Hacker News: ohlookabird

New comment by ohlookabird in "How to build a submarine and survive [video]"

ohlookabird — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 09:26:47 +0000

Thanks for the pointer to this fantastic talk. The excitement, thoroughness and dedication they put into this project along with their entertaining presentation is wonderful.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Download all of Wikipedia on your phone"

ohlookabird — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:54:35 +0000

Back in the year 2001/2002 (I think) I remember doing this with a Wikipedia plugin for Rockbox (https://www.rockbox.org/), which I had running on my Archos FM Recorder. It was truly awesome to have all this knowledge in the palm of your hands without omnipresent Internet.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Show HN: SQL Dry Runs with SQL Simulator"

ohlookabird — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 18:46:48 +0000

I do the same and transactions work well most of the time. I use ZFS as filesystem for my DBMS (Postgres), which allows me to do consistent snapshots. Being able to rollback has been helpful for testing complex or large queries as well.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Is Gmail killing independent email?"

ohlookabird — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 21:03:31 +0000

Works very well in my experience. I never get unwanted ads. The only time this is mildly annoying is during election time. Parties usually distribute flyers/pamphlets with their ideas (which are otherwise known, but still interesting to compare to each other).

New comment by ohlookabird in "The legacy of fy_iceworld, Counter-Strike’s divisive, popular custom map (2020)"

ohlookabird — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:19:34 +0000

I was recently surprised to see CS 1.6 running in the browser: https://play-cs.com Makes it way to easy to get sucked into a game or two.

New comment by ohlookabird in "What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?"

ohlookabird — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 16:52:09 +0000

Yes, this helps a lot! For me, it also helps to have a training plan, or simply calendar events that remind me what exercise I should do at a given day. Usually this allows me to trick my mind and avoids the decision whether or not I should exercise and I will "stupidly" do what the calendar says. This made it much easier to develop a habit.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Warpd: A modal keyboard-driven virtual pointer"

ohlookabird — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 19:27:04 +0000

Very useful, thank you!

New comment by ohlookabird in "Science needs more research software engineers"

ohlookabird — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:41:57 +0000

For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.

New comment by ohlookabird in "I spent two years launching tiny projects"

ohlookabird — Wed, 18 May 2022 15:51:46 +0000

With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

New comment by ohlookabird in "I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books"

ohlookabird — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 07:25:42 +0000

Absolutely! Noticing that it usually takes ~20min for me of getting into the groove was a profound revelation for me a few years ago. I noticed a pattern that if keep on powering through those initial 20min, there is a good chance you can continue being productive for a few hours or even the whole day.

New comment by ohlookabird in "An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email"

ohlookabird — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 05:56:34 +0000

But why would you not be able to reply with the aliased email? I do this regularly. Of course your mail client needs to support this, but using Mutt this is absolutely no problem (just change the FROM header) and I have heard from other users who use Thunderbird that they can also create new identities (just not as easy on the fly). In fact I wrote a small script for Mutt that would automatically set the correct sender if I reply to an email that contained a wildcard. Works pretty well.

New comment by ohlookabird in "An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email"

ohlookabird — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 05:52:28 +0000

How do you mean? This is exactly what I can do with my setup. If you are referring to the use of Gmail: I prefer to run my own infrastructure as long as this is possible.

New comment by ohlookabird in "An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email"

ohlookabird — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:35:04 +0000

Nice! I do something similar, but using an automatic aliasing scheme so that I don't have to manually configure an email address for each service and other users can use this without me knowing their aliases. In my setup, aliases can contain wildcards, represented as percent signs. If an alias phil.%@domain1.com is set up, all your examples will be sent to the respective aliased address. I use Postfix Admin with a MySQL database. Hence the Postfix setup looks like this:

    virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps.cf,
                         mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps_wildcard.cf,
                         hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

The first file is just regular aliases, and is basically a simpler version of the second file (no SQL selections/filters) and could also be merged into a single query with the second file:

    user = mail
    password = 
    hosts = 127.0.0.1
    dbname = maildb_postfix
    query = SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1
            LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s')
            WHERE '%s' LIKE a1.address
            AND a1.active = '1' AND a2.address IS NULL

This works, because the percent sign in the alias is picked up by the LIKE keyword. A setup like this allows me to configure many aliases through Postfix Admin's web admin page, including optional wildcard aliases (depending on which users wants that). It has been working very well for me over the past 15+ years. Also, I haven't looked at that SQL query since then and would likely write it in a nicer way today.

Note: with the above code SQL injection could be possible through an alias name, but given that in this setup I am the only one managing the mail accounts, I was willing to take this risk. :-) Postfix Admin might do some cleaning/validation, but I haven't checked on it.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Elan School"

ohlookabird — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 19:08:19 +0000

Found it also a while ago (maybe also on HN), and was captivated by it. I had to spend a whole Saturday reading through it. Absolutely horrifying.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Files – Single-file photo gallery and file manager"

ohlookabird — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 19:13:17 +0000

I only get this when loading the page:

This page crashed. Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'destroy')

New comment by ohlookabird in "SimpleDB: A Basic RDBMS Built from Scratch"

ohlookabird — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 08:10:43 +0000

Indeed, thanks for the link! We used this SimpleDB in university 15 years ago and implemented our own database nodes like hash joins, table scans, index scans, etc. as well as the paging logic and more. This was really useful to better understand ideas behind many databases.

New comment by ohlookabird in "Kavita – Self-hosted digital library which supports a vast array of file formats"

ohlookabird — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 13:16:25 +0000

Maybe a play on "batteries included"?

New comment by ohlookabird in "Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank"

ohlookabird — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 16:44:38 +0000

For what?

New comment by ohlookabird in "Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps"

ohlookabird — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 14:51:42 +0000

Wow, thank you very much for this link! I had no idea and the comic presentation is fantastic. I couldn't stop reading and read it front to back. It's horrific what these kids had (and surely somewhere have) to endure without a chance of getting out. I hope that person is better now and that his work will help to continue to fight those practices, bring justice and raise awareness. (Like also others did in books and other forms of course!)

New comment by ohlookabird in "Saudi Arabia executes Mustafa al-Darwish for teenage protests"

ohlookabird — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 07:05:45 +0000

indeed, and it looks like neither thinks having a death penalty is somehow problematic...