Hacker News: whitlock

New comment by whitlock in "Do_not_track"

whitlock — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:08:10 +0000

https://toptout.me - exists and handles a lot of these problems, if not looking to create a new wheel.

Though if you just want a simple ENV var that handles this WHILE honoring the specification on this page: https://github.com/alloydwhitlock/do-not-track-cli

New comment by whitlock in "Do_not_track"

whitlock — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:00:13 +0000

Love it. This is an annoying problem and likely the actual solution than asking folks to use a universal one. I'll put something together as a starting point.

New comment by whitlock in "The Invention of the AeroPress (2014)"

whitlock — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 19:12:29 +0000

I recently watched the AeroPress Movie (https://aeropressmovie.com/), which was a fun look into the history and culture around the AeroPress. Something I enjoyed about it was seeing the inventors workshop in his garage, as well as his opinions on what constitutes a "good cup" of coffee.

New comment by whitlock in "Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year"

whitlock — Tue, 14 May 2019 22:25:18 +0000

The statistics cited by Local Babysitter are ten years old, collected in 2009 by Nielsen. This doesn't reflect how media has changed in the last ten years, along with how children consume it. It would be nice to have a more updated source explaining what has changed in the last ten years, since obviously Nielsen is collecting this data.

New comment by whitlock in "Build your own IoT/MQTT node for less than $2"

whitlock — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 05:17:40 +0000

Cheap boards like the ESP-12F (ESP8266) allow you to remotely control a device or receive sensor data, like that from a DHT11 temperature-humidity sensor. Instead of paying a lot of money, you can flash your own firmware on a device and make your own custom IoT device.

MQTT is a messaging protocol used to communicate with the device. You can use something like Mosquitto to communicate with your new IoT device. It is lightweight protocol and easy to work with.

You'd use something like an ESP32 – which has Bluetooth – if you want a simple BLE beacon, otherwise if you don't need Bluetooth then an ESP8266 device would likely work better.; If you want to look at related videos, I'd suggest looking at the YouTube channel Andreas Spiess publishes with various devices. He has a few videos on BLE and ESP32 (ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNoFdKgvskU) where he goes into detail.

New comment by whitlock in "Build your own IoT/MQTT node for less than $2"

whitlock — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 05:03:09 +0000

Like you hinted, flashing Sonoff-Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 hardware lets you get A LOT of home automation equipment for fairly little. They make many devices and someone getting started should checkout the Sonoff-Tasmota for supported devices AND check out Sonoff.

If you don't want to use a Sonoff Basic or maybe the bigger 4 channel option, I'd suggest getting some of their wall adapters like the S31 (think Wemo wall plug). There is a confirmed flash for Sonoff-Tasmota & ESPurna for it and would let someone dip their toes into cheap home automation with MQTT.

New comment by whitlock in "Bug #2: Order anything for free on BigBasket"

whitlock — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 00:36:08 +0000

"They even offered a token bounty of 5000 rupees in BigBasket credits, which we have not accepted."

That's a pittance for such a critical flaw in their purchasing system, especially for a company valued at over 180 million USD. 5000 Rupees is, by the way, worth $77.19.

New comment by whitlock in "A/B test Facebook posts with Spark"

whitlock — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 16:44:31 +0000

I thought this was in reference to Apache Spark.

New comment by whitlock in "Access Denied to Apple.com"

whitlock — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 05:41:14 +0000

Someone violated read-only Friday.

New comment by whitlock in "Elementary OS Freya Released"

whitlock — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 02:05:46 +0000

There is no upgrade path from OS Luna (previous release) to Freya. Their own web site states, "elementary OS Luna users should back up their data and perform a clean install". Given that the operating system is built on Ubuntu I should be able to upgrade from Luna to Freya without too many issues.

Disappointed? Yes. I wrote this post on my Cr-48 running Elementary OS Luna. Instead of running Apt to update my laptop now I'm browsing DistroWatch in another tab to see what else has come out.

New comment by whitlock in "Unix Commands I Wish I’d Discovered Years Earlier"

whitlock — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 01:21:23 +0000

If you like xargs, but want more flexibility, I'd highly suggest GNU parallel. Such flexibility includes running jobs on multiple computers, running intensive command using all available CPU's (like xargs -P), and creating unique scripts to handle multiple parameters.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html

New comment by whitlock in "How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)"

whitlock — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 20:26:01 +0000

Thank you for answering my question. I was afraid you'd skip it if there was truth in what NPR had presented.

I'm probably not the only person who felt that you and Pete are misleading people with the story of Pete's online profile after that interview. In some ways it may have done more harm than good overall.

Have you done anything since then to try and get NPR to correct or update the article?

New comment by whitlock in "How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)"

whitlock — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:53:00 +0000

Patrick,

I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080...