Hacker News: wps

New comment by wps in "Phloto for My Photo Flow"

wps — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:21:40 +0000

This really reminds me of Damselfly: https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly

New comment by wps in "What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications"

wps — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:43:00 +0000

The real solution is to allow users to own their push solution, and for it to become more commonplace among apps to support alternative push providers such as Unified Push. Molly, the FOSS Android Signal client supports this configuration.

New comment by wps in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

wps — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:42:58 +0000

I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app.

Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exams. This is common practice in many other countries.

New comment by wps in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

wps — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:17:34 +0000

This website is actually gorgeous. What do you call this style?

New comment by wps in "Before GitHub"

wps — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:47:28 +0000

Those screenshots and videos are taking up space SOMEWHERE, whether it be your inbox or your filesystem, why not have them as unversioned artifacts in your db? (Fossil supports this). Of course if you have multiple people working on it and many assets, other solutions would be better (shared cloud drives, etc). But for my use case of a storing textual information only (and perhaps a demo video, which many Git users often keep a video in their source and link it in the readme), Fossil works great to keep all my stuff together in the same context.

I explicitly dislike the idea of using Git as the backing store. Forget the fact that Git is not native on Windows and is immensely bloated; the actual .git folder is a mess for backup systems when working locally compared to a single database file.

New comment by wps in "Before GitHub"

wps — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:31:56 +0000

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets, etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file.

I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easily allows me to get right back into the context of a project, niche details and agreements had with a client, etc. No need to pollute the codebase or gather together a million emails or notetaking software just to get back up to speed.

It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git.

New comment by wps in "Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor"

wps — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:29:04 +0000

Has anyone here used https://pikchr.org/ from the creator of SQLite?

New comment by wps in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

wps — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:58:41 +0000

Hello. You missed the point I was making drastically. Of course for software that I build personally I can do all that, but not for all the random stuff in my system that I’m trusting maintainers to package for me, or otherwise good PKGBUILDS in the AUR. You physically cannot have the bandwidth to be on top of these supply chain issues all the time.

Also, semantic versioning is not some golden goose that fixes this issue, update embargoes help, but that doesn’t require semver. Vendoring dependencies is not a scalable solution for all the software people use.

New comment by wps in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

wps — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:31:17 +0000

Genuinely how are you supposed to make sure that none of the software you have on your system pulls this in?

It’s things like this that make me want to swap to Qubes permanently, simply as to not have my password manager in the same context as compiling software ever.

New comment by wps in "Installing a Let's Encrypt TLS certificate on a Brother printer with Certbot"

wps — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:40:19 +0000

My router doesn’t have a WPS button, so I also had to use the two button interface. Not fun having to cycle through some 50 plus ASCII characters for the WiFi password. I’m pretty sure you can emulate the button press in openwrt with some package though. It was faster to just enter the password than to figure all that out.

New comment by wps in "POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"

wps — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:36:43 +0000

I just use HN as my comment platform. I have a Hugo short code that (very respectfully!) grabs the comments on a full rebuild, but only if those comments are not already cached and if the post is less than 7 days old. The formatting looks quite good on my site. Feel free to check it out at the bottom of this post: https://mketab.org/blog/sqlite_kdbx

New comment by wps in "GrapheneOS: Duress Pin/Password"

wps — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:24:51 +0000

For sure, but these LARP situations are mostly based on defending against a highly motivated and powerful entity like the government.

But other situations like against thievery, domestic abuse, or brute force deterrent (ie: setting a simple duress code that is likely to be triggered, say 1111), it has the potential to work well.

Graphene brings out some of the best of android. Profiles are first class citizens, private spaces within the owner profile (I think all profiles can have them now?), and app pinning are great.

New comment by wps in "GrapheneOS: Duress Pin/Password"

wps — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:38:09 +0000

The main critique I’ve seen of the duress pin is that it causes undue trouble. The obvious counter argument is that if you genuinely have the need for a duress pin, it’s worth its weight in gold. If the severity of the charge or physical punishment (in countries without due process) would in any way be less by NOT having xyz data on your phone, then it’s helped. Say, the difference between 10 years for destruction of evidence and 80 years for espionage.

New comment by wps in "Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL"

wps — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:34:35 +0000

The web server that powers fossil was also written by its author! It’s nice that unlike git instaweb you don’t need to install an additional web server just to see a read only view of your commits.

New comment by wps in "Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL"

wps — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:32:57 +0000

I use Fossil for all of my long term projects. It can even import Git repositories if you want to try it out.

Today I was working on a semester paper for a non-technical class. It is versioned in fossil and I have all my miscellaneous ideas, initial outline, and the paper guidelines in the Wiki. The branching also makes much more sense, and I’ve used it for major revisions of the paper or its structure.

Fossil is legitimately awesome, and I lament the fact that Git gained popularity over it.

New comment by wps in "Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL"

wps — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:26:20 +0000

Fossil itself is a C binary, not a database. Maybe they meant that Fossil’s source code is hosted in Fossil, or that Fossil repositories are SQLite files? I don’t exactly know either.

New comment by wps in "Ask HN: Most beautiful personal blog UI you have ever seen?"

wps — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:39:44 +0000

I quite like this one: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

Although it is a bit slow to load sometimes.

New comment by wps in "iPhone 17e"

wps — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:24:18 +0000

I think the most valuable part of this “e” lineup is the in-house developed modem. The power and security benefits are probably enormous.

New comment by wps in "Switch to Claude without starting over"

wps — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:28:51 +0000

Well, the masses are wrong. See: insane amounts of compute wasted on “thank you”, “haha true”, “redo it”, etc. I think the UI should be designed to avoid misuse, and I think an ever growing distillation of your most common traits is not a good use of context length. If you want it, specify it. Maybe even hard limits on chat length, why are we 20 replies deep in a single chat? A user friendly option could be a single button that distills that chat down, and opens a new one with prebuilt instructions to continue the conversation. I’m no product designer though, just some thoughts.

New comment by wps in "Switch to Claude without starting over"

wps — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:24:32 +0000

Gemini’s web UI and mobile app are horrible. Gemini outputs malformed links that lead BACK to gemini.google.com. There are constant bugs with the side panel not showing your chats or the current chat timing out for no reason. Also, the mobile app has an issue if your text input is too long where the entire text entry box lags, even to the point of locking up the entire app. Openrouter’s web ui runs circles around all the frontier lab UIs. I even prefer their PWA to any of these mobile apps.