Hacker News: l72

New comment by l72 in "Fastpotify"

l72 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:57:28 +0000

Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!

There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!

New comment by l72 in "Fastpotify"

l72 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:48:10 +0000

Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!

New comment by l72 in "Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others"

l72 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:36:46 +0000

I wish git worked like some of the other dvcs (bazaar/breezy). The default merge type from a branch should be a merge commit and git log should only show the first parent (commits directly on the current branch).

This gives you a very clean log on main (it only shows commits directly on this branch). There is no need to squash, rebase, or anything else. And if you want to dig down into individual commits that happened on a branch, you can!

This can be a bit replicated by forcing a merge type of merge and setting an alias of log to "log --first-parent", but since that isn't the default, that isn't what you see when you look at the commit logs on platforms like github.

I never understood why git decided to show a flat list of every commit that happened, even if the commit originally happened on a separate branch.

New comment by l72 in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

l72 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:09:38 +0000

icculus [1] (who ported a bunch of games to linux), still uses finger [2]

  [1] https://icculus.org/~icculus/
  [2] https://icculus.org/finger/icculus

New comment by l72 in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

l72 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:33:20 +0000

As a user, I really don't care for magic links. The whole, start the log-in process, switch context, wait for email (sometimes up to a minute), click on it, have it open a new tab in a different window than where I started is just a pain. I feel like I spend half my day logging in to services these days.

The only time I like magic links is for services where I am "not really a user". For example, an appointment reminder for my doctor where I need to validate my insurance. Great, send me an email 24-hours before with the reminder and a magic link, as I don't want to think about an account there.

New comment by l72 in "Qwen3.8-2.4T"

l72 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:43:31 +0000

> In particular, Qwen3.8-Max is the official version based on Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B with more features, such as vision input & non-thinking support, 1M context length by default, official built-in tools, etc.

That is unfortunate, that the open weight model doesn't have vision support or the 1M context length...

New comment by l72 in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

l72 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:56:06 +0000

I don't look at the logs of my personal site very often as it is a static site, but just went to check, and yeah, it's almost all ai crawlers. Note sure what is going on here, but I hope this isn't really anthropic:

  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /secrets.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /credentials.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /secrets.yml HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /service-account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /key.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /config/.env HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /service_account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 366 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /serviceAccountKey.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /firebase-adminsdk.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /Dockerfile HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.github/.env HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /firebase-service-account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.docker/config.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.npmrc HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.boto HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.s3cfg HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.svn/entries HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.htpasswd HTTP/2.0" 404 346 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /terraform.tfstate HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /docker-compose.yaml HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.vscode/launch.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_rsa HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_ed25519 HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_ecdsa HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/authorized_keys HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/known_hosts HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai"

New comment by l72 in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

l72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:05:40 +0000

Yeah burned discs wore out much earlier but it depended a lot on the brand. Fry’s great quality brand (or whatever it was called) did not last long. But my memorex and verbatim still work fine after 30 years of mistreatment!

New comment by l72 in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

l72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:03:42 +0000

Agree with the siblings. I have hundreds of CDs in binders. They have lived in the unconditioned storage, very hot and humid attics, and on the floorboards of cars and for the most part, very few have any issues. It is quite incredible.

But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!

New comment by l72 in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

l72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:00:00 +0000

I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful.

You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.

I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.

New comment by l72 in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

l72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:55:58 +0000

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors.

Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!

Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.

When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.

New comment by l72 in "I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself"

l72 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:29:49 +0000

This is surprising to me and the exact opposite of what I want for a few reasons:

1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong.

2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly, some software like nextcloud doesn't have LTS version. One of the things my family likes the most, is that the stuff I host isn't constantly changing like commercial products. Having google photos change or netflix have a new interface randomly is very, very frustrating for them.

Since my homelab is completely internal, I avoid quickly doing updates (unless it is a critical security issue), and definitely avoid doing major version upgrades unless there is good value in it.

New comment by l72 in "Fox to buy Roku"

l72 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:49:56 +0000

As someone who has canceled all my subscriptions and just uses Jellyfin for 100% of my content, what are some good options besides a Roku?

I would love to have hardware like Roku, but just run a jellyfin client, with no need to even have Internet, just access to my jellyfin server on my local network.

It would need to be family approved as I don't need another project. I am not interested in AppleTV or a Google device (unless it can be 100% degoogled).

Has anyone ever successfully gotten things like CoreELEC/LibreELEC to work well?

I wish jellyfin would just sell some hardware, preloaded with a great jellyfin client. I'd pay a premium for it to help fund software development.

New comment by l72 in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

l72 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:03:27 +0000

You can always use something like this [1], which will make sure any file removed on the command line via rm (or other utilities, like git rm) ends up in the trash instead

[1] https://github.com/faratech/trashd

New comment by l72 in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

l72 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:33:51 +0000

I’ll agree with some parts of this as I have some big issues with parts of systemd. But writing service files with systemd is so much better and having a unified interface into logs is really really nice.

New comment by l72 in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

l72 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:29:18 +0000

I think it is amazing that Linux has reached such an audience that the knowledge of what windowing or desktop system being used is unknown.

But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will.

I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users.

People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996.

Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.

New comment by l72 in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

l72 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:18:31 +0000

I worked at a company that had a powerful legacy software that was meant to be configured once and run full screen.

At some point it needed a custom interface and the ability to reconfigure itself on the fly.

Adding in a GUI was not a reasonable option.

We ended up writing a GUI (in gtk) then using Xembed to embed the other process and communicate via a Unix socket.

What would have been a major rewrite (and likely a port to a different language) ended up being a few a days project and worked beautifully.

It really showed me how powerful X11 really was.

New comment by l72 in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

l72 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:48:23 +0000

When switching to Wayland I lost a lot of custom interactions. I’ve learned to live without them but I still miss them.

For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows.

I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows.

As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.

New comment by l72 in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

l72 — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:41:32 +0000

I know nothing about this, but they do seem to have a gamepad: https://frame.work/products/8bitdo-ultimate-2c-wireless-cont...

New comment by l72 in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

l72 — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:24:21 +0000

That’s like saying movies should have to rate every scene so a 7 year old can watch the “safe” parts of an R movie?

If a site is really mixing so much content (like Reddit) then they should really be separating their sites into different subdomains.