Hacker News: flanbiscuit

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

flanbiscuit — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:49:19 +0000

Pnpm did this first but I’m glad to see all the others follow suit

For anyone wondering, you need to be on npm >= 11.10.0 in order to use it. It just became available Feb 11 2026

https://github.com/npm/cli/releases/tag/v11.10.0

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Robert Duvall has died"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:20:49 +0000

The Michael Douglas one I’m assuming where Duvall was the cop

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)"

flanbiscuit — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:03:41 +0000

> There is no set path, allowing players to switch freely between mining, ship-to-ship combat, and alien diplomacy. The broader plot of the game emerges slowly

This reminds me of Star Control 2, aka The Ur-Quan Masters

> The game influenced the design of numerous other games for decades after its release.

And in SC2 wiki page I see this:

> Once Reiche and Ford conceived Star Control 2, they would draw large inspiration from Starflight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II

Never played Starflight before but seems right up my alley as SC2 is one of my favorite games

Edit: Just finished reading the rest of the readme. Very cool! I honestly knew nothing about Forth (just that it was a programming language) and now I want to play around with it.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

flanbiscuit — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:41:15 +0000

> and I caved to the blue bubble pressure

Ha! I feel this. I was a long time Android user since the original G1 (aka HTC Dream). Was a strictly Pixel phone user for my last 4 phones. Recently jumped over to iPhone. For the most part I’m enjoying it.

There are minor things, like the keyboard being annoying to type with. For instance, when I’m typing something into the URL bar of Safari, for some reason, I’m constantly hitting the period key next to the space bar, and I feel like I’m not anywhere close to it.

I also find it confusing how to dismiss the keyboard. Android had a very clear icon for this, on iOS it’s just a checkmark which is a little misleading in my opinion.

On iOS, speech to text is pretty good, but I have to annunciate clearly, where I felt that android was a little bit more forgiving.

Another issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t think the GPS (or maybe it’s just Google maps) is as accurate as it is on android. On iOS, if I’m on a highway it sometimes thinks I’m on the shoulder road next to the highway. So I’m constantly being rerouted to get back on the highway. I felt like I didn’t have that on android.

Back to the blue bubble thing though. Being the one and only android user amongst my friends and even my wife, I was always hearing about how I ruined the chat. I didn’t realize until switching over to iOS just how integrated everything is and what you can do in the chat when everybody else is on iOS, like editing previous messages, being able to answer messages via your Messages app on your laptop, and of course, not having images and videos getting compressed terribly. Although RCS chat improved that more recently.

One thing I do love is that automation and shortcuts is something that’s natively part of the system and that I don’t to install some app like Tasker or whatever the more modern version of that is.

At this point, I really like both of the OSes. What made me actually finally switch over was that everyone I knew who had an iPhone would have it for like five or more years and I was going through pixel phones every two years. I got tired of spending all that money.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Hackers (1995) Animated Experience"

flanbiscuit — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 04:05:18 +0000

“Do you remember where I put that thing that one time” is a line that pops up in my head so often.

I don’t remember the last time I saw this film and this is the 2nd time that it’s popped back up into my life recently, so it’s a sign that I need to watch it.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Just the Browser"

flanbiscuit — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:42:28 +0000

For anyone interested

This is the shell script it runs on Mac/Linux: https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/mai...

For FireFox it downloads this: https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/mai...

  {
    "policies": {
      "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
      "DisableTelemetry": true,
      "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true,
      "FirefoxHome": {
        "SponsoredStories": false,
        "SponsoredTopSites": false,
        "Stories": false
      },
      "GenerativeAI": {
        "Enabled": false
      },
      "SearchEngines": {
        "Remove": [
          "Perplexity"
        ]
      }
    }
  }

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:08:52 +0000

ChatGPT is currently integrated into Apple Intelligence. When I ask Siri something I can choose to use ChatGPT for my answer.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl...

So I'm guessing in a future update it will be Gemini instead. I hope it's going to be more of an option to choose between the 2.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:40:59 +0000

Nice to see other fellow Western NC folks commenting here, I'm in Asheville. I did not know about all of these text only version of major news sites. I'm going to bookmark them.

What saved us from a news deficit after Helene was that we had 2 portable AM/FM radios. Both of the radios took batteries and one of them you could even charge via a hand crank. I highly recommend having a portable AM/FM radio of some kind. Blue Ridge Public Radio (our local NPR) was amazing during this time. Their offices are located right in downtown, which never lost power, so they were able to keep operating immediately after the storm.

I also feel this pain of bloated sites taking forever to load when I'm traveling. I'm on an old T-Mobile plan that I've had since around 2001 that comes with free international roaming in 215+ countries. The only problem is that it's a bit throttled. I know that I could just buy a prepaid SIM, or now I can use an eSIM vendor like Saily, but I'm too cheap and/or the service is just good enough that I'm willing to wait the few extra seconds. Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin helps some, but not enough (also I just switched to iPhone last month). I've definitely been on websites that take forever to load because there's just so much in the initial payload, sometimes painfully slow. I don't think enough developers are testing their sites using the throttling options in the dev tools.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "You can make up HTML tags"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:35:49 +0000

I learned this back when HTML5 was brand new around 15-ish years ago. If you wanted to use the new tags like

, the only “polyfill” needed was some css styles. You can see it in the early versions of the HTML5 Boilerplate:

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/v0.9/css/styl...

I realized that I could just make up tags and style them and it was work.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio"

flanbiscuit — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:23:54 +0000

Same for me. Worked smoothly in Firefox (MacOS Desktop)

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:52:31 +0000

yes bun does both of the things mentioned in the parent comment:

> Unlike other npm clients, Bun does not execute arbitrary lifecycle scripts like postinstall for installed dependencies. Executing arbitrary scripts represents a potential security risk.

https://bun.com/docs/pm/cli/install#lifecycle-scripts

> To protect against supply chain attacks where malicious packages are quickly published, you can configure a minimum age requirement for npm packages. Package versions published more recently than the specified threshold (in seconds) will be filtered out during installation.

https://bun.com/docs/pm/cli/install#minimum-release-age

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Quest for Permissively Licensed PDF Library in C#"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:23:30 +0000

I needed this post a year ago when I was looking for this exact thing. I did end up going with Puppeteer because I needed it for something else that I couldn't avoid. I use a large list of flags with it to launch the most minimal version of headless Chrome that I can.

I am going to look into switching to MigraDoc and see if i can drop puppeteer

Thanks for this great research!

New comment by flanbiscuit in ".NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser"

flanbiscuit — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:35:44 +0000

A while ago I was at an agency and we got a client that was a very popular weather app. Things like mapbox and some analytics libs (can't remember exactly, this was 2019) The project was a big redesign of the app. We looked into using Xamarin to see if we can at least write the core logic in C#. The issue we ran into is that there were many third party libraries we needed to import that weren't converted to Xamarin/C#. There was a way to try and have it automatically bind but never worked properly. In the end we just went pure native. Turns out Xamarin was a fun toy framework but Microsoft couldn't point us to anything serious and battle tested in production written in it.

I'm curious to see if .NET MAUI will surpass Xamarin and actually get serious adoption. They have to figure out the third party binding issue.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "iPhone Pocket"

flanbiscuit — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:57:54 +0000

I was also hoping it was a small phone announcement but it not being part of a keynote didn't give me high hopes.

I've been on Android since day 1 but I'm thinking about switching to iPhone. If they ever made foldable (clamshell style, not book style) phone I would buy it immediately. I just want a small phone.

Yes I could get an Android foldable that already exists but I like to stick with Pixels and they don't have one yet and I'm kinda of done with Pixels. They are crap quality.

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:12:02 +0000

With Swift SDK for Android, you can write all of your code logic in Swift for both and only need write the native UI related code for Android and iOS.

https://www.swift.org/blog/nightly-swift-sdk-for-android/

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance"

flanbiscuit — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:48:14 +0000

Is Cordova still actively developed? Or are people just rolling their own per OS these days?

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Why Nextcloud feels slow to use"

flanbiscuit — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 05:19:54 +0000

There was an HN discussion about it 3 months ago with responses from the author, in case anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711519

New comment by flanbiscuit in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"

flanbiscuit — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:53:41 +0000

I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Haven't read this one but I'm adding it to my list now. Thanks!

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Smartphones and being present"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:58:19 +0000

oh nice! that looks perfect. Will try it out

New comment by flanbiscuit in "Smartphones and being present"

flanbiscuit — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:56:59 +0000

I wanted to develop an alternative to App Timer on Android. I need something more like "App Timeouts". App Timers are per 24 hours, so as soon I hit X amount of minutes, I'm blocked from using it until midnight and then it resets.

What do I mean about App Timeout?

I want to say "Once I reach 20min on this app, block me from using it for 2 hours". Then it resets after 2 hours from that point. Both of those times being configurable of course.

The problem with the built-in Android App Timers now is I end up setting it to something large, like 1 hour or more because I'm thinking about how much time I want for a full day, but then I just sit there in 1 sitting swiping for that whole amount of time. And this usually happens after midnight so I know that I'm going to be blocked for my next day until after midnight again and the cycle continues.

I'd rather something force me to use it in shorter bits of time. So at midnight I can allow myself to get into an Instagram hole for 10 or 20min, but at least I know when I wake up it's been reset. I think doing this will train me to use the app for shorter amounts of time in general (or at least I think so and I want to test that theory).

I don't even know if this is possible in Android. How can one app block another. Maybe by allowing it to overlay over other apps or something?