Hacker News: kali_00

New comment by kali_00 in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

kali_00 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 21:37:03 +0000

With almost everyones backups stored in plain-text, making it all a little silly.

Think about it for a second: you can re-establish your WA account on a new device using only the SIM card from your old device. SIM cards don't have a storage area for random applications' encryption keys, and even if they did, a SIM card cannot count as "end-to-end" anymore. Same goes for whatever mobile cloud platform those backups might be stored on. And you'd hope Apple or Google aren't happily sending off your cloud decryption keys to any app that wants them. Though maybe they are?

New comment by kali_00 in "XOR"

kali_00 — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 23:51:07 +0000

Understanding basic boolean logic isn't just fundamental to programming, it's a particularly easy component that's usually taught very early, for both reasons.

It takes one table to explain XOR and it's the first one on the page. In ASCII:

  a | b | a XOR b
  --+---+---------
  0 | 0 |    0
  0 | 1 |    1
  1 | 0 |    1
  1 | 1 |    0

If a "programmer" seeing that still can't read code using a XOR, I'd fire them.

New comment by kali_00 in "Show HN: Tetris Variant in a Rotating / Flipping Square"

kali_00 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:12:31 +0000

This is good, I definitely had fun! Really cool original idea! I liked how I discovered the "vertical line" win by accident when I thought I was going to lose. (I didn't quite get the instructions at first, but it made sense when playing.)

A couple of issues I noticed:

- some pieces rotate in an odd way, as if around an off-centre fixed point. It felt unlike regular Tetris and caused losses that otherwise wouldn't have been in tight spots. Like the piece would "jump" over an entire grid section unexpectedly. It's especially noticable with the long piece.

- on my system, trying a "hard mode" game after a few normal mode games, the hard mode immediately began insanely fast. Repeat plays then caused it to keep speeding up even further each restart, eventually going into endless loop by itself, where it seemed to be so fast it couldn't correctly check gamestate. In these restarts, no pieces would appear, but the score kept increasing anyway, eventually up to some very high number (eg, >70,000) before it'd finally decide a game over state. Each successive game would do the same thing, but advance to yet higher scores.

EDIT: Reproduced the second issue, and noticed hundreds of "Skipping tick during rotation" messages in the console. The procedure for me to reproduce was: play a normal game until you hit the 6000-7000 huge speed-up and game over, then keep playing hard mode games repeatedly, until it takes over.

New comment by kali_00 in "Beej's Guide to Git"

kali_00 — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 12:06:15 +0000

Not wrong, but something I found confusing, in section 2.7.5 (page 11 of PDF):

"Let's say you modified foo.txt but didn't add it. You could: "

Followed by:

"And that would add it and make the commit. You can only do this with files you added before."

Wait, what? So, I modified foo.txt but didn't add it, and then the command to add and commit at the same time can only be done with files I did add before?

Guide was working great to heal years of git trauma up until that point though!

New comment by kali_00 in "Taking a $15 Casio F91W 5km underwater"

kali_00 — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 13:31:06 +0000

Notably, there was no attempt to operate the watch at such depths. Pressing a side button would be an interesting test, for instance. Many "water resistant" watches, rated to a certain depth are only rated so, given the not inconsiderable caveat of not being able to operated - just looked at. The higher end, more expensive models claiming full waterproof ability don't typically have such functional restriction.

New comment by kali_00 in "How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain"

kali_00 — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 01:43:10 +0000

I would guess by reflecting light off something silvery, eg, a wall painted in metallic silver paint.