Hacker News: stonesweep

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Sat, 01 May 2021 19:34:02 +0000

Nah. +4 for the thread after adding up the down/up votes. I dipped out, the conversation held no further value to continue to me especially after being told "well it's an idiom you just don't understand". No minds will be changed, no positive outcome will happen from continuing.

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:42:37 +0000

> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

> Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1]

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything. Useful? Yes, great for finding random solutions to random problems. Authoritative source on terminology used in the industry I work? Nah.

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:24:00 +0000

Man pages can be tricky as the content can vary distro by distro (how up to date is your copy of man-pages, what changes have happened, etc.) - this technique is pretty portable to extract the synopsis of a man page specifically due to the format it uses (most times I'd use like grep -A3 -B2 foo /some/file, e.g.).

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:18:35 +0000

> One definition of "server" is "a service in a network"

Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

I was not nerd-sniping and could care less about serverless as a term, I'm specifically talking about calling a "service" a "server" in this chat. I feel this is presenting something as accepted definition which does not match my experience in the field.

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:14:47 +0000

This makes no sense (too abstract of a statement), but here let's try this:

    $ man systemd | head -4 | tail -1
       systemd, init - systemd system and service manager

An email daemon (Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, UW-IMAP, Sendmail, etc.) are services running on a server. An "email server" would be a server running a daemon to provide email service in this example.

New comment by stonesweep in "Health of the KDE Community"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 14:37:01 +0000

100% agree, I missed that - at this point in time (and maybe still a bit today?) there was a lot of grift between C and C++ being used for Linux systems things around that time as well (including how big the resulting binaries were, because modems to download!). Thanks for the reminder.

New comment by stonesweep in "A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 14:33:14 +0000

I disagree with your assessment, email is a service and not a server. A service can run on a server, or ephemerally as in this article (which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them). S3 and SES are services running on servers.

New comment by stonesweep in "Health of the KDE Community"

stonesweep — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 03:17:22 +0000

In the beginning (95-ish) Qt was license encumbered, there was serious agitation about KDE becoming popular while using it, leading to the very-open GTK based GNOME desktop competition. It was a big kerfuffle at the time.

See the History of Qt section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

New comment by stonesweep in "Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves"

stonesweep — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 20:05:32 +0000

In the US it's the same, the FDA has regulations and all the (not real cheese) items have either a funny name ("cheeze") or have something like "imitation cheese product" or "cheese food product" (I've seen a number of different labels over my life) to indicate it's not real (milk) cheese.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...

New comment by stonesweep in "Bronze Disease"

stonesweep — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 12:22:40 +0000

It's an extremely mild abrasive in this form (of vinegar, yep) - some folks dilute baking soda in vinegar, I feel that's too coarse myself. One of the mildest silver polishes I know about and use, Blitz (not Flitz) is still grittier than ketchup in your fingers. I only use organic, free range grass fed no corn syrup ketchup, my metal is pampered. /s ;) (you just use your fingers or qtips for the crevices, then wash in warm soapy water, dry well then plop into a sealed glass jar of acetone for a few days)

New comment by stonesweep in "Bronze Disease"

stonesweep — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 11:52:59 +0000

Many hobbiest collectors (in my travels, which is of course my experiences) use 100% acetone soak on metals. A brand known as Renaissance Wax is a popular microcrystalline coating used to inhibit reactions (ive been told its popular with knifemakers as well). Ketchup is a great copper/bronze/brass cleaner while we're here, not so hot on nickel, sort of ok on silver. Titanium and zirconium just don't care how you clean them, aluminum is ketchup friendly.

New comment by stonesweep in "Google promised its contact tracing app was completely private, but it wasn’t"

stonesweep — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 13:48:06 +0000

> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread.

I am a US citizen, I simply have lost confidence in any promise made by any tech company in regards to my privacy and roll back to War Games - the only winning move is not to play. We have lost all confidence that any data shared will be kept private, there is little oversight or penalty for abuse of it.

New comment by stonesweep in "Sisters with Transistors"

stonesweep — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 13:53:26 +0000

It seems like this website is trying to convert to local timezone in browser, the ICS places it at 8pm on 4/24 New York time:

    DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T200000
    DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T212400

If you're a frontend developer on HN reading this, please don't do what this website does - please list an absolute date/time stamp of your event in plain text on the page(s) in question. Thanks in advance.

New comment by stonesweep in "X11 Universal File Opener and XDG Mess"

stonesweep — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 12:51:31 +0000

nod and the .desktop file is just an INI-style file that one can hand create for anything at all, the launched app just needs to accept the URL as a parameter input as if typed on the CLI for this scheme.

New comment by stonesweep in "Converting Markdown to ePub or Mobi Using Pandoc"

stonesweep — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 23:19:54 +0000

Sure thing, it's pretty simple and straightforward I can post right here. In your CI/CD runner, you add a "before" script like so (Gitlab YAML example):

    image: debian:latest

    before_script:
        - bash myscript.sh

Your myscript.sh can be as simple as four lines (one to install curl, it's not a default on Debian), example:

    apt-get -y install curl
    VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")')
    curl -sLo "pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb" "https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/${VERSION}/pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"
    apt-get -y install "./pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"

The Github API used above has the nice default of listing the latest release as you see used there in the grep on the right, one could enhance that with `jq` for higher intelligence but this very simple setup is functional as a starting point to develop your own style.

New comment by stonesweep in "X11 Universal File Opener and XDG Mess"

stonesweep — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 21:30:34 +0000

Each DE can have slightly different paths, but in general find the file mimeapps.list. It's typically looked for in the traditional manner of /etc/, /usr/share/ and /usr/local/share/ and $HOME to find global, local and personal configurations. In your $HOME it's usually something like this:

    ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
    ~/.config/mimeapps.list

In here you find the MIME type pointing at a .desktop file (app launcher), it's a matter of changing that. Mine for example related to using Firefox:

    [Default Applications]
    x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
    x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop

Find the .desktop file you want to launch and just update that bad boy. Most DEs have a GUI tool to manage this for you without having to resort to manual editing...

New comment by stonesweep in "Converting Markdown to ePub or Mobi Using Pandoc"

stonesweep — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 11:24:29 +0000

I use pandoc in a CD pipeline, the version in the repos is stale compared to upstream (normal, that's how it is) unless you're on a rolling distro like Arch.

I have reported pandoc bugs and had them fixed (great dev team), pulling the latest single-DEB install (no deps, unlike the one in the Debian repo) and using it gets all the latest updates which matter to a process like this.

In this particular case your needs to use the latest pandoc lead to the wget pull and install, which thanks to their DEB design is easy and clean to do in an ephemeral CI container.

New comment by stonesweep in "Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons"

stonesweep — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 12:58:22 +0000

The author is using random online radios so they don't get to choose the server end - as a client, VLC is powerful but I prefer Audacious for the user interface. (random user survey :) ) - I have the same problem with VLC on my Android, it works but I much prefer other streaming clients for the better (subjective) UI.

New comment by stonesweep in "Are top websites using WebGL for fingerprinting?"

stonesweep — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:58:31 +0000

It's been awhile, but IIRC the recommendation to disable it is based on security, not privacy. Other comments here explain it better than I could, not a programmer by trade.

New comment by stonesweep in "Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons"

stonesweep — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:49:42 +0000

If the author is reading this, you've hit/stumbled on "HTTP Live Streaming" radios which are sort of the next evolution of classic Shoutcast/Icecast generated streams. There are better clients for it out there than Chrome which could probably enhance the experience (proper audio controls, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients