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binaryapparatus

Show HN: Replaced news reading with two tiny editions a day, then made it public

https://cutthroat.news/

I am passionate news reader "to stay informed", which used to take 60-90 minutes daily. Then somewhere around February I wrote local news reader to fetch feeds and articles, feed them to AI along with my profile, ending with very tight digest of everything that interests me, joy and few minutes to read. Lots of Python and exposed scripting wires but it worked well. Then other people saw what I...

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I see it more like platform for sharing personal most important message at the moment, with occasional link to one's project, but it is not intended as marketing tool. Appeal should be that (with enough users, I don't want to simulate them in any way) next message can be something very interesting.
Author here, just adding a few more details.

What AI told me to tell you:

In today's overwhelming digital landscape, it's easy for individual thoughts and moments to get lost in the noise. I wanted to create a space where everyone has an equal opportunity to have their voice (or at least a short burst of it!) seen by a potentially massive audience, without the need for building a profile or fighting algorithms.

Flamabl.com offers a super simple premise: type in your message, and every 15 seconds, my system randomly selects one message from all currently connected users to display for everyone to see. It's part luck, part shared moment, and a whole lot of "what's next?". When your message "wins," you get a fun burst of fireworks! You can also vote on the messages you see, and each message with votes gets a permanent link with its vote history. The catch? Messages only stay in the pool while you're actively on the site, emphasizing the "now" of the experience.

Who can benefit from it? Anyone who has a fleeting thought they want to share, a quick question for the world, a link they think might be interesting, or even just wants to experience the unpredictable stream of collective consciousness. It's for the curious, the spontaneous, and those who enjoy a little bit of internet randomness. Plus, if you have something you want to promote (a new project, a cause, etc.), it's a free shot at being seen by a potentially huge audience for 15 seconds!

Why it's interesting to me:

It's websockets all the way down, providing the same message on all connected devices every 15 seconds. The server is written in C++, split into several components, so if the number of users starts to grow, I can easily roll out a few more "workernodes" to handle the websocket connections for the end users. Crucially, all the server components also use websockets for internal communication, allowing them to reside on the same server or be distributed across several. The frontend is simple React code. Everything is highly optimized so that potentially millions of users can see the same message simultaneously and vote.

Show HN: Flamabl.com – Real-Time Global Collective Thought Stream

https://flamabl.com/

I just launched flamabl.com, a unique experiment in shared online consciousness. It is technically interesting, ready to scale, and something I wanted to make for a while. It could flop or be the next big thing, time will tell. Every 15 seconds, a random message from connected users is displayed globally. Submit your thought, and you might just get your 15 seconds of fame. Vote on what you see....

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Re:ASCII Art: From a Commodity into an Obscurity on Thursday December 28, 2023 @06:08AM (#38792236)
Found somewhere on stackoverflow many years ago and being my shell banner ever since:

    .-------.
    |  Hi   |
    '-------'
        ^      (\_/)
        '----- (O.o)
               (> <)
Re:ZSA Voyager: Low profile split keyboard on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @07:32AM (#37403631)
I am happy zsa/ergodox ez user for many years and was waiting for something like this from zsa, since moonlander wasn't for my hands. My current ergodox layout doesn't use keys that are removed on voyager, so everything plays perfectly. I can vouch for the zsa product quality, since my ergodox didn't hiccup for many years with lots of typing.

It is hard to explain to people who never tried qmk layers that more keys doesn't mean better keyboard, having proper layers on home row is many times more ergonomic. One of the things that don't click unless you try I guess.

> How does it deal with interrupted backups?

Any new backup is hardlinked against previous in temporary 'in-progress' directory, then renamed to proper name at the end. If backup breaks, new 'saf backup' by default first removes 'in-progress' than starts things again (linking with latest good one) but you can 'saf backup --resume' to try to finish interrupted one. I prefer clean try again (which is the default) but --resume works well too.

> Can it automatically prune backups older than N days?

Yes, manually by 'saf prune' on top of 'saf backup' doing prune itself. Prune periods are defined in each .saf.conf, per backup source location, with the defaults of 2/30/60/730/3650 days, for all/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly backups. All defaults are easy to change per source.

> I don’t see anything about encryption.

saf doesn't deal with encryption, only with transport. I prefer to use other specialized tool for the encryption if I have such backup target that needs one.

With me that's absolutely okay. We all need more choice and HN is a great way to learn about alternatives. Few nice things I borrowed from those two scripts mentioned in readme (credit given) wouldn't be possible without alternatives and open source.
"saf bugs, rsync bugs/misconfiguration"

On top of many cheap backups, I am also trying not to rely on any single peace of technology (I know, it is not ideal that hardware and OS remains the same on any computer no matter what backup is used). If I use saf as my preferred rsync based solution I will also use Borg or duply/duplicity as a additional backup to avoid rsync bugs.

Having two or more rsync based backups, so they all go trough the same rsync pipe, makes much less sense than mixing completely different backup solutions, right?

Those same questions always bug me, and I did try all from very smart to very brute force solutions. I love ZFS but then we can question ZFS and OS bugs in the same manner as saf or rsync -- that rabbit hole is deep and quickly becomes expensive since ZFS may need ECC ram and other more expensive components.

Lately, in last few years, I am leaning towards using many cheap backups instead of clever and more expensive ones, with the idea that many of them can't all break at the same time. Yes occasional checks are good but safety in numbers seems as a good strategy.

It is not an accident that saf tag line says "one backup is saf, two are safe, three are safer" ;)

In my understanding, rsnapshot is equivalent of 'saf backup' which is only one bit of saf functionality. saf has few more commands to be able to see and analyze what's on the backup target side.

rsnapshot uses centralized rsnapshot.conf, saf has git style .saf.conf per each backup source location.

Apart from using rsync, there are more differences than similarities between rshapshot and saf.

Author here. Yes, I am also the one that loves to see alternatives on topic of interest to me on HN. However putting an effort to publish different take on something already 'solved' is either because I want my own solution no matter what (I don't) or because other solutions didn't fully cover all my use cases (they didn't). I would gladly use somebody else code instead of my own, if that was possible.

Two scripts linked at the bottom of README.md are almost perfect and I used one or another for years, but one of them sometimes misses to hard link with previous backup, creating new full backup and wasting resources -- not something that's easy to detect since they all look correct before 'du' or similar analysis.

saf solves few of the problems I faced during the years in a elegant way: multiple targets, target related commands, reliability. Why not XY? Why not saf?

Show HN: Saf – simple, reliable, rsync-based, battle tested, rounded backup

https://github.com/dusanx/saf

I had this backup code working reliably for years, using local file system, vps/dedicated server, or remote storage for backup, then I finally get time to wrap README, iron few missing switches and publish. Should be production ready and reliable, so it could be useful to others. Contributors are welcome.<https://github.com/dusanx/saf>

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Re:Portugal’s digital nomad bubble poised to pop on Monday January 09, 2023 @04:13AM (#34308348)
Two+ years in Algarve, with registered activity and paying all the taxes here. Having foreign income all my taxes fall within sweet NHR regime. Can't say anything bad about bureaucracy, with proper lawyer help it is slow-ish but very decent process.

Lease prices are driven by taxes and tourism, short term (AL) accommodation is taxed at 6%, long term lease contracts go from 30% (for 1+ year contracts) down to 10% (for 10+ years contracts). Obviously landlords are pushed into short term accommodation which creates lack of long term offers. Matter of getting taxes more fair over long/short term categories would fix the market immediately.

Quality of life and nice people are above anything else so I wouldn't change a thing from this current setup.

Show HN: I Made a Decent Android TV Web Browser

After some effort to find decent Android TV Web Browser that can work without hacks and support basic 'mouse' navigation using TV remote, I wrote one myself.Doesn't spy at all and has no idea what you are looking at. All the traffic goes directly to Android TV device with no intermediary servers. Under active development so with feedback it can only get better.Very useful, very decent...

( Read More... | no comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Tridactyl: A Vim-like interface for Firefox on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @05:18AM (#24636891)
Huge Tridactyl fan here, it works beautifully. I am using it for over a year, ever since I spotted its mention at Suckless 'rocks' page: https://suckless.org/rocks/
Re:Holy Panda Keyswitch on Friday February 14, 2020 @10:48AM (#22327498)
> Weight: 67g bottom out if using Panda springs, 100gf bottom out if using Halo True springs

That means they require more force than Model M? Too much I think.

Re:Vim tricks on Monday June 03, 2019 @04:37AM (#20081411)
Great tip, thanks, trying it now. Seems nicer and easier to tweak than spacemacs, from my perspective.
Re:Vim tricks on Monday June 03, 2019 @02:37AM (#20080900)
I was using/am using:

    Plug 'tmhedberg/SimpylFold'
    "Plug 'python-mode/python-mode', { 'branch': 'develop' }
    "let g:pymode_python = 'python3'
... in different combinations. Deleting any char takes surprising amount of time, so much so that I usually mark block to delete instead of char by char even if it is three char block. Of course I may be using wrong plugins, however that's what I found that should be used in various articles online.
Re:Vim tricks on Sunday June 02, 2019 @07:24PM (#20079094)
Interesting, I don't often use Python but recent project had few 3000+ lines .py files, which make Vim _very_ unresponsive when editing. Other languages weren't so problematic but Python code is what made me look at Emacs direction at the first place.
Re:Vim tricks on Sunday June 02, 2019 @07:13PM (#20079030)
"Exobrains, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins, functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using Emacs."

This is disturbingly accurate from my point of view. I keep wondering if I should finally jump ship and stop tweaking vim with questionable results. Spacemacs? Pure emacs + evil? Suggestions welcome.

"Nidavellir is real? Seriously? I mean, that place is a legend. They make the most powerful, horrific weapons to ever torment the universe. I would very much like to go there, please."
Re:From Vimperator to Tridactyl (2018) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @11:26AM (#19185193)
I first heard of Tridactyl because it was listed on https://suckless.org/rocks/ page. It filled huge gap left from Vimperator and no complaints on my side. Works well.
Re:Ask HN: Best things in your bash_profile/aliases? on Sunday January 13, 2019 @04:29PM (#18898815)

    function convert-decimaltobinary(){
        n="$1"
        bit=""
        while [ "$n" -gt 0 ]; do
            bit="$(( n&1 ))$bit";
            : $(( n >>= 1 ))
        done
        printf "%s\n" "$bit"
    }
    function convert-binarytodecimal(){
        echo "$((2#$1))"
    }
    function convert-hextodecimal(){
        echo $(( 16#$1 ))
    }
Re:My one-liner Linux Dropbox client on Tuesday December 25, 2018 @06:16AM (#18756995)
Huge additional plus, entr does not rely exclusively on inotify, it is also 'BSD kqueue wrapper. It is the only command line utility that I found that allows cross platform (linux/BSD) scripting with file system events.

I have few scripts that rely on entr and I am always sure they are OS agnostic.

Re:DigitalOcean launches its container service on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @05:36PM (#18659649)
Sorry if off-topic: How does DO compare to Linode? I have lots of experience with Linode but since I hear good things about DO I would love to try it out.
I did initial plunge into Haskell when I started using xmonad, looking at config file was visibly 'something else'. I would probably recommend starting with Haskell first -- if you want to properly blow your mind that's the way to go. All the principles are common so diving into Elixir took very little time afterwards. Some principles are getting their way into imperative languages and it is much easier to grasp them on pure functional level first. Understanding and using map, filter and reduce, in JS project, was much easier to grasp immediately because they borrow that logic from functional languages.

Elixir is beautiful but probably few notches easier to understand and write than Haskell. Reason I would start with Haskell is that it doesn't hide functional logic with syntactic sugar. For example variables in Elixir are not mutable but since you can assign to the variable already used in function, it can prevent programmer from understanding what immutable really means.

What an amazing language. I am working on a Elixir project, with a lot of Erlang peaces used directly. Integration is flawless and beautiful to observe. I do have many languages in my toolbox but only few of them were truly exciting for me, Haskell six or so years ago and Elixir/Erlang/OTP this year.
Re:Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? on Monday November 19, 2018 @03:34AM (#18484911)
https://newsboat.org/ Newsboat, fantastic RSS reader, built on top of newsbeuter.

http://www.mutt.org/ Mutt for email of course.

https://vifm.info/ Vifm file manager, I am using it for everything, not having any other file manager on my system.

https://github.com/pimutils/khal Khal for calendar.

https://github.com/scheibler/khard/ Khard for contacts.

https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer Vdirsyncer to sync calendar and contacts with any web calendar service.

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