Hacker News: jsn

New comment by jsn in "NetHack 5.0.0"

jsn — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:36:28 +0000

The DevTeam released nethack-3.4.3 in Dec 2003, and then pretty much went dormant for 11 years -- no new releases, no roadmap, nothing. So some time around 2013 some people not connected to the DevTeam created this project: http://nethack4.org/ . So now the DevTeam skips 4.x version numbers completely to avoid confusion.

New comment by jsn in "Sit."

jsn — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 08:13:21 +0000

> Zen shinkanzen

You probably meant to say "shikantaza", I don't think "shinkanzen" is a word.

New comment by jsn in "Coherent: The affordable Unix-like PC OS from over a decade before Linux 0.01"

jsn — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 23:06:16 +0000

Huh, what a blast from the past. About 30 years ago, in Russia, I hacked up cyrillics keyboard support for Coherent by extending the line discipline layer in its kernel. It was probably still Coherent 3.0 though (which IIRC was based on Unix V6?), and the one on github seems to be 4.2.x.

New comment by jsn in "Chasquid – SMTP server focused on simplicity"

jsn — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 21:51:45 +0000

Apparently there's no support for smarthost / relayhost (or I can't find any traces of it in the documentation). Running your own low traffic mail exchanger without it is often not a pleasant experience.

New comment by jsn in "We have used too many levels of abstractions"

jsn — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 14:25:35 +0000

You can just `openssl s_client en.wikipedia.org:443`.

New comment by jsn in "The effects of sleep debt"

jsn — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 05:29:20 +0000

^ This. I have narcolepsy and it's really similar to what OP describes. And Sodium Oxybate is seriously life changing stuff if you have narcolepsy.

New comment by jsn in "Sarco suicide capsule ‘passes legal review’ in Switzerland"

jsn — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 02:16:11 +0000

Hmm, interesting. Are you speaking from experience? Because I definitely am. I watched my mother die a very slow, very painful death from cancer several years ago. I can assure you she would be absolutely genuinely happy to get that cellophane hood and that nitrogen cannula. And, having seen what I've seen, I will also take the hood over some very real alternatives in a heartbeat. Playing dress up with this ridiculously futuristic glass coffin toy instead seems somewhat preposterous when you are facing death.

New comment by jsn in "Sarco suicide capsule ‘passes legal review’ in Switzerland"

jsn — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 19:48:56 +0000

Yeah, this is seriously overengineered. A cellophane hood with elastic collar and a nitrogen nasal cannula is all it takes.

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 17:22:08 +0000

No, it (again) doesn't work like this at all. 1) DNS blocking of cloudflare is useless, you can receive IPs, or names in non-cloudflare zones, 2) IP blocking of the whole cloudflare will bring so much collateral damage (unrelated services going down) that it's a non-starter, politically speaking, 3) cloudflare is far from the only mass frontend / cdn available, there are hundreds high-collateral services out there.

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 14:50:43 +0000

They don't have to be strictly unique per user. You can send out different sets of URLs to different cohorts of users, then correlate new URL blockings with client IDs to detect rogue app installations and excommunicate them. Telegram did that when Russia tried (unsuccessfully) block it.

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 14:18:32 +0000

Not as of yet. Actually, if you use tor (with out-of-Russia exit nodes, which I think is the default when using it from Russia?), you can already freely access all the sites blocked in Russia, non-onion ones. But, obviously, tor and VPNs are good solutions only for people willing to go an extra mile to get to the prohibited content.

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 11:59:17 +0000

Not really. You can use whatever you like, the possibilities are endless. AFAIU, the most straightforward approach would be to use Android / IOS push notifications (which can't be easily blocked) to regularly push a constantly changing (to avoid censorship) URL of your backend API servers to the mobile apps.

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 11:53:47 +0000

Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?

New comment by jsn in "Russia restricts opposition election voting app"

jsn — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 10:25:43 +0000

> In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution.

The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.

New comment by jsn in "Musicolet – Offline Music Player for Android"

jsn — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 12:24:42 +0000

It now has the option to avoid (laggy) Android media service framework, and to use its own scanner to detect media changes instead. That should be immediate.

New comment by jsn in "When Bloom filters don't bloom"

jsn — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 17:26:39 +0000

32 bit mask is way too generous, you only need 5 bit masklen. It all doesn't matter though since they have v6 addresses and ranges.

New comment by jsn in "DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot"

jsn — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:57:26 +0000

You are mistaken. PRISM is specifically a program that "collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies" [em. mine]. NSA wiretapping the non-public links of Google et ol was not PRISM (I'm not even sure that the name of that program was ever disclosed).

New comment by jsn in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)"

jsn — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 19:46:02 +0000

> IPv4 and NAT require maintaining a lot of state at critical intermediate routers. I'm sure we've all experienced (perhaps regularly) a NAT'ing router losing state because of a reboot, state tables overflowing, or similar hiccups.

As far as I can see, that state is not very important for the mobile IP design describe in the article. A router reboot or other hiccups are handled more or less the same way as an address change (there is a temporary connectivity loss, and when it's restored, you create a new mapping on the Y server between the existing connection, identified by the same old uuid, and the new external/internal addresses/ports of the client X).

New comment by jsn in "Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader"

jsn — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:59:41 +0000

I use calibre from community packages on archlinux, it has absolutely no problems reading metadata (authors, titles and covers, and tags etc when present) from epub / mobi / pdf / etc.

New comment by jsn in "Why Telegram is insecure (2015)"

jsn — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 13:32:51 +0000

This is just Crypviser spreading lies. No, being on that Russian register doesn't imply any intention to comply with any wiretapping / censorship requests; in fact, IIRC, it doesn't even necessarily imply any consent to being added to the register. Saying that Treema's being added to the register means it "moved under the control of the Russian government" is no different than adding their company name and address to some Excel file on your computer and then saying that Threema has moved under your control.