Hacker News: alessivs

New comment by alessivs in "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot"

alessivs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:40:03 +0000

I've been using this shoelace knot on all kinds of laced shoes–even those featuring bad quality, tubular, inflexible, shoreline convenience shop-like laces since 2010-ish; in fact, I've found it to be the only efficient knot that works on those kinds of laces and guarantee several hours of security. Despite not being optimized to train procedural memory, I made sure to enter the lacing procedure in an Anki-like application (called SuperMemo before its decline) so I could recall how to do it over the years to this day. Other people have benefited from my epiphany as I've taught them this knot. I consider this knot a fundamental life skill, comparable to learning to ride a bike or change a bulb.

New comment by alessivs in "Enable CORS for Your Blog"

alessivs — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:48:43 +0000

Let's get this behavior to be the default in Wordpress and Laravel for public sections—that would cover a lot of ground. I regularly encounter and suffer from unmodified instances of Laravel's default session cookie timeout of 120 minutes. If a more relaxed CORS policy were the default, it won't be an inconvenience and would likely be just as widespread.

New comment by alessivs in "Codeberg is down"

alessivs — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 12:03:53 +0000

Drew's direct engagement into tech cancel-culture (with targets such as DHH, RMS, Andreas Kling, Jack Dorsey), makes it difficult to do business with him (assuming hosted sourcehut service as an alternative to codeberg). Furthermore, at the newly proposed service rates it is much more liberating to self-host (any lightweight forge–including sourcehut).

New comment by alessivs in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

alessivs — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 01:40:58 +0000

Radiopharmacy / Nuclear pharmacy. While peaceful, it's a delicate science and some kind of inspections are usually enforced. Thankfully, Iran did allow IAEA inspectors and is a signatory of the NPT (non-proliferation treaty). One could wish that was the reality of the nuclear operations of certain other states which are not scrutinized.

Some developments in this area:

https://tvbrics.com/en/news/iran-presents-15-developments-in...

https://wanaen.com/iran-surpasses-70-locally-produced-radiop...

New comment by alessivs in "Micrographia (1665) [pdf]"

alessivs — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:25:40 +0000

Ultima games incorporate archaic language constructs in their dialogues and texts, but they are fictionalized rather than historically informed. I call it "langfic" (as in "fanfic"). The French edition of U7 is also notorious for featuring old vocabulary, but does so mixing up constructs from different eras and reforms. While the effort on the English edition is much more convincing, I wouldn't bank on it as a reference of its use; instead, I would turn to more scholarly sources that examine Early Modern English in depth.

Please go away, Tim Berners-Lee (2019)

alessivs — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 03:23:18 +0000

Article URL: https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/please-go-away-tim-berners-lee.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091618

Points: 13

# Comments: 3

New comment by alessivs in "Namecheap: Russia Service Termination"

alessivs — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 02:46:38 +0000

They also fail to acknowledge the thousands deaths on both sides since 2014 until today, since the coup and introduction of Maidan snipers to kill the innocent. To name a concrete example, you can freely consult the magnitude of the casualties related to the Donbas-related conflict alone (some 13,000-14,000 lives since April 2014). Part of the staff is Ukrainian...they ought to know.

Why today? Perhaps the answer lies in the field of sociology or psychology.

As pointed out by others before me, this mainly pushes affected customers to transfer domains to Russia-based providers, increasing their profits (a little) and sphere of control (a little more).

...But it makes them feel better?

New comment by alessivs in "Namecheap: Russia Service Termination"

alessivs — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 01:49:52 +0000

You could have spared us the affronting lack of tact in purporting to be both litigant and judge in an ongoing conflict, the infantile role-playing as a war tribunal, and the omission of your conflict of interest in your diatribe (part of your staff is Ukrainian).

Your dismissal of technical and non-technical complexities involved in moving over domains in such a time frame, brushing off of forged business relationships, have prompted me to end all business with you. You are not a serious provider. I am not Russia-based, and I'm moving elsewhere.

New comment by alessivs in "Ask HN: How do you memorize things you read?"

alessivs — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 17:38:59 +0000

That isn't it either. See [1]

There are analyses and processes (both software-based and relating to one's assessment of learning significance when deciding to add material) only possible with the priority queue implementation in SuperMemo.

[1]: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Minimum_definition_of_incrementa...

New comment by alessivs in "Genius Checklist"

alessivs — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 17:10:19 +0000

Yes, go ahead and read deeply. In spite of the chosen TLD, disagreeing with any piece of advice doesn't accidentally invalidate other ideas like some guru's all-or-nothing self-contained theory. There is also no luring you into signing up for a mailing list to offer you products or courses.

New comment by alessivs in "Police to begin regular, warrant-free searches of homes for child abuse material"

alessivs — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 13:15:32 +0000

Moderators sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.

New comment by alessivs in "Learn Python by doing fun interactive exercises"

alessivs — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 15:46:38 +0000

No relation with https://epicpython.io/ ?

New comment by alessivs in "How to gain more from your reading"

alessivs — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 03:28:33 +0000

> I need to once over a paper to even be sure the cards created are worth remembering.

In my experience, this task is still better when distributed over time. Time-distributed reading involves distributed judgement of quality.

What Incremental Reading would do for you, given enough sources and/or sufficient coverage of the subject matter, is effortlessly resurface highlights and cards whose usefulness was initially doubtful. Each resurfacing would be in a successively reshaped knowledge network that stands a better chance to help you understand its merits and role between other pieces of knowledge: between reviews, this network is forming and expanding in an initial stage, to then contract, solidify, and be pruned of noise.

When evaluating the usefulness of the card or piece of knowledge, without IR one may fall back to simply taking a snapshot of the network at t1 and t2 and judge on those premises. With IR you will have made the piece integral to the network the moment it is created, and will evolve as part of it. In the end, this piece may not be simply kept or discarded, but perhaps reassigned to complement a different source, or morphed into answering a different question. Whatever the result, it has better chance to serve your purposes (and even this capacity may be reassessed in the future).

New comment by alessivs in "How to gain more from your reading"

alessivs — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 00:14:45 +0000

Every mentioned problem (workload, new vs. old reading task distribution, scheduling, plus retention) is exactly what incremental reading–at least, as implemented in the other prominent SRS–aims to solve (which it does, rather well). Does the Anki IR plugin not tackle them?

New comment by alessivs in "Firefox 90"

alessivs — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 04:34:42 +0000

> I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs ...snip... some multicolored highlighters

xournalpp, okular.

New comment by alessivs in "Otter Browser"

alessivs — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 06:05:08 +0000

I was referring to a choice between WebKit and Chromium/Blink in Otter, not the web in general, though the sheer resources required to keep up with the Web(R) from other players may be leading us that way (hopefully not).

For example, after switching the preferred engine in about:config, it's even possible to leave Otter in a transitional state, having one tab load a web page in WebKit, and another in Blink, in the same running application.

New comment by alessivs in "Otter Browser"

alessivs — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 03:51:37 +0000

As noted in a sibling to your comment, there's a choice between WebKit and Blink (your build allowing).

Here's QT's note addressing your concern in QtWebEngine: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine#Relationship_to_Chromium

    Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out

New comment by alessivs in "Otter Browser"

alessivs — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 03:49:30 +0000

> The web needs independent browsers...[websites] should work on any browser

Unfortunately, independence ends with the choice between WebKit (QtWebKit) or Blink (QtWebEngine), albeit with a faithful Opera 12-like interface that's less resource hungry than Vivaldi. Otter is still in development and it shows in some rough spots and occasional crashes.

New comment by alessivs in "Otter Browser"

alessivs — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 03:27:49 +0000

Depending on your build, you have a choice between:

- QtWebKit: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_WebKit

- QtWebEngine: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

(I realized I replied to a previous version of the parent comment)

Why SuperMemo thrashes any note-taking system

alessivs — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 13:27:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.masterhowtolearn.com/2020-02-28-why-supermemo-trashes-any-note-taking-system-(including-onenote-and-evernote)/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27688240

Points: 2

# Comments: 2