Hacker News: Shellban

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!

New comment by Shellban in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

Shellban — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:13:12 +0000

I will be replacing the Raspberry Pi 4 I use as a home server with a more powerful HP desktop. I am getting tired of DDOSing myself whenever I open the wrong menu on Nextcloud.

New comment by Shellban in "Suicides Were Frequent at the Golden Gate Bridge. Not Anymore"

Shellban — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:20:02 +0000

Ideally, we as a society would eventually figure out and solve what drives so many people to suicide in the first place. However, it is heartening to know that this band-aid measure does seem to be effective (assuming that you trust the experts declaration that people are not simply finding another method).

New comment by Shellban in "Ask HN: Is Linux Safe to Daily drive in 2026?"

Shellban — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:10:26 +0000

Functionally, it is very similar to Flatpak. The main reason people do not like it (for reasons independent of sandboxed applications in general) is that Canonical controls the store and that it is not open-sourced, and that it is very difficult to remove it on Ubuntu setups (a major pain-point for people who need an unsandboxed Firefox setup).

New comment by Shellban in "Ask HN: Is Linux Safe to Daily drive in 2026?"

Shellban — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:07:56 +0000

This usually happens when you do non-standard things like try to change the desktop environment and then update to a new major version. If you pick a distro that is already close to what you need in the first place, this should not be as much of an issue.

Source: Personally got it into a state where it became a huge headache to update.

New comment by Shellban in "Ask HN: Is Linux Safe to Daily drive in 2026?"

Shellban — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:05:38 +0000

This, exactly. I tend to run into a lot of problems, but that is mostly because I tend to tinker with it in non-standard ways (hard to be surprised about your computer no longer booting when you intentionally tried to change the encryption setup). However, if you install a distro closest to your use-case and and then stick with just general applications (i.e. the kind you can get from Flatpak), you should not run into issues.

Of course, some things will randomly break unexpectedly, but you get that with Windows and MacOS, too.

New comment by Shellban in "Can you read 900 words per minute?"

Shellban — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:15:49 +0000

It depends on the density of the information and general complexity of the sentences and ideas. This exercise kept the ideas rather simple, but an old Dickens novel or a complex text-book would be much harder.

New comment by Shellban in "Text Is King"

Shellban — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:09:40 +0000

Another advantage of text over the long-term: it is accessible for discussion.

Let us say that you want to analyze, say, drinking culture in Ireland. You could write documentary on it, or do a fictional character study. However, those require actors, camera equipment, editing tools and time, and it generally extremely expensive and time consuming. A quick TikTok video may be a bit cheaper than a full-scale film, but still needs some of that equipment and cinematography skills.

Music is not much better. You need skills in singing, translating ideas of rhythmic lyrics, as well as supplies for instruments.

Writing, however, is simple. At minimum, all you need is paper and skill in articulating ideas. Almost anyone worthy to rationally ponder a topic already has the skills to put it to paper (assuming that they have gone through a proper First-World education and know reading and writing).

Text is also one of the easiest to share. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that poses problems in sending all that information. Plain text, however (or even most rich-text formats) can be transferred to anyone over almost any protocol, even rudimentary ones such as word-of-mouth. Ideas shared through text can be sent at an unrivaled pace.

New comment by Shellban in "I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool"

Shellban — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:50:11 +0000

Another Emacs user here. I would argue that even Emacs is a bit of a struggle sometimes. More modern editors like Sublime Text, Kate, or even Notepad have an advantage of being intuitive. Typing on a letter always outputs that exact letter. The shift key does one thing and one thing only. Mouse integration allows for rather precise cursor placement in a way that utilizes a human's natural hand-eye coordination. The shortcuts that they do use are common across the OS (no need to remember if the copy you need is Ctrl+A - W, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Shift+C, or Ctrl+C).

Part of the issue is that operating systems have gotten more advanced and more standardized since Vi and Emacs were originally built. However, there is the case that UI designers have learned a lot over the decades. I like Emacs as well, especially when I am doing sysadmin work. However, I have to admit that it is not always intuitive. And even Emacs is more intuitive compared to the modal-nature of Vi.

New comment by Shellban in "I'm addicted to being useful"

Shellban — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:40:44 +0000

I am not sure where you found this, but I would agree that GitHub is very useful, for code backup and for sharing with the world.

New comment by Shellban in "Our approach to age prediction"

Shellban — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:30:36 +0000

Considering that OpenAI is having trouble getting its models to avoid recommending suicide (something it probably does not want for ANY user), I rather doubt this age prediction is going to be that helpful for curbing the tool's behavior.

New comment by Shellban in "Congress wants to hand your parenting to big tech"

Shellban — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 02:54:14 +0000

At what cost, though? Most laws have some sort of benefit, but it always comes at a cost. Are we all willing to pay that cost?

New comment by Shellban in "Things you can do with diodes"

Shellban — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:36:11 +0000

You can blame Benjamin Franklin for that. By the time we figured out the mistake, the standards were set in stone.

New comment by Shellban in "The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press"

Shellban — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:13:09 +0000

VHS recordings of live TV are a bit different. According to Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., this practice is known as Time Shifting, which is simply making the recording available for later use. The ad money has already exchanged hands, and the work was already available for public use. The court rules 5-4 that this time shifting fell under fair use.

YouTube ad money works a bit differently, and downloading the video tends to bypass that process. Also, Streaming is by its nature on-demand, so there are a lot fewer benefits for downloading the video. Furthermore, U.S. copyright law has changed since the previously cited case, so there are some extra restrictions to contend with that the Sony case did not.

New comment by Shellban in "The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press"

Shellban — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:35:01 +0000

The author makes the case that EULAs are "toothless." However, what about federal law? In the U.S., at least, it is illegal to make copies of other people's work. This is not an offense against YouTube (who does not inherently own the media they present), but the publishers, the creators, etc. Somehow, I doubt that Alan Becker would approve people downloading and sharing his videos willy-nilly.

New comment by Shellban in "Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware"

Shellban — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 23:37:09 +0000

Whether or not SteamOS installed them is irrelevant. All the hacker would need is to compromise a machine that had some sort of remote access to other devices (ssh in this case, with some sort of keylogger to decrypt the private key).

New comment by Shellban in "Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware"

Shellban — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:45:46 +0000

Well, Arch has (historically) been rather difficult to install from scratch, and requires a lot of Linux knowledge to get up-and-running as a daily driver. If one is installing it for the first time and misses something (which audio backend?), it can be rather frustrating down the line.

There is a reason Ubuntu is usually the first distro new Linux users go to. For almost a decade now, installing a feature-complete Ubuntu setup is not much more difficult than reimaging Windows.

New comment by Shellban in "Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware"

Shellban — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:38:47 +0000

I had the regular librewolf-bin package installed on a couple of my machines. It took me a bit of time to note that librewolf-fix-bin is something separate.

New comment by Shellban in "Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware"

Shellban — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:35:43 +0000

As @lillylizard pointed out, it turns out that these are new packages, not comprised existing packages like I first thought. Still, the nature of the hack is a Remote Execution, as you pointed out elsewhere, meaning the hacker could pull my router password from the password manager, or grab my SSH keys and log into whatever machine is listed in the known_hosts, or just mess with my Ebay account and the credit card saved on there. The hacker could in theory do literally anything I could do.

New comment by Shellban in "Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware"

Shellban — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:02:07 +0000

I only just noticed the difference myself. That was a scare!