Babboe. We looked at converting it to electric but very few companies would actually do it and the one that we finally got to give us a quote basically said it wasn't worth it. They would've had to replace the whole brake system due to the higher speed of an electric bike. We ended up just buying a different electric cargo bike.

New comment by Contortion in "Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site"

Contortion — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:11:26 +0000

Is there a reason why the URL parameters are obfuscated? I think it would more user (and SEO) friendly to have at least the place names in the URL, e.g. brolly.sh/forecast/united-kingdom/yorkshire/york.

Still, great project! Definitely fulfils my desire for minimalism in all things.

New comment by Contortion in "Beagle: Git, URIs and all the dirty words"

Contortion — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:43:59 +0000

Agreed. I think the code examples in the article could do with showing before and after states of the branch or repo and maybe compare with standard git commands.

Even then I don't think the abstraction to HTTP verbs is necessarily a useful one as web requests and version control are two different mental models.

New comment by Contortion in "The Last Evolution, by John W Campbell Jr. (1932)"

Contortion — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:16:03 +0000

For anyone who isn't aware, the same author who wrote the short story the film The Thing was based on.

New comment by Contortion in "What if the browser built the UI for you?"

Contortion — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:46:39 +0000

I think OP has envisioned a situation half way between what we now have and what will soon be the actual reality and that his idea will just be quickly skipped over.

I don't think website design will go away, but I do expect that people will soon be ordering products and booking holidays through AI chats instead of doing it themselves, which will require the kind of manifests he's talking about, but will skip the UI layer completely.

New comment by Contortion in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

Contortion — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:45:43 +0000

Reminds me of https://ytch.tv/ which I really like for its simplicity.

New comment by Contortion in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

Contortion — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:08:24 +0000

Yeah, it makes searching for bug reports/help rather troublesome

New comment by Contortion in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

Contortion — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:04:18 +0000

I had this problem and it turned out to be an upstream issue with MicroG which was eventually patched. If you have an error message you can search for existing issues on /e/OS' gitlab/forum.

Revolut stopped working for me for a while with the error that the bootloader wasn't recognised and rooted phones aren't supported. After about a month an OS update solved it.

New comment by Contortion in "Show HN: I remade my website in the Sith Lord Theme and I hope it's fun"

Contortion — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:58:49 +0000

My browser auto-declines cookies so I also had the same thought. On reloading I can briefly see a pop-over with a lot of text in it before it disappears, so I guess that is the cookie game I initially missed.

New comment by Contortion in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

Contortion — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:59:26 +0000

And next to impossible to get rid of. I would much rather use Signal but convincing even privacy-conscious people to switch is an uphill battle.

New comment by Contortion in "Abusing Entra OAuth for fun and access to internal Microsoft applications"

Contortion — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:07:17 +0000

Microsoft documentation is a nightmare, it doesn't surprise me there are vulnerabilities.

I recently built an SSO login using Entra ID (which was thankfully single-tenant) and I basically had to keep randomly stabbing in the dark until I got it to work with the correct scopes and extra fields returned with the access token.

Trying to search for any kind of Getting started guide just took me to child pages several levels deep full of incomprehensible Microsoft jargon and hyperlinks to helpful-sounding but ultimately similarly useless articles.

New comment by Contortion in "PHP 8.5 adds pipe operator"

Contortion — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 06:11:27 +0000

Agreed. Like in JS and Java, it would be a lot nicer if the language itself had the chainable methods.

New comment by Contortion in "Ratfactor's illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets"

Contortion — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 05:21:49 +0000

If you never wash your sheets, you never have to fold them.

New comment by Contortion in "PHP 8.5 adds pipe operator"

Contortion — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 12:14:02 +0000

Basically what Collections do in Laravel.

New comment by Contortion in "Forced to upgrade"

Contortion — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 18:38:51 +0000

Fairphone guarantees 8 years of updates for the Fairphone 5.

New comment by Contortion in "Rider is now free for non-commercial use"

Contortion — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 17:32:14 +0000

I've tried VS Code and Haystack (based on VS Code) for writing PHP and I just couldn't stand it after having used PhpStorm. Basic things like copying variables, indenting, moving lines into if statements, multiple cursors etc. just aren't intuitive in VS Code when writing PHP and a lot of the things I can do in PhpStorm with the press of a button just aren't possible.

I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.