News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

davidkellis

Didn't l0phtcrack do this like 25 years ago?
Re:Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest on Friday December 19, 2025 @11:45AM (#46327872)
Some amateur radio folks do something along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...
Does this affect the linux version of homebrew? I'm hoping this has no effect.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) on Sunday November 09, 2025 @06:02PM (#45870117)
Vibe coding a programming language: https://github.com/davidkellis/able
Re:Should I Use a Carousel? (2013) on Saturday June 07, 2025 @10:18PM (#44214093)
How many other user interactions are generally considered objectively bad practice? Sure, there may be a time and place, but what is frequently overused?

Toasts:

- https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux

- https://youtu.be/LeCKu0HqGFQ?si=xKApVFSqdzLGF0SD

Modals (being a special case of modes):

- https://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/

Modes:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/

- https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/timed-modes/

What else?

Re:Forgejo: A self-hosted lightweight software forge on Sunday January 19, 2025 @12:30AM (#42753987)
It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.
Re:Quill v2 – Rich text editor on Friday April 19, 2024 @01:51PM (#40089916)
At first I couldn't figure out why Quill was being posted again, but now I see that a long awaited version 2.0 was released 3 days ago (see https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/ ). Thank you for the heads-up!
Re:Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn't (2011) on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @01:00PM (#39457182)
These are not new, but my takeaways from https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2020/which_parsing_approach.ht... and https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog/2020/09/16/challeging-L... are to embrace various forms of LR parsing. https://github.com/igordejanovic/parglare is a very capable GLR parser, and I've been keeping a close eye on it for use in my projects.
Re:Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort? (2023) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @08:25AM (#38445436)
It's definitely a good reference, but I'll never read them cover to cover. Not unless I'm having trouble sleeping. :-)
ELI5 please?

Ask HN: What software license is most appropriate to build a business on?

Source code licensing seems to be a sensitive topic, and I have my own opinions, but I'd rather just be frank and ask the group: What are the best open source licensing options to build a business on?I benefit greatly from open source - standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. I enjoy making my projects available for others to use freely. At the end of the day, I'm selfish - I care...

( Read More... | 1 comment | on HN )
My tin-hat alter ego says the three letter agencies are creating these companies for the sole purpose of then purchasing the data and skirting the law. But that guy is crazy. ha ha.
Re:Royal Navy Says Quantum Navigation Test a Success on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:00AM (#36223026)
Sounds like inertial navigation to me.
Re:Keyd: Linux Key Remapper on Saturday June 03, 2023 @10:40AM (#36177067)
I was looking for the same thing. This is what I hacked together to scratch the itch: https://github.com/davidkellis/mackeys

I run PopOS

I'm self hosting Ghost for blogging, Home Assistant for smart home controller, and in the middle of setting up Vaultwarden for passwords. I also run a lot of stuff off my Synology - Synology Drive instead of Dropbox or Google Drive, Synology Photos instead of Google Photos. I don't have a great solution for email or phone - emails is paid hosting through Zoho and use Android for phone. I'd like to get off those. It's all a long drawn out process.
I'm in the same boat. Trying my best to de-FAANG my life. Self hosting as much as possible, with as little management overhead as possible, but I'm still stuck on Android and I don't know how to break free.
What are the best alternatives to iOS and Android? Is it reasonable to consider the hardware itself "safe", given that the software tracks and calls home about every single thing it does? What are the alternatives?
Re:Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing? on Friday January 22, 2021 @03:23PM (#25875926)
Everyone hates paywalls
Re:Parsing Algorithms on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:14PM (#24900023)
I'd like to see something like this for practitioners. I kind of have a feel for what's out there, but I don't know of anything that is: 1. pleasant to use 2. simple 3. scannerless 4. supports left recursion that produces a left-associative parse
My wife and I homeschool our children. We are part of a local homeschool co-op, and the kids love it.

I've been working fully remote for a year and a half, and homeschooling doesn't hinder my remote work in any way. I periodically have a "break-in", where one of the kids barges into the office during a meeting, but it's no more interruption than any other common interruption (e.g. someone comes in late, someone pardons themself to the restroom, etc.).

Re:RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @02:50PM (#23990278)
At some point it makes more sense to switch to Crystal.
Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @10:10PM (#22188537)
I saw vlang.io a few months ago. Every time I come back to the site, my jaw hits the ground again. I am utterly impressed by Alexander's productivity - it blows me away every time I consider it.

I think V is an impressive language, but it isn't quite geared toward my vision of what a language ought to be.

I am more a Rubyist than a C, Rust, or Go developer, and so my preference is for a higher level language that's a little more pleasant to use and doesn't make me think about some details that I consider "irrelevant". I'm firmly in the "sufficiently smart compiler" camp, and think that I shouldn't have to think about those low level details that only matter for the sake of performance - the compiler ought to handle that for me.

Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:45PM (#22177520)
No. I was pretty naive in my initial attempts. I tried for many months to make Laurence Tratt's Algorithm 2 (see https://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/tratt__direct_le... ) work, but ultimately I failed. I recall running into some problem with my implementation of Tratt's idea that led me to conclude that his Algorithm 2 doesn't work as stated. My reasoning is buried in a git commit message from many months ago - I'd have to go look it up.

My takeaway from Tratt's explanation was that the general technique of growing the seed bottom-up style when in left-recursion - I think I've also seen that idea termed "recursive ascent" somewhere else but I can't place it offhand - seemed reasonable, so that's what I kept working on until I figured out something that seemed to work.

Later on, I ran across https://github.com/PhilippeSigaud/Pegged/wiki/Left-Recursion, which describes Sergio Medeiros' technique at a high level. One of the nice things I used from the Pegged project was the unit test suite. I re-implemented some of the unit tests from Pegged in my own PEG implementation and discovered that it failed at those unit tests.

It took me another number of months to figure out why my implementation failed the unit tests. I re-jiggered my implementation to make it handle the scenarios captured by those unit tests, and then naively thought "hey, it works!"...

All was well until I ran across another set of unit tests in the Autumn PEG parser (see https://github.com/norswap/autumn). My implementation failed some of those as well. After another number of months, I had a fix for those too.

Long long long story short, this process continued until I couldn't find any more unit tests that my implementation would fail, so once again I'm at the point where I think "well, I think it works".

There have been a number of occasions where I've thought "if this doesn't work, I'm just going to re-implement Pegged in Crystal!". Perhaps that's what I should've done. Ha ha! In a few months, when I find another test case that breaks my implementation, I may just do that. We'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. Fingers crossed. :-)

Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:13PM (#22176513)
I'm trying to build a programming language that might best be characterized as rust - ownership + GC + goroutines (coroutines with an automatic yield semantic).

My rationale for starting this project was that I like specific features or facilities of many individual languages, but I dislike those languages for a host of other reasons. Furthermore, I dislike those languages enough that I don't want to use them to build the projects I want to build.

I'm still at a relatively early point in the project, but it has been challenging so far. I'm implementing the compiler in Crystal, and I needed a PEG parser combinator library or a parser generator that targeted Crystal, but there wasn't a PEG parser in Crystal that supported left recursive grammar rules in a satisfactory way, so that was sub-project number 1. It took two years, I'm ashamed to say, but now I have a functioning PEG parser (with seemingly good support for left recursive grammar rules) in Crystal that I can use to implement the grammar for my language.

There is still a ton more to be done - see http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/LifeAfterParsing... for a list of remaining ToDos - but I'm optimistic I can make it work.

Older »