Hacker News: wmkn

New comment by wmkn in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

wmkn — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:40:23 +0000

Yups, I love the idea of LaTeX, LaTeX itself not so much.

New comment by wmkn in "No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data"

wmkn — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 06:19:59 +0000

I enabled it (quite intuitively) by clicking on the little cloud icon in Timeline. I didn’t need to go to settings.

New comment by wmkn in "Bitwarden: Generate a Username"

wmkn — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:48:18 +0000

Unfortunately because of the way Bitwarden works you should consider your passwords compromised when Bitwarden itself gets hacked - regardless of vault encryption. Especially if you ever used the web login.

To access your account you need to type your master password, the same password that is used decrypt your vault. If a competent hacker gains access to the Bitwarden servers they could install a compromised login page that logs master passwords and with that gain access to password vaults.

Sounds far-fetched maybe, but your password security depends completely on the ability of Bitwarden to protect their servers. The encryption is just a minor hurdle once the servers are compromised.

Note that 2FA doesn’t help since it is not used for vault encryption.

New comment by wmkn in "The worst part of working from home is now haunting reopened offices"

wmkn — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:58:56 +0000

Looking at the comments and article, I almost feel like a freak for actually not minding going back to the office.

My commute to the office is about a 10 mins walk - maybe that’s the difference with many others here. Either way, I like the separation between work and home. I also believe that online meetings and chat are not a great substitute for actually talking to people, especially when you are building something together.

New comment by wmkn in "JSON for Modern C++ version 3.10.0"

wmkn — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 12:41:56 +0000

What? I would argue that unordered_map is nearly always a reasonable choice when in need of an unordered associative container. There is nothing particular wrong with it.

Not sure what your rationale is for saying it’s only useful for extremely niche use cases. I would be curious to know why you think so.

New comment by wmkn in "Using CMake and Managing Dependencies"

wmkn — Tue, 25 May 2021 14:44:25 +0000

CMake as a library with bindings for various scripting languages (e.g. Python) would make a lot of sense to me. Have the power of a proper scripting language and let the CMake library deal with generating the build system.

I once looked into extracting the CMake build system generation code and make it into a standalone library. But I soon realized that it’s not exactly a weekend project.

New comment by wmkn in "Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies"

wmkn — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 22:03:25 +0000

If these private companies are anything like Serafe I can see why this referendum ended in a no.

New comment by wmkn in "Never Ever Use NixOS"

wmkn — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 13:16:35 +0000

This might have been a nice article to read. But after reading just the first paragraph I got unclosable overlay advertisements blocking out 80% of the screen making it impossible to continue reading.

Seeing this more and more often nowadays. No matter how good the article, if I cannot read it I won’t stick around.

New comment by wmkn in "Google pilots a feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok, Instagram"

wmkn — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 23:33:56 +0000

What are you talking about? They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable. That’s how Google started and got successful in the first place.

New comment by wmkn in "A gentle introduction to pointers using C (2019)"

wmkn — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:42:02 +0000

Yes, so the structure itself has padding (added by the compiler). But that is regardless of whether it is in an array or not. OP seemed to suggest that C arrays introduce padding of some sort, which they do not.

New comment by wmkn in "A gentle introduction to pointers using C (2019)"

wmkn — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:12:33 +0000

> possibly with padding

What padding?

New comment by wmkn in "U.S. trails most developed countries in voter turnout (2018)"

wmkn — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:42:47 +0000

> There's no common official record on where someone lives in the US

When a US colleague transferred from our US office to our European office they were surprised and a little shocked that they were required to register their address with the local authorities. They felt that the government had no right to know where they lived.

For me, as a European, I was quite surprised about the opposite. How is it possible to have a functioning government without proper records about who lives where?

Only after the realization that the US does not keep records about who lives where did things like voter registration make sense to me.

New comment by wmkn in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

wmkn — Fri, 29 May 2020 16:27:13 +0000

Shooting should not be the starting point of law enforcement. Shooting should be a last resort. Implying that looting indiscriminately means shooting is a call to violence.

New comment by wmkn in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

wmkn — Fri, 29 May 2020 16:10:57 +0000

Fair point. ‘Looting inevitably leads to innocent people getting shot’ is probably not what Trump meant.

New comment by wmkn in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

wmkn — Fri, 29 May 2020 15:57:35 +0000

Because the exact phrase has historical context [1] in a sense of: if you loot, we shoot. Clearly it wasn’t said in a sense of: looting inevitably leads to violence.

That makes it sound like Trump used it in a similar fashion.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-...

New comment by wmkn in "Why Does the DICOM Standard Exist?"

wmkn — Tue, 19 May 2020 06:45:50 +0000

This was an ultrasound machine. Philips would first have you import the data in their own QLab software and from there export a copy (which misses some of the data from the private fields). With GE reading the data was completely impossible.

New comment by wmkn in "Why Does the DICOM Standard Exist?"

wmkn — Mon, 18 May 2020 21:09:37 +0000

All manufacturers do this indeed. The “good” data is in the private fields that can only be read by the manufacturer’s proprietary software. The fields that are open for everyone usually have a lower quality version of the actual data. The latter is usually good enough for a small preview, but not good enough for proper diagnostic usage.

New comment by wmkn in "Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube"

wmkn — Mon, 18 May 2020 15:58:15 +0000

> Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?

A few weeks ago the discussion here was about how YouTube is not removing enough content (mostly in relation to Covid-19). The consensus was pretty much that they do it on purpose because it makes them money.

I don’t think YouTube (or any large public content platform) has a winning move in this discussion. Any move will be perceived as nefarious.

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

wmkn — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:06:39 +0000

> too much extraction results in a acidic, heavy taste, too little extraction results in the dreaded "mud water" light taste

It's actually the opposite. Over extraction results in more prominent bitter flavors and under extraction in more prominent sour flavors.

New comment by wmkn in "Dutch museum says van Gogh painting stolen in overnight raid"

wmkn — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 17:20:47 +0000

For a van Gogh that would never work. No legitimate art dealer would touch it. Regardless of the amount of time in between.