Hacker News: beart

New comment by beart in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"

beart — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:38:37 +0000

I just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.

New comment by beart in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

beart — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:33:12 +0000

New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few years, this just feels like a final reminder that it's time to move on.

New comment by beart in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

beart — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:48:15 +0000

Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most.

For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.

New comment by beart in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

beart — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:55:03 +0000

Hmm. My company has an internal portal for generating Gemini API keys. I select a project from a drop down, enter a name, and press okay.

New comment by beart in "Pixel Watch 5"

beart — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:05:49 +0000

Yes you can see most of your data without a cloud connection. But some features are limited and require the subscription. A google account is required though to use the app I believe.

Of course, getting more than a snapshot of the data is a bit of a pain. Fitbit has a developer portal and you can create a dev app key to export your data. There is at least one open source project that pulls this data down regularly and feeds it into grafana. I'm not sure if the pixel line of watches provides a similar developer portal.

EDIT: actually, you said cloud connection. I think in this case the data is still being sent to the cloud, hence the API to fetch it. But you don't have to enable sharing with other services or purchase the health subscription. So maybe the answer is still that no, you can't really do much without the cloud connection.

New comment by beart in "Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet"

beart — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:14:30 +0000

It looks like the screenshot was an actual photo of someone's monitor. I'm left wondering why print screen wasn't utilized. And for some reason it really makes me not want to touch this project.

New comment by beart in "Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun"

beart — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:22:24 +0000

I think you're off by about 90 orders of magnitude for the actual heat death

New comment by beart in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

beart — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:30:40 +0000

Okay... but when "you" is a junior engineer on your team and now you are suddenly spending your entire weekend dealing with malware, it's kinda on you as well.

New comment by beart in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

beart — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:44:28 +0000

Oh yeah that's a good point - two layers of auto executing scripts/binaries.

New comment by beart in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

beart — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:38:27 +0000

This doesn't require anyone placing anything deliberately on your machine (as in, needing to exploit it somehow ahead of time). It could be as simple as checking out a branch to review, where the author of the branch has added the .exe.

New comment by beart in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

beart — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:33:41 +0000

A lot of malware was delivered back in the day via Windows AutoPlay feature. Someone plugs a USB drive in and bam, they are immediately exploited. You could say it's always a problem if the USB drive is already full of malware. However, Microsoft disabled AutoPlay in Windows 7 (and backported this fix) specifically to address this vulnerability.

This exploit feels very similar to me. I don't know if there's a specific name for this classification of AutoPlay issues.

New comment by beart in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

beart — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:27:04 +0000

It has nothing to do with npm. However, a binary could be configured to extract your git/npm secrets using this exploit, which could then lead to a npm supply chain attack (or pip, etc. etc.).

New comment by beart in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

beart — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:52:56 +0000

Joe Arpaio was not removed from office. He was charged with contempt but was never incarcerated. He was pardoned and then lost his next election.

New comment by beart in "Trump notifies Congress of new war against Iran"

beart — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:42:02 +0000

That might be a loophole, but in this case I don't think it matters. The emergency powers let the president do whatever they want at this point. And even if there is a law preventing endless war, Congress is completely fine with it, and has been for decades.

New comment by beart in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

beart — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:51:17 +0000

Vermont doesn't allow it either and it remains the most beautiful state IMO

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:14:28 +0000

Right, I'm thinking along the same lines as what Zoom offers. Except with the additional feature that the link is custom tailored to a known, pre-configured user. So you also skip the "log in as guest or create an account" step.

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:19:00 +0000

What would be really awesome is some sort of feature where, once self hosted, I can generate a package or link that will download + install + pre-configure the login. Basically a bespoke installer/setup script. that can be linked to a particular person. The goal being to make onboarding as frictionless as possible. This could have some security implications maybe (the link is shared by mistake), but for a small self-hosted instance, that seems like something that could be mitigated fairly easily. Maybe only works with local accounts or something.

That would really make it easy to send a friend a link, "hey come chat with me", without having to worry about a response such as, "I'm already on discord, I don't want to set up all that stuff".

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:59:02 +0000

There is an audience for this, and it's me and my friends.

I have a small group of close friends. We are on discord just about every day, but we really don't bother with anyone outside our group, other than the very occasional invitation to another friend/coworker to join for some games.

We don't care about network effect, social media features, engagement, etc. We just want a well made application for private text, voice, and video that we never have to actually think about.

And no, matrix is not that.

New comment by beart in "Resetting Xbox"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:04:49 +0000

I had completely forgot MS bought them.

New comment by beart in "Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:19:43 +0000

Third party apps used to work fine without an account. They kept track of your settings and filters locally. My usage declined rapidly when reddit killed them.