Hacker News: mircerlancerous

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

mircerlancerous — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 06:00:31 +0000

I've used GOGS for years (Go Git Service). https://gogs.io/getting-started/introduction

New comment by mircerlancerous in "HTML over WebSockets: real-time SPAs with barely any JavaScript"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:47:53 +0000

Frankly I think serving dynamic HTML at all is a problem in an SPA. Use a service worker to cache structure, control, and styling, then use an API to fetch dynamic data in a more efficient manner.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

mircerlancerous — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:32:45 +0000

Attention to details that matter and knowing what to pass on, is what's important. If they did poorly on the important stuff but then point out the typo, clearly they were putting their efforts in the wrong places

New comment by mircerlancerous in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

mircerlancerous — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:03:16 +0000

Sadly I've seen this kind of interviewing from lots of places; maybe it's a technique they teach in college or something.

Interview questions like this are useless as they are not an accurate approximation of a real work scenario. I've frozen up at a whiteboard in an interview before, and then figured it out on the drive home.

The best approach I've found is to do a send home quiz, and then ask them questions about the quiz to test understanding. The test also shows coding habits, which tells you a lot right there.

Bonus: put some typos in the quiz that don't matter. Red flag for the people that get hung up on that.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "File transfer using animated QR codes"

mircerlancerous — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:55:29 +0000

Very cool. Probably pointless but it's so neat I feel compelled to try to find a use for it :)

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Why Vanilla JavaScript"

mircerlancerous — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:32:13 +0000

Any framework that requires me to learn custom syntax, is a problem in my opinion. I agree with the author that the browser is already the framework, and a powerful one at that. I don't really struggle with views and dom thanks to my own libraries, so maybe those without appreciate thw guilded gardens of these frameworks. Problem is that if these frameworks fall out of favour or stray from their original quality, you're stuck with worthless knowledge and maybe code as well

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:46:29 +0000

Interesting; good to know.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:45:54 +0000

I've been running this web server for over a year with no stability issues like that. The app itself shutting off was the biggest issue, but the alarm plugin reboots it whenever that happens. Perhaps you had a bad batch of phones but in my case, it's been very reliable.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:43:20 +0000

Glad you like it! The phone serves everything. In this case Cloudflare will be helping with some caching, but it's not required.

Edit: actually looking at the logs, it looks like Cloudflare caching is off or isn't working; everything you see is served up by the phone.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:30:12 +0000

Author here. What boiling water doesn't take care of all that ;)

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:29:28 +0000

Author here. I'll admit that I have made limited use of AI for helping in areas that I'm less familiar with (like FTP protocols), but I haven't paid a dime; all free plan. I'll use AI to help make the project possible, but it's not trustworthy enough to make things readable and maintainable.

If you want help getting this setup for yourself, let me know; happy to help.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:26:22 +0000

Author here. Qik is the name I've given to the project. It's pretty clear on all the pages that it will always be free, and that there's no reference anywhere to any crypto services. Give specifics if you think otherwise; there's lots of noise these days, so I'm not offended you figured this was another one.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:23:01 +0000

Author here. All good points from this point and its replies, which to me says best to me that not all products and experiences are equal, so proceed based on your comfort level.

Note that the app is capable of monitoring both battery charge percentage and temperature. If one was inclined a USB to serial adapter with some simple circuitry could be used to monitor and control the state of charge. Good idea for a follow-up project and article!

Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

mircerlancerous — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 02:19:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.offthebricks.com/articles/smashed-toilet-phone-web-server

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48535821

Points: 54

# Comments: 24

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Ask HN: How are you handling QA being bottlenecked with more AI-generated PRs?"

mircerlancerous — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:33:39 +0000

Hold the submitter to a higher standard by introducing penalties for errors, and/or incentives for clean PRs. In my opinion a PR should be flawless once submitted, as the dev should have tested thoroughly. QA should only catch errors in a small percentage of cases

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Ask HN: Which is Better–Android or iOS?"

mircerlancerous — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:06:57 +0000

If you want to buikd and distribute something B2B or just to friends or colleagues outside of the app stores, it's a nightmare on iOS. Sideloading isn't as simple anymore for Android, but it's way easier. It's for that reason and for more open hardware and software that I exclusively work on Android now. Too bad about iOS as generally I like Apple hardware, just not interested in the hassle with everything else.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Ask HN: Am I getting old, or is working with AI juniors becoming a nightmare?"

mircerlancerous — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:14:54 +0000

Personally if I see a PR that's not readable, I send it back immediately without much of a read-through. AI or not, the code should be readable or it's not maintainable by people or AI

New comment by mircerlancerous in "Ask HN: Anyone else get fatigued by interaction with LLMs?"

mircerlancerous — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:45:56 +0000

Yes, very familiar. I think it might be ok though, as it's similar to a web search where you maybe need to refine it a few times. Just assume that the first answer may not be fully correct or complete, until the AI has more context. It would be a nice change if it would ask the follow-up questions automatically.

New comment by mircerlancerous in "LightningPDF – HTML to PDF API with a native renderer and Chromium fallback"

mircerlancerous — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:37:23 +0000

You may want to offer a page credits option instead, as "50 pdfs" for the free tier is a little vague. Is that 50 1-page pdfs, or 50 100 page pdfs? We generate our pdfs one page at a time, and then stitch them together into one at the end; I'm unsure whether your solution would be practical for us. Self-hosting is maybe the other option

New comment by mircerlancerous in "A Broken Heart: getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code"

mircerlancerous — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:37:19 +0000

Totally agree that creating something to reproduce the issue is a big turn off when it comes to reporting bugs; what else can one do though? In your case though, I guess it was a pretty simple thing