News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

JayGuerette

Re:SSH Secret Menu on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @08:44AM (#47334851)
I use ProxyCommand in edge-case devices where key auth is not an option and the password is not controlled by me. ProxyCommand points to a script the retrieves the password from the vault, puts it on the clipboard for pasting, reminds me via stderr it's done so, and then proxies the connection.
Re:How Virtual Textures Really Work on Friday February 06, 2026 @06:19PM (#46919520)
A good portion of the world and Lenna herself have asked that image be retired.
Re:Assorted Less(1) Tips on Friday January 02, 2026 @09:40AM (#46465184)
Also -X or --no-init

" ... desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen."

I prefer to not clear the screen. I usually want to continue to refer to something or even copy/paste from the content to my current command line.

Re:How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking on Friday December 12, 2025 @07:30PM (#46250735)
I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.
About 8y ago we were looking at a used Mini Cooper. Car Fax reported no major problems. I went to the bank to get a loan. They reported 2 minor and 1 major accident that the car had been in that were NOT reported by Car Fax. Once we knew where to look we were able to see evidence of the damage & repairs to the car.

I think that if lending institutions don't trust Car Fax then we probably shouldn't either.

Any TV that doesn't have your WiFi password is a dumb TV. No TV I've owned to dated has required network connectivity to work.
My pet peeve, grep unnecessarily followed by awk/sed.

Original: df -h | grep "$partition" | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/%//'

Efficient: df -h | grep -Po "\d+(?=%\s+$partition)"

Re:Running DOS Apps on Windows from 1.0 to 95 (2020) on Saturday April 13, 2024 @09:05AM (#40022892)
"I'm not sure why it is that Windows 3.1 is the go-to when people name a Windows OS of this era."

It's because business was the primary market for PCs and Windows 3.11 added a network stack and changed everything. Networking was no longer an arcane science that required 3rd party software. Office networks became almost trivial to set up. The impact of this on the world is impossible to overstate. Everybody who used Windows in this era used Win 3.1(1).

Re:Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder? on Saturday January 21, 2023 @04:52PM (#34470982)
Apple isn't creating neural hashes for CSAM detection, as they'd have to be in possession of source material to create them, so they're getting them from someone else. Since it's indistinguishable in it's hash form, when the supplier becomes interested in looking for something else, nobody will ever know.
Re:XFCE 4.18 Released on Thursday December 15, 2022 @12:37PM (#34002926)
I've used XFCE seemingly forever, at least 20 years.

In recent years I've grown to dislike Thunar and a variety of other things that were mostly GTK issues and some XFCE issues. I was really frustrated with clicking on the system tray and having that click register as a click on the menu that popped up, that just so happened to be 'Quit', and closing the app.

Then I upgraded my computer in a huge jump. Sure, games were faster, but I wouldn't enjoy the results of my investment at any given moment. So I switched to KDE for the first time ever, with animations and sexiness everywhere. It's got it's issues, and it's multi-monitor support is really sub-par, but so many things suddenly work better.

Best example: The flow of clicking on a ZIP to download and ultimately looking at the extacted output in new folder is suddenly effortless and intuitive.

I love the polish of KDE and while I'm tempted to give XFCE another try, the thought of giving up on the effortless sanity of KDE for GTK funk makes me shudder.

Re:What Is DOS/4GW? on Sunday November 20, 2022 @05:52PM (#33686385)
"... a terminate-and-stay-resident program (or TSR) was a computer program running under DOS that uses a system call to return control to DOS as though it has finished, but remains in computer memory so it can be reactivated later. Needless to say, this was extremely unreliable."

There were very likely some hacky TSRs that caused problems, but in my experience most were extremely reliable. We used an off-the-shelf TSR to enhance a motion control system that laser scribed ceramic vacuum checks for silicon wafer fabrication. Those things cost $5k in 1990, and took ~20h of processing, increasing their value to $15k; we wouldn't screw around with something that was inherently "extremely unreliable".

I've used pushover for years as well. I wish they would charge me $5/y instead of a $5/lifetime. I've asked them to do that. I want this service to last.

I set up Tasker on my phone such that when a specific low-priority (no visible/audible alert) message from pushover, containing only a hash key, is received it picks it up and does an HTTPS request to my self-hosted server to retrieve the actual notification text.

I have a bash/websocat client connected 24/7 to wss://client.pushover.net/ as well that I should probably put up on git for other people.

Re:Pipe Viewer on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @10:46AM (#33263004)
pv is a great tool. One of it's lesser known features is throttling; transfer a file without dominating your bandwidth:

pv -L 200K < bigfile.iso | ssh somehost 'cat > bigfile.iso'

Complete with a progress bar, speed, and ETA.

Re:CZ5B (Chinese rocket) Reentry Prediction on Saturday July 30, 2022 @10:19AM (#32287002)
1. Disguise payload as space junk 2. Design to "fall" on populated area 3. Say "oops" 4. ...
Re:Acme Thttpd on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @12:22AM (#31663156)
For static content and cgi-bin, busybox is much faster.
Re:Show HN: Favicons for HN on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:35AM (#31097563)
Thanks!
Re:Show HN: Favicons for HN on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:18AM (#31097323)
My version, better alignment, grayscaled icons, eliminates duplicates on navigation:

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name     hacker news favicons
    // @match  https://news.ycombinator.com/*
    // ==/UserScript==
    for (let link of document.querySelectorAll('.titlelink')) {
      if (link.attributes["hasIcon"] != 'true') {
        const domain = new URL(link.href).hostname
        const imageUrl = `https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip3/${domain}.ico`
        const image = document.createElement('img')
        link.attributes["hasIcon"] = 'true'
        image.src = imageUrl
        image.width = 16
        image.height = 16
        image.style.paddingRight = '0.50em'
        image.style.paddingLeft = '0.50em'
        image.style.verticalAlign = 'middle';
        image.style.filter = 'grayscale(1)';
        link.prepend(image)
      }
    }
Re:PHP Pipes in 156 Bytes on Thursday March 03, 2022 @11:05AM (#30542744)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan
Re:What I wish I knew when learning F# on Thursday October 14, 2021 @09:42AM (#28864084)
His claimed inspiration, Hillel Wayne’s post “Why Python is my Favorite Language”, is a piece of fluff that basically says "I only like the things I already know". I was so uninspired, I couldn't read further.
Re:The Invention of a New Pasta Shape on Saturday March 20, 2021 @04:05PM (#26525732)
Looks like a variation of lanterne: https://www.alamy.com/lanterne-pasta-image2466309.html
Re:Time to Upgrade Your Monitor on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @05:44PM (#23557142)
37% of programmers are using Retina displays? Since the OSX market share is ~8.5%, your numbers are way off.