Hacker News: calmingsolitude

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare"

calmingsolitude — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:16:32 +0000

This post is quite disingenuous. Both the title and body talk about it being free, but the actual readme on the repo says:

> […] default CPU limit on Workers is too small for it. wrangler.jsonc raises it, and raising it needs the paid plan, which is a few dollars a month. I haven't tried the free plan.

https://github.com/finereli/whatsapp-mcp/tree/64f1b3017931e4...

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Show HN: Esp32sim – Run ESP32 firmware in the browser"

calmingsolitude — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 07:14:25 +0000

It’s not a criticism. The creators of these projects have most likely shopped around and used existing projects before deciding to build their own. I’m as interested in the “why” they built something as much as the project itself. Unfortunately, with LLMs, it looks like writing and communication skills have taken a hit.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "I paid people to try and follow my README"

calmingsolitude — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 17:48:31 +0000

LLMs are good at reading READMEs. They are absolutely horrendous at writing them.

Ctrl + Shift + A to search tabs on Firefox

calmingsolitude — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:46:15 +0000

Article URL: https://gist.github.com/radiantly/f18ea1fd06d8dd328b6ae64b6fa7cb36

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030962

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by calmingsolitude in "How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC"

calmingsolitude — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:08:55 +0000

This makes absolutely no sense. The API returns the exact content of the message, and has no idea where it possibly might be displayed. It could be another browser, so html tags will need to be sanitized, but it might as well be the terminal, so ansi escape codes will need to be sanitized instead.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Unreal Agent"

calmingsolitude — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:37:51 +0000

Mildly disappointed that this has nothing to do with Unreal Engine, the popular game engine.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography"

calmingsolitude — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:45:54 +0000

> it sounds like its an optional mode you have to enable

It’s opt-in because your photo is sent to Apple’s servers. Only if it were on-device should they even consider making it default.

> i guess you need internet to take a picture

Not really, internet is required to process the reference image, but that can happen later if you’re not currently connected.

> are complex hardware attacks really that important?

No, but the floor shouldn’t be “trivially exploitable” like C2PA[0]. It’d be interesting if there were a middle ground but we don’t have anything like that as of now.

[0] https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

calmingsolitude — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:20:19 +0000

Well written post, really enjoyed reading it.

> A single Go process exclusively accesses that database, and serves the control plane for those tailnets. This single-writer design is exactly how SQLite is meant to be used.

This line led me to believe that the writer and checkpointing logic lived on the same database connection, so I was curious to find out how the data race occurred. However, the bug details on the SQLite page[0] outline that it can only ever occur if there are multiple connections open, so the writer and the checkpointer must have been on different threads.

[0] https://sqlite.org/wal.html#the_wal_reset_bug

New comment by calmingsolitude in "I hate packaging my software for Linux"

calmingsolitude — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:20:37 +0000

The author has a point, but at the same time is overly complicating things. Seeing that it is already available via cargo, all that is left to do is offer a .tar.gz bundle as well. In the case that the software actually becomes popular, someone else will package it for the distros in question.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"

calmingsolitude — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:44:34 +0000

> It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

From the screenshot in the article, this is the memory usage of the Renderer process spawned by the Weather App. I find it very unlikely that some other app (say, the Copilot app) can then piggyback on Weather Renderer process. Do you have a source for this?

> killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space

Closing the weather app on my PC does in fact kill all child processes and frees up around 1GB of committed RAM. Are you not seeing the same?

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

calmingsolitude — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:37:17 +0000

Flora Incognita and PlantNet are not open source, so they cannot be published to F-Droid. However, iNaturalist is and the apk can be directly installed from the GitHub releases page.

https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

calmingsolitude — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:56:45 +0000

No. I’ve heard this argument multiple times before - “let the human review and write tests” - and sure it might work, but this is almost never practiced. AI makes coding a lot faster, so no one is really ready to spend time on manual review and writing tests when LLMs can do that as well and take you most of the way.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Vaporlink – drop a folder or HTML file, get a shareable link that kills itself"

calmingsolitude — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:18:25 +0000

How does this compare with solutions that currently exist to solve this problem, say for example ngrok?

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS"

calmingsolitude — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:59:35 +0000

Basically all of Graphene's RCS issues have been fixed[0]. Additionally, your stance seems somewhat unusual - GrapheneOS isn't only meant to be used by people that have "something to hide". As for explaining it to border guard - it's just Android - if you're unlocking your phone for them anyway, they definitely shouldn't care about what flavor of Android you're running, whether it's LineageOS, ColorOS, GrapheneOS, etc.

Of course, there might be more nuance to your situation than I am privy to, but almost everyone travels, and I'd heavily hope that being stopped at the border isn't the reason keeping them away from Graphene.

[0] stickied comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1pceh1t/am_i_th...

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

calmingsolitude — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:59:42 +0000

I still use it because I like how easy it is to use extensions on iOS but definitely agree that there are a lot of UI bugs. Listing the most prominent ones just in case the dev is around:

- At times, the search bar text disappears and the "refresh page" icon is left aligned (instead of right aligned).

- When a link has an associated app that can open it, Orion opens a modal that asks whether you'd like to open it in-app or continue on the browser. However, sometimes it immediately opens the app and shows the modal once you navigate back.

- When using a custom search engine, you can no longer use the search bar to edit your query and it just shows the url.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Real Linux. In a browser tab. No install. No server. No Docker"

calmingsolitude — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:50:57 +0000

Have to agree. Unsure why the page is comparing with docker/cloud shell instead of jslinux/webvm.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "A sociotechnical threat model for AI-driven smart home devices"

calmingsolitude — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:13:09 +0000

Eh, millions of households have a smart speaker that's constantly recording and I doubt that the majority of people that use one have truly internalized the ramifications of having such a device at home.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "Valve says it's ready to launch the Steam Machine this summer"

calmingsolitude — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:54:14 +0000

If I were to hazard a guess, Valve was apprehensive about releasing the steam machine/frame this year because the high memory prices would mean that they'd have to price the steam machine/frame pretty high as well. However, once they saw how the steam deck was selling like hot cakes even after a $300 bump, they're deciding to go for it anyway.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "How fast is N tokens per second really?"

calmingsolitude — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:44:02 +0000

You've advertised twice on this thread about your site, but I personally find the UX to be worse, not to mention the phantom scroll issues and (imo) the tasteless animations.

New comment by calmingsolitude in "A few words on DS4"

calmingsolitude — Fri, 15 May 2026 03:58:55 +0000

Parent is simply pointing out the incorrect usage of "empirically", which should typically only be mentioned when you've tested it yourself.