News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

tangoalpha

I used to use Spren app. It later disappeared. I still use an old apk that I preserved. Works great! This app looks great. Will try!
Re:Pipe Dreams – The life and times of Yahoo Pipes (2023) on Monday January 05, 2026 @03:57PM (#46504850)
Pipes was ahead of its time. Built a scraper and aggregator back in 2008-2010, fetching content from over 2000 sources, pumping all of it into a Drupal website. The amount of regex transformations and other things I had in that pipeline - is in hindsight - more complex, larger scale, and more convoluted that any other nifi or airflow pipelines I built later in my career. And all of it was free. What was possible was limited only by one's creativity!
Nice app. Using moto edge 60 pro. The app navigation gets hidden under the phone navigation icons. I'd like to pay. Except without user login, I am unable to figure out if the purchase can be linkedin to my 2-3 devices (each of which may use a different Google account)
Re:I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @10:58PM (#44058351)
Got permanent tinnitus due to damage to auditory nerve from an accident back in 2010.

Coping was hard. Distracting yourself with various things so you dont think about it was key.

Things to try - 1) Keeping yourself distracted or occupied and trying to not be conscious about it for 50% of the day to start with, gradually improving to 90% of the day 2) White noise apps for sleep 3) Carry ear plugs at all times. Plug them in if watching a movie in a theatre or attending to an Indian wedding. Prevents worsening of the situation.

To those out there: you're not alone. The journey is different for everyone, and what helps one person might not help another — but with patience and experimentation, many find ways to manage and live fully despite it.

Re:Orbit. Mozilla's AI Assistant for Firefox on Monday December 30, 2024 @09:47PM (#42555893)
Looks like there is no way i can use it without giving up on screen real estate. I'd love to have it pinned in the browser toolbar and I click it when I need it. But it wouldn't allow itself to be hidden and needs to have a floating circle taking up page real-estate.

Disabled it.

Show HN: Newton Eyes – AI-powered vision companion for the visually challenged

https://newton-eyes.app/

Hi HN,I'm excited to be working on Newton Eyes, an AI-powered app designed to be a vision companion for the visually challenged. By simply taking a picture, users receive a detailed description of their surroundings, enabling them to perceive the world in ways previously unimaginable.Features -------- AI-Driven Descriptions: Capture photos with your camera to get detailed, accurate...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
The tech stack check seems to fail every time. Would love to see with the tech stack details included. Nice and fast, otherwise!
"location": { "street": "853 Watsica Flat", "city": "North Biankaview", "state": "Wisconsin", "country": "India", "zip": "72621-2558", "coordinates": { "latitude": 6.5434, "longitude": -152.386 }

Could be a useful tool if this location data is coherent. State, City, Zip, Country and Lat/Lon are each of different places.

I used to run a small relatively unknown service back in the day when internet on mobile was still unaffordable in India.

People could sms to a number that I had procured with any keyword. The service send the user a list of 5 top results' domain names from Google results for that keyword. User would respond with a number (1-5). The service would send the 20 characters of the first h1 tag on the page, and first 140 characters of the first body tag on the page. (tyring it's best to not send any markup but just the text). Last 20 characters would be an ad.

It was buggy but it had decent traction initially. I didn't get any advertisers so for the most part of it the ad text was something like 'advertise here - with short link to contact from'

Reminds me of those days where every kb accessible on mobile was so valuable.

Re:Twitter restored ElonJet account on Thursday December 15, 2022 @06:23AM (#33997899)
Twitter TOS seems to have been updated just to allow this https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1603165961795903489
Not sure if it's the case elsewhere as well, but at least in India, email address on amazon orders are accessible to sellers if you made a purchase from a seller. I have had sellers reach out to me right after buying something from amazon, offering an incentive for a review.

Further, customer support agents can pull up your details as well. At least when there is an active ticket. I was reached out by one of the support executives confronting me from his personal mobile number after I left poor feedback for a chat interaction.

Amazon has little or no respect for data privacy especially in regions where there are no strict regulations that can cause them monetary loss through fines.

Since you mention it's in UK, I am surprised this is the case.

You might want to make the validation case insensitive as well as make the validation ignore any black space around the answer phrase.

https://imgur.com/a/AD2YZ0l

+1.

Got tinnitus due to injury to auditory nerve.

Those who are just starting with overcoming Tinnitus - Make sure to give time. Human brain is amazing at latent inhibition, ie capability to ignore things that it learns to be irrelevant.

That is your largest medicine. In my country, there are sugar cane refineries/factories that emit very pungent small that is very strong and spans across miles in radius. People who live around in that vicinity develop ignorance to the smell in a matter of months.

All I can say is - whether it is a decision to try some experimental medication or surgery, or otherwise - give it 9-12 months time after you acquired Tinnitus. There will be bad days, but there is a good chance that you will realize you could live with it. With an inconvenience (for comparison) as severe as your car's "check engine" warning beeping every 10 seconds.

Re:Stupid Patterns on Saturday January 01, 2022 @07:17AM (#29757705)
So, some random person had subscribed to Tata Sky (television set-top box channels subscription in India) with my mobile number. He wouldn't pay his dues on time, and Tata sky would call me every month multiple times. Their customer service would take down my request to change the number, but they never changed it.

I was able to track down his actual phone number and on Facebook. Messaged him and explained to him. He wouldn't act. He said he intentionally gave a random number since he didn't want to be bothered by their phone calls and asked me to "deal with it".

Finding no other option, I used Tata sky IVRS service calling from my mobile number(linked to his account) to subscribe to a bunch of expensive channels, totalling the monthly subscription fee to 10x of what his usual fee was.

He reached out to me requesting that he be allowed to take control of his account, as he is unable to change the phone number linked to the account, without an OTP (one time password) received on the existing number (which was my number).

Did take some sweet revenge by not responding to his request for a while, but eventually gave him the OTP after a week.

Re:Tuple: Pair Programming Tool for macOS on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @11:07PM (#29645506)
Nice one. One suggestion. While you open the shared URL on the pair's browser automatically, there are still a bunch of steps involved in copying the url, pasting it in the app, and then hitting open, before the URL opens in the pair's browser.

Instead, build a chrome/firefox extension that allows 'pushing' a tab into the pair's browser session. I find something good, I right click on the tab and click " Send to Pair" or similar.

The desperation is more in countries where being in poor or lower-middle income family restricts access to affordable quality schooling for kids, affordable sheltering, quality medicine or insurance. Hence you see more such desperation in under-developed or developing countries like India.
Re:Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:06PM (#28685662)
This would be a large personal disaster and a full time personal project if the service provider decides to shut down the service. One would have to crawl through all services they have signed up for to update the email addresses.

Instead get a domain. Configure email as well as a catch all address. Example [email protected] would reach [email protected] which you use as your primary email address.

And say, if I am signing up for Netflix, I would give the email as [email protected]. The email automatically reaches my single primary inbox with the catch-all behavior. And if I find a lot of spam to [email protected], I know which service is leaking my email address and I can quickly block all emails sent to [email protected]

Re:The most underused browser feature: reader mode on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @09:00AM (#28301070)
I have been using reader-mode on Firefox and Chrome for long.

Not just for better readability, but also most content behind paywalls is accessible with readermode.

(May be because, most of the paywalls on news websites load all initial content, and then either truncate the content or hide the content using javascript, and hitting the paywall renders the page again without a lot of the CSS and JS that is used for hiding the content behind the paywall).

Hopefully, this content doesn't have those paywall service providers to start working around reader modes.

Re:Turn your Android phone into SMS API gateway on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @05:11AM (#28126649)
I had once run a campaign where we had published a number, and we had to collect all responses to an advertisement sent to that number, to be pushed to a web system.

Didn't buy one of those phone numbers from an SMS API. Had good success with Tasker Android app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....

(This was in 2012-13. Not sure if Tasker can do these things today what it could do in 2012, due to increased security limitations in Android)

Had a rule configured in Tasker to call a HTTP end point with the sender details. received timestamp and the text message content, whenever a message was received on the android phone.

Didn't have to write any code and could get it done in the Tasker app UI, as it had all the variables/tokens available and I just had to form the endpoint link to be pinged with those variables in the request.

A similar thing might be possible with Tasker or similar apps to do the other way round (ie, having the phone send an SMS via mobile network in response to a ping from another device on the wifi network)

Chrome on Android shows incorrect (trimmed) domain name with no visual cue

https://ThisIsNotMyBankDomain.com/ and https://MyBankDomain.com/ would look exactly the same on the address bar in Chrome Android.Number of characters trimmed is dependent on your device width.Users can be easily tricked into opening longer incorrect phishing domains that would look exactly the same as original domains.Sample screenshot - https://imgur.com/a/DBlFiLt (someone visiting...

( Read More... | no comments | 7 points | on HN )
Re:Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @11:12AM (#25917461)
Firefox takes privacy so seriously that they fail to detect you are on Firefox, if you are using Firefox!
Re:Programming Language Creator or Serial Killer? on Friday January 22, 2021 @11:41PM (#25879716)
Scored 10/10. Marking mugshot-looking pics for serial killers and professional-looking portraits for programming language creators.
An OTA firmware update can change this behavior overnight. Unless it's a physical bounce switch that actually disconnects power mechanically, you are still at the mercy of someone else.
This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India.

Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed.

But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review.

This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.

Re:Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps on Thursday August 13, 2020 @03:01PM (#24146956)
Congrats, Jeff! Nice to see the new publication.

Older »