Hacker News: Shellban

New comment by Shellban in "Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time"

Shellban — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:21:59 +0000

It looks decent on my 1920x1080p window running on a 4K monitor, but I have overlapping problems on my M1 Macbook.

New comment by Shellban in "Why I email complete strangers"

Shellban — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:30:24 +0000

> So you have a fear of rejection?

Well, may be true for some people. For me, it is a matter of wasting my time when I have other things I could accomplish.

New comment by Shellban in "Why I email complete strangers"

Shellban — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:03:20 +0000

The big one is the fact that you will likely be ignored by a large host of them. Even with modern spam filters, a lot of unsolicited messages are simply a waste of packets. Odds are, even your useful, inquisitive message will be buried under the more disingenuous messages, especially in an age of LLMs. Trying to get in contact with anyone that already has a large audience can be discouraging.

New comment by Shellban in "I Love the Computer"

Shellban — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:29:54 +0000

Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.

New comment by Shellban in "I Love the Computer"

Shellban — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:28:11 +0000

Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.

New comment by Shellban in "Linux 7.1"

Shellban — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:38:25 +0000

It is a way to block bots, similarly to Cloudflare or Google's captcha. The Arch Linux website uses it.

New comment by Shellban in "Write for One Person"

Shellban — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:33:16 +0000

Or "you, but three years from now" in some cases. Logging my random OS changes or what were at the time "one-time shell scripts" in my journal has proven invaluable in some cases.

New comment by Shellban in "AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit"

Shellban — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:13:35 +0000

Well, I seem to have been spared, purely because I have not turned on one of my laptops in a week. Like a few people here, I should probably be rethinking how I use the AUR.

New comment by Shellban in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

Shellban — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:04:20 +0000

> These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.

@concinds, you yourself are being too empathetic. I am trying to view these websites on my $2,000 PC on high speed internet, and it still is maddeningly slow.

New comment by Shellban in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

Shellban — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:49:42 +0000

I like JavaScript-light websites just as much as anyone (my own website works on the same principle). However, I do wonder how much of the increased traffic has to do with AI agents that now have an easier time working with the more standard web forms. My own contact form had a bunch of bots quoting Scorpion lyrics before I added a rate limiter.

New comment by Shellban in "It's death"

Shellban — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:36:34 +0000

Ecclesiastes is an interesting one. It goes chapter by chapter, trying to find meaning in life through process of elimination, trying education, hedonism, labor, and wealth. While some things (usually wisdom) bring about more joy in the interim, he declares that they all will lose their charm rather quickly. In the end, all joy from these will leave us before death. Solomon's last hope for fulfillment lies in the eternal and supernatural.

New comment by Shellban in "The new bibliomaniacs"

Shellban — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:58:52 +0000

I am just hoping that the cost will eventually go down in a few years, and we will be able to start homelabbing again.

My server drives are not going to last forever...

New comment by Shellban in "Digital Identity Management in Norway Is a Catastrophe"

Shellban — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:33:05 +0000

Sometimes I wonder if we should consider using some sort of a hardware key going forward, like a Yubikey or similar product. Physical devices are fairly easy to understand, and a simple on-device PIN or fingerprint-reader adds a 2FA that prevents a lot of fraud. While an ID number is fairly easy to steal, a GPG private key is nearly impossible if handled right.

Of course, the flip-side, this would open up more opportunities for tracking (requiring the hardware keys to log into Facebook). However, in most societies, we do need some way of authenticating who is who, and at least this approach makes fraud much more difficult.

New comment by Shellban in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:56:40 +0000

https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii

New comment by Shellban in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:53:01 +0000

I even added this as an option in my Grub menu.

New comment by Shellban in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:50:21 +0000

*whistles innocently*

New comment by Shellban in "Don't Roll Your Own"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:28:47 +0000

Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.

New comment by Shellban in "Don't Roll Your Own"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:25:21 +0000

The Google Chrome team would like a word with you.

New comment by Shellban in "Don't Roll Your Own"

Shellban — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:24:07 +0000

It depends. A lot of websites refuse to display some stuff without JavaScript, and of course online payments insist on JavaScript (to the point that trying to push through without it can result in strange errors and potential double-charges as you troubleshoot).

New comment by Shellban in "Google Public CA is down"

Shellban — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:00:52 +0000

I have the domain. If you want you cat videos back, you are going to have to pay me:

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!