Hacker News: lillesvin

New comment by lillesvin in "Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor"

lillesvin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:42:13 +0000

I didn't mean to detract from your tool. Sorry if it came off like that.

More options is more better. :)

New comment by lillesvin in "Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor"

lillesvin — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:53:52 +0000

If you're not afraid of working in a CLI, ImageMagick is also a very solid tool for editing lots and lots of images in bulk as long as you know what you want done to them.

New comment by lillesvin in "Nightingale – open-source karaoke app that works with any song on your computer"

lillesvin — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:43:44 +0000

Indeed it was.

> [...] users forked Songbird and created a Windows, Mac, and Linux compatible derivative under the name Nightingale.

[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)]

New comment by lillesvin in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

lillesvin — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:49:54 +0000

Even your fancy guitar is not exempt from harmonics math. TFA has nothing to do with the quality of a guitar and everything to do with 12-Tone Equal Temperament.

New comment by lillesvin in "Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution"

lillesvin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:12:11 +0000

> The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.

So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.

> Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.

It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.

New comment by lillesvin in "Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution"

lillesvin — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:29:46 +0000

I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?

New comment by lillesvin in "Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution"

lillesvin — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:07:54 +0000

> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.

Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.

New comment by lillesvin in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

lillesvin — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:02:25 +0000

> Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me. I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...

Obviously I don't have any data backing me up here, but I'm going to guess that that isn't the main reason why so many people choose Chrome over Firefox.

New comment by lillesvin in "The longest Greek word"

lillesvin — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:35:48 +0000

Aristophanes was such a troll. I can only recommend reading some of his plays, like The Assemblywomen (where this word is from), The Wasps, and The Clouds. They're almost 2500 years old but they've aged incredibly well both thanks to the many amazing translators that have worked on them and because the source material is also solid satire that in many cases is still relevant today.

Plato argued that The Clouds (which is sharp satire of Socrates and his school) was in part what got Socrates convicted and killed. This is obviously debatable but Aristophanes certainly didn't self-censor or mince words.

New comment by lillesvin in "Elasticsearch was never a database"

lillesvin — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 08:56:58 +0000

Searchable snapshots in Elasticsearch can be backed by S3 and they perform very well. No need to store the data on hot nodes any longer than it takes for the index to do a rollover, and from then it's all S3.

New comment by lillesvin in "Elasticsearch was never a database"

lillesvin — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 08:53:58 +0000

What kind of storage do you have backing your Elasticsearch? And how have you configured sharding and phase rollover in your indices?

I work with a cluster that holds 500+ TB logs (where most are stored for a year and some for 5 years because of regulations) in searchable snapshots backed by a locally hosted S3 solution. I can do filtering across most of the data in less than 10 seconds.

Some especially gnarly searches may take around 60-90 seconds on the first run as the searchable snapshots are mounted and cached, but subsequent searches in the cached dataset are obviously as fast as any other search in hot data.

Obviously Elasticsearch isn't without its quirks and drawbacks, but I have yet to come across anything that performs better and is more flexible for logs — especially in terms of architectural freedom and bang-for-the-buck.

New comment by lillesvin in "Comparing AI agents to cybersecurity professionals in real-world pen testing"

lillesvin — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:36:28 +0000

Do I read it right, that ARTEMIS required a not insignificant amount of hints in order to identify the same vulnerabilities that the human testers found? (P. 7 of the PDF.)

New comment by lillesvin in "Charles Proxy"

lillesvin — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:27:58 +0000

Just to mention an alternative option, ZAP (aka. Zed Attack Proxy) covers much of the same ground as Burp and is entirely free and Open Source.

New comment by lillesvin in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

lillesvin — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 23:08:06 +0000

Come on, just stop. "They" have been used to refer to singular antecedents since the 14th century. (Source: https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-the...)

New comment by lillesvin in "A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs"

lillesvin — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:22:12 +0000

But neither does the actual server. HMAC only verifies that the message is from whoever it claims to be from and that it is intact. It won't know what you intended the body of the request to look like.

New comment by lillesvin in "A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs"

lillesvin — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:55:14 +0000

Ah, my bad. Sorry.

But couldn't you then just make the call to an echo service (like HTTPbin) or simply dump the request when you send it?

New comment by lillesvin in "A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs"

lillesvin — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:44:41 +0000

But the returned signed string will be an HMAC-SHA256 hash, won't it? Then there's not going to be any '\n' or '\\n's in there. Only thing you'll be able to tell is if it matches your hash or not, in which case 'OK' or 'not OK' will work just as well.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

New comment by lillesvin in "A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs"

lillesvin — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 23:54:25 +0000

Given that you can't infer the error from simply looking at the signature string, I don't see how having the expected string rather than a simple "OK" or "mismatched signature" (as you get now) would make a difference?

New comment by lillesvin in "A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs"

lillesvin — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 23:39:20 +0000

I know it's kinda besides the point and I don't know what language this was being done in, but I don't personally know any language where

    String signature = "POST" + "\n" + "/api/v1/..."

and

    String signature = "POST\n/api/v1/..."

don't result in identical variables, so I'm a bit puzzled why that would result in an error.

However, there's a quoting error in the failing example where the double quotes in the JSON body aren't properly escaped:

    String signature = "POST" + "\n" + "/api/v1/query" + "\n" + token + "\n" + timestamp + "\n" + "{"body":"content"}"

It may just be the example that's not correctly formatted, but the other (working) example does in fact escape the double quotes in the JSON. I guess, depending on how forgiving the used language is with quoting, that could also be the source of the error?

New comment by lillesvin in "Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux"

lillesvin — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:09:00 +0000

I use screen sharing from the official web client in Firefox on both Debian and Fedora without any issues. What issue(s) do you encounter?