News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ahnberg

Re:Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year on Thursday September 18, 2025 @04:16PM (#45294445)
I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3
Re:No Calls on Thursday January 16, 2025 @12:41PM (#42728353)
I totally love it!
I think the biggest issue is people who claim it can't be done and that the only way to accomplish this is to physically meet.

I feel like the biggest hinderance to making the most out of a remote option are the ones who prefer going to the office or explain all kinds of issues with "it's because we don't meet in person".

One just have to embrace and apply the mindset that it is possible. Different, surely, but still possible!

I'm not saying there is something WRONG with going to the office, it is lovely to hang out in person with lots of people, but it is very limiting in many ways as well. Just limiting in other ways than remote. You learn to deal with both, when you need to, though. The issue is mostly that people deal with the office-problems but don't care much about dealing with the remote-problems.

Worth mentioning is The Echo Nests old genremap; which is also very interesting to roam around in: https://everynoise.com/
Re:For 110 years, climate change has been in the news on Friday August 19, 2022 @09:11AM (#32520534)
Sadly the fact that it HAS been written about for so long just fuels the fire (no pun intended) for the sceptics.

Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have: "See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"

Re:Being on call sucks on Wednesday July 20, 2022 @09:00AM (#32165147)
I'm one of the few persons I ever heard of that actually enjoyed being on-call. I believe it goes with my puzzle problem solving mentality to an extent. Being randomly challenged with a problem to look at where you might not know the solution, simply excites me.

Combining on-call duty with an approach of weeding out repeating issues, build better systems and ensuring that unnecessary calls don't happen is key of course, being woken up 25 times for silly predictable errors is pointless and draining.

And finally having an employer that doesn't expect you to be in at 8am if you've been up all night is also very important, catching up on sleep is necessary to manage your balance and health. But given this freedom, I totally dig it. :)

Re:ZeroTier Business SSO on Thursday June 09, 2022 @05:41PM (#31687297)
The issue isn't so much that one single separate service is priced in a certain way. When you add up dozens and dozens of services for various split needs for the business, and each one of them has a $/user/month thing and then to build decent security into it all, you double or triple that amount per service. It adds up, very quickly.

For the good of the Internet, the security of the global entirety of things, it is very very wise if everyone makes an attempt to make the defaults sane and secure, including things like this. It surely is a differentiator between "individual" and "business", but it shouldn't have to be. I agree wholehartedly with the sso.tax site that it's just one way for business to attempt to make revenue out of a basic need that any modern company would have.

Make the profit of real value added services for enterprises, automation, integrations, support, advanced features that gives insights or saves money or whatever; but don't be sneaky with the security aspect, is basically what I'm saying.

Compare it with streaming services. No one can argue against Netflix being particularly expensive. Anyone can afford it. It's just one latte per month. But when you not only want to consume what is on Netflix, you have to get another service, and another, and another, and another. Very very soon the aggregated cost starts to be very noticeable for a lot of people. And piracy makes a comeback.

Re:Tell HN: Please Stop Using Imgur on Sunday June 05, 2022 @10:37AM (#31631362)
You just have to find the direct link to the image and then use that, and it seems to work always for me so far?

https://i.imgur.com/XjeS3dG.png for example.

Re:Ask HN: Teach me something new on Saturday April 30, 2022 @09:30AM (#31215936)
Then you can even superpowerboost the ^r by installing fzf! https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
Re:Am I too old to become a professional programmer? on Sunday April 10, 2022 @06:22PM (#30982321)
No.
Re:Keep a Log on Friday December 03, 2021 @06:01PM (#29436716)
This is such a valuable recommendation. I've been doing the same since 20+ years back. On and off I've been bad at it, but I always end up coming back and continuing.

I think of it as more of a daily diary though, I mix random notes of things I've done, thought of doing, or interesting links and/or command-lines I've found useful so I don't have to reinvent them as often in the future.

It has proven to be immensely useful for myself. Can highly recommend!

My way is mainly org-mode files through Emacs over the years. Now having switched primarily to VScode I use a simplified org-mode version to get similar feeling, and it works pretty well. Everything is mostly text anyways!

Re:PuTTY 0.75 Is Released on Saturday May 08, 2021 @12:25PM (#27088524)
Noteworthy security fix:

- On Windows, if a server sent control sequences at high speed to reconfigure the terminal window title repeatedly, PuTTY would pass on all those title changes to Windows itself at high enough speed to make the window system unresponsive, resulting in a denial of service to other local applications.

Noteworthy UI fix:

- The terminal was unable to display Unicode characters in the range U+F000 to U+F1FF (part of the private-use area).

This latest one is amazing for the ones of us who like to pimp our terminal using nerdfonts, fancy icons in the terminal and such. This now finally works well!

Re:A practical guide to reducing loneliness on Monday April 26, 2021 @01:04PM (#26944968)
Kindness goes the longest way, for sure!
Re:A practical guide to reducing loneliness on Monday April 26, 2021 @01:03PM (#26944953)
A lot of my meaningful contacts and relationship building has been because I didn't put down the phone. Being an introvert in a crazy extrovert world is insanely draining.

Social media, digital communication and so forth has surely saved a huge part of my life. It has opened doors, allowed me to connect and establish friendships with people all over the world. It allows me to keep in touch with remote friends and close ones alike. All in all summing up to the feeling that I am less lonely.

Excluding Corona time this also means that I have people to actually meet when I want to go out. So it is not a replacement for "real life" meeting with people. It is an augmentation.

Each to their own; but I personally am somewhat tired of the constant norm of bashing on "digital" and phone and so forth.

I totally love it. Being an introvert and a digital-first person this is amazing for me. Even I miss some social interactions now and then, but productivity wise, mental health, feeling useful and happy this is insanely good for someone like me.

I dread the day the world returns to normal from THIS perspective, but of course longing for the sake of business owners, everyone who feels bad in this environment and so on.

At least for a moment my way and preferences has become the norm, and perhaps people who prefer the other normal will somewhat appreciate the constant struggles people like me have in the normal world instead. How they feel now in isolation, I feel every day of my life in regular society that they long for and that is the norm.

Not exactly the same thing, but I have 3 physical monitors in Windows and when I need to go into focus-mode I sometimes use an application called MultiScreenBlank[1] to dim or blank out the screens I do not want to bother me.

[1]: http://multiscreenblank.nookkin.com/

Re:Ciphey – Automated decryption tool using AI and NLP on Sunday August 02, 2020 @03:22PM (#24030924)
I built a docker container based on phusion/baseimage so anyone can try this as long as they have docker installed. Just run this to have it decrypt to "Testing": $ docker run ahnberg/ciphey ciphey -t "01010100 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111"
Maybe they will get around to fixing their In-Reply-To header removal madness one of these decades too, would be something!

Tired of Microsoft users subscribed to mailinglists constantly breaking threading.

Do you have something published yet? Code, articles or anything? Sounds very interesting!
Re:Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume? on Monday February 03, 2020 @06:12PM (#22230421)
You can explain it either honestly with medical issue during an interview, phrase it as a sabbatical where you focused on something else or yourself for a year to figure out what you wanted, and did projects on the side instead of working.

Or a "fun" way is to claim you worked for any government agency who would never verify or deny that you ever worked for them. :P

Mandatory link and strong recommendation: https://xkcd.com/1179/
Re:Relearning to Type on Saturday October 12, 2019 @11:29AM (#21233884)
I believe the pain comes from having a "proper" qwerty finger setting, where you have 8 of your fingers on asdf and hjkl. Then typing some combinations is awkward.

I never got the hang of that style but rather evolved into some fluent version where my fingers float around and sometimes I will use different fingers to type the same latters based on what I previously typed.

This has allowed me to end up at a top speed of around 160wpm using normal qwerty keyboard layouts.

I always felt that switching to a totally new layout crippled me when moving around between customer servers, mobile devices and so forth.

But I totally get that others have had different experiences and I appreciate that there are alternatives out there. I love choice.

Very interesting read!

Re:How Slack Harms Projects on Sunday August 18, 2019 @09:40AM (#20730067)
Flawed logic. The idea with asynchronous communication such as e-mail, chat and such is that you CAN be slow in replying, if you chose to. Establish that culture, and this is not a problem.

Most of these articles against chat or digital communication base their criticism on the fact that people can't focus, can't plan, can't decide what to do. With that assumption or decision nothing will work.

Figure out how to focus instead, figure out how much chunk of time you as an individual need to perform a task and make progress. Then check e-mail, Slack, phone etc in between ... and it will be just fine. fud!

Re:Using Slack through an IRC client on Saturday January 12, 2019 @05:01PM (#18893515)
I can also recommend you to look at: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
I often use something like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/easyreader/boamfhe... to give a nice reading experience for lengthy articles. Works fairly well.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016) on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @05:12PM (#12850051)
Spotify | Network Engineer | New York | FULL TIME | ONSITE

We're looking to expand our internal network team at Spotify. My team is responsible for our global presence in all our offices, our VPN setup as well as supporting systems. Some travel will be required. We're looking for someone with prior experience in the field and someone who has worked with multiple vendors since we have a bit of a mixed stack. We also need the applicant to have experience with Linux administration and an automation mindset with an interest in scripting.

Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have at [email protected] but when reading the application and you feel you're a fit, please submit your application through the link and not directly in e-mail to me.

Job ad can be found at: https://www.spotify.com/se/jobs/view/oSVc3fwM/

Pro-tip: press space whenever you hear something you like and the song will continue playing, and you have a good chance to catch it. Also, clicking anywhere on the screen (while paused or not) takes you to the active song in Spotify.
Thank you for sharing. A very interesting read!

Older »