Hacker News: paledot

New comment by paledot in "Test"

paledot — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 04:26:05 +0000

I thought that was supposed to be banned by international treaty.

New comment by paledot in "Compromising OpenWrt Supply Chain"

paledot — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 04:24:58 +0000

HASS configuration has gotten a lot better in the past few years. Almost everything can now be done via the UI, including automation and scripting, and it's one of the smoothest scripting GUIs I've used. It even supports cut/paste for visual blocks. And for those 5% cases, there's an inline YAML editor which will open (and validate) only the pertinent block of what I'm sure is a 1000-line YAML file for editing in-browser.

Z-Wave is still dodgy, but the migration to zwavejs has been an improvement and probably is as good as things will get with the state of Z-Wave being what it is.

It's still not perfect, but HASS has become one of my user-facing open-source success stories. Most of the remaining annoyances are out of their control at this point.

New comment by paledot in "Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)"

paledot — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 04:16:43 +0000

Your personal information is valuable. See also why smart TVs are/were cheaper than "dumb" TVs when the latter was even still an option.

New comment by paledot in "Handling cookies is a minefield"

paledot — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 05:24:39 +0000

Wait, you can't shard on session ID?

And this is an ephemeral key-value store here, which is basically a best-case scenario from a performance standpoint. It's basically the last thing you're going to need to think about sharding, which is why session stores traditionally cohabitate(d) with web servers.

No, session storage doesn't get expensive fast. It's extraordinarily cheap unless you screw up the configuration very badly indeed (Apparently PHP still defaults to writing session data to disk?!)

New comment by paledot in "IMG_0416"

paledot — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 23:45:41 +0000

And the former default is no longer developer friendly. (Or friendly to anyone else, really.)

New comment by paledot in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"

paledot — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 11:54:49 +0000

Tags are crowdsourced. I was tagging games with "always-online DRM" before they declared it on the store page, but only the top few tags are displayed, so there's no point.

New comment by paledot in "Pretty.c"

paledot — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 01:11:18 +0000

String/str are both valid UTF-8 by definition, though. Plain ol' piles of bytes in Rust are generally represented by Vec/[u8].

Rust could have done better in naming, but a definite design goal of the language (for better and worse) is to not make things that are complicated for the compiler appear simple to the user. Which unfortunately results in:

    String/str
    CString/CStr
    OsString/OsStr
    Vec/[u8]
    AsRef
    Cow<`a, str>

New comment by paledot in "Show HN: HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories"

paledot — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:07:41 +0000

You realize that the Industrial Revolution was almost 100 years long, right?

New comment by paledot in "A $1k Wheelchair"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:24:24 +0000

You're in the right ballpark, though a good chair can easily get you into the 5 figures. Top-end is perhaps $20k.

New comment by paledot in "A $1k Wheelchair"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:22:46 +0000

They're crap. And that's what you find at hospitals and airports.

New comment by paledot in "A $1k Wheelchair"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:20:39 +0000

Late to the party, but I just wanted to say how refreshing it is to see an accessibility-related post on HN that isn't about a bunch of able-bodied MIT undergrads winning awards from able-bodied judge panels for building a product that disabled people can't use to solve a problem that disabled people don't have.

There is effectively zero overlap between problems that able-bodied people think that disabled people have, and problems that disabled people actually have.

New comment by paledot in "Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:05:09 +0000

Yes, it's based in the real world. This was the Falcon 9 launch price that I could come up with in the amount of time I was willing to spend on a shitpost. I agree that launch prices will continue to come down, but launchers will always be mass-constrained and launching lead spheres into orbit will never be a practical solution.

New comment by paledot in "A $1k Wheelchair"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:02:31 +0000

Presuming that you mean "stairs", these exist and impress Hacker News users who think any problem can be solved with enough overengineering, but nobody really uses them because they're so much worse at everything else. I've used one to board an airplane embarking from the tarmac, that's about all they're good for.

New comment by paledot in "A $1k Wheelchair"

paledot — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:56:29 +0000

This is a bit like saying that an ill-fitting bicycle can cause more harm than good: technically true but missing the point. Sometimes it's valuable to have a cheap bicycle that you can expose to the elements without worrying about messing up the high-end components on your more expensive bike.

These seem to be mainly intended as secondary chairs or for part-time wheelchair users, rather than as primary chairs. My wife has three wheelchairs and I can see a case for buying one of these as her fourth.

Mind you, the situation with electric wheelchairs is very different. Many electric wheelchair users are at elevated risk of pressure sores, may not be able to get in and out or reposition themselves independently, etc. The profit margins on these chairs are still inexcusable, but the amount of custom fitting and memory foam everything is warranted because the user may well be in this chair, in that position all day every day. The cupholder and the umbrella mount are must-have accessories.

New comment by paledot in "Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]"

paledot — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 17:54:59 +0000

Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.

New comment by paledot in "What's inside the QR code menu at this cafe?"

paledot — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:51:35 +0000

The Python core docs are uniquely terrible, though.

New comment by paledot in "What's inside the QR code menu at this cafe?"

paledot — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:49:18 +0000

Is it illegal, in fact? If a cop saw you, you'd be arrested and prosecuted for attempted auto theft, and your "I just wanted to see how comfy the driver's seat was" defense would ring hollow in court. But sitting in an unoccupied car without authorization isn't trespassing unless it's parked on the owner's land, and I'm not sure what other laws would apply to that specific act.

New comment by paledot in "One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)"

paledot — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 19:09:27 +0000

It's no better at exporting to CSV. I wrote a CSV parser a few years ago that had one set of logic for Excel CSVs and a completely different set for everything else.

New comment by paledot in "Data sleuths who spotted research misconduct cleared of defamation"

paledot — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 03:48:55 +0000

He's also running out of lawyers willing to commit perjury and risk disbarment on his behalf.

New comment by paledot in "Entire staff of game publisher Annapurna Interactive has reportedly resigned"

paledot — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 12:06:27 +0000

I don't know either, but it seems like approximately 100% of the reason game studios opt not to self-publish in this day and age is that lift. Annapurna's name alone carried a lot of clout.

(Side note: continue to be disappointed that they didn't brand themselves as "Annapurrna" on the Stray opening screen.)