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stonesweep

Born on January 01, 2021•382 Karma

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on April 30, 2021

•on: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

I disagree with your assessment, email is a service and not a server. A service can run on a server, or ephemerally as in this article (which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them). S3 and SES are services running on servers.

throwaway894345•

on April 30, 2021

> email is a service and not a server.

Those aren't mutually exclusive, which is my whole point. One definition of "server" is "a service in a network". Another definition is "a computer in a network". So you can have a server running on a server without contradiction. If the user isn't responsible for managing the underlying computer, then you have a serverless server.

> which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them

Of course, "serverless" means you don't have to worry about the underlying servers, not that they don't exist. Perhaps you were only clarifying and not nerd-sniping, but this particular nit is so boring and predictable in every serverless thread.

on April 30, 2021

> One definition of "server" is "a service in a network"

Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

I was not nerd-sniping and could care less about serverless as a term, I'm specifically talking about calling a "service" a "server" in this chat. I feel this is presenting something as accepted definition which does not match my experience in the field.

throwaway894345•

on April 30, 2021

> Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers. Oxford English Dictionary defines "server" as:

> a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network.

Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1] which isn't authoritative, but indicates that "server" can mean either hardware, VM, or software services.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13118205/483347

on April 30, 2021

> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

> Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1]

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything. Useful? Yes, great for finding random solutions to random problems. Authoritative source on terminology used in the industry I work? Nah.

on April 30, 2021

I'm surprised you need a source for this. Literally half of the server software out there refers to itself as "<thing> server".

Apache [1] "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet". This is not referring to the machine hosting, it's referring to the software that you run to provide a service.

Postfix [2] "mail server"

IIS [3] "Web server"

I could go on...

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/

[2] http://www.postfix.org/

[3] https://www.iis.net/

on April 30, 2021

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers?

I don't think he was being condescending, so there's no need to be offended on behalf of other people.

I think he was suggesting that part of the linguistic confusion comes from how the tech industry has become so global that different words and phrases are exchanged between cultures, but within the tech sphere.

For example, it's not uncommon to hear the phrase "Do the needful" in places like Seattle, even though the phrase originated elsewhere and was imported by tech workers.

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything.

Good call. I'm with you there.

throwaway894345•

on April 30, 2021

> Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers?

What is condescending? I'm observing that it's a common problem among non-native English speakers. It seems like you're taking offense on behalf of others and unduly so.

> I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

This is a common idiom among English-speaking IT professionals. If you're not familiar, that's fine. Now you know.

> I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything

In a minute of Googling, I found several random sources on the Internet that indicate that the term is overloaded precisely as I described. One of those sources was the Oxford English Dictionary. I think that suffices to demonstrate that this is a common idiom, but I can't force you to be persuaded. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

on May 1, 2021

Accept the L.

on May 1, 2021

Nah. +4 for the thread after adding up the down/up votes. I dipped out, the conversation held no further value to continue to me especially after being told "well it's an idiom you just don't understand". No minds will be changed, no positive outcome will happen from continuing.

imwillofficial•

on April 30, 2021

You are incorrect, see man pages.

on April 30, 2021

This makes no sense (too abstract of a statement), but here let's try this:

    $ man systemd | head -4 | tail -1
       systemd, init - systemd system and service manager

An email daemon (Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, UW-IMAP, Sendmail, etc.) are services running on a server. An "email server" would be a server running a daemon to provide email service in this example.

on April 30, 2021

This makes me think there should be a Linux tool to extract the Nth line of a file. With options to get the N-Mth lines, etc

on April 30, 2021

There are many. Sed is fast. This will give you lines 11 to 500

sed -n '11,500p' < file.txt

on April 30, 2021

Man pages can be tricky as the content can vary distro by distro (how up to date is your copy of man-pages, what changes have happened, etc.) - this technique is pretty portable to extract the synopsis of a man page specifically due to the format it uses (most times I'd use like grep -A3 -B2 foo /some/file, e.g.).

on April 30, 2021

Ugly way to get the first indented line: `man systemd | grep '^ ' | head -1`

Which is the summary

on April 30, 2021

Calling cut with a newline as the field delimiter works:

man systemd | cut -d $'\n' -f 4

Works with multiple lines too:

cut -d $'\n' -f 10-20,50-60

imwillofficial•

on April 30, 2021

Makes plenty of sense: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/smtp.1.html

"SMTP transaction against an SMTP server"

on April 30, 2021

•on: Health of the KDE Community

In the beginning (95-ish) Qt was license encumbered, there was serious agitation about KDE becoming popular while using it, leading to the very-open GTK based GNOME desktop competition. It was a big kerfuffle at the time.

See the History of Qt section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

on April 30, 2021

Also Qt is C++, whereas GTK is basically C.

on April 30, 2021

100% agree, I missed that - at this point in time (and maybe still a bit today?) there was a lot of grift between C and C++ being used for Linux systems things around that time as well (including how big the resulting binaries were, because modems to download!). Thanks for the reminder.

on April 29, 2021

•on: Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated ...

In the US it's the same, the FDA has regulations and all the (not real cheese) items have either a funny name ("cheeze") or have something like "imitation cheese product" or "cheese food product" (I've seen a number of different labels over my life) to indicate it's not real (milk) cheese.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...

on April 28, 2021

•on: Bronze Disease

Many hobbiest collectors (in my travels, which is of course my experiences) use 100% acetone soak on metals. A brand known as Renaissance Wax is a popular microcrystalline coating used to inhibit reactions (ive been told its popular with knifemakers as well). Ketchup is a great copper/bronze/brass cleaner while we're here, not so hot on nickel, sort of ok on silver. Titanium and zirconium just don't care how you clean them, aluminum is ketchup friendly.

on April 28, 2021

Is there a reason for using ketchup specifically? Or is it just the vinegar ingredient doing the trick?

on April 28, 2021

It's an extremely mild abrasive in this form (of vinegar, yep) - some folks dilute baking soda in vinegar, I feel that's too coarse myself. One of the mildest silver polishes I know about and use, Blitz (not Flitz) is still grittier than ketchup in your fingers. I only use organic, free range grass fed no corn syrup ketchup, my metal is pampered. /s ;) (you just use your fingers or qtips for the crevices, then wash in warm soapy water, dry well then plop into a sealed glass jar of acetone for a few days)

on April 27, 2021

•on: Google promised its contact tracing app was comple...

> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread.

I am a US citizen, I simply have lost confidence in any promise made by any tech company in regards to my privacy and roll back to War Games - the only winning move is not to play. We have lost all confidence that any data shared will be kept private, there is little oversight or penalty for abuse of it.

on April 27, 2021

I agree 110% -- The best solution is to stop using their products; put down the smartphones, remove FAANG & co. from your life entirely.

You end up less lonely, less depressed, less tracked, and oddly, somehow now I feel better informed.

selimthegrim•

on April 27, 2021

Po-Shen Loh's NOVID app from CMU held some promise.

davidthewatson•

on April 27, 2021

Indeed, Novid did have promise. Po's work should be celebrated.

The problem is that Novid depends on self-report. Self-report is not reliable, or else we'd have seen success around this kind of self-reported contact tracing, which does not model reality accurately at scale.

The problem is that a surveillance network is perfect for this kind of healthcare application, where the balance of power is toward the invisible surveiller and does not depend on the surveilled being compliant.

on April 27, 2021

I think a lot of people think this way even outside of tech.

on April 24, 2021

•on: Sisters with Transistors

It seems like this website is trying to convert to local timezone in browser, the ICS places it at 8pm on 4/24 New York time:

    DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T200000
    DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210424T212400

If you're a frontend developer on HN reading this, please don't do what this website does - please list an absolute date/time stamp of your event in plain text on the page(s) in question. Thanks in advance.

on April 22, 2021

•on: X11 Universal File Opener and XDG Mess

Each DE can have slightly different paths, but in general find the file mimeapps.list. It's typically looked for in the traditional manner of /etc/, /usr/share/ and /usr/local/share/ and $HOME to find global, local and personal configurations. In your $HOME it's usually something like this:

    ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
    ~/.config/mimeapps.list

In here you find the MIME type pointing at a .desktop file (app launcher), it's a matter of changing that. Mine for example related to using Firefox:

    [Default Applications]
    x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
    x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop

Find the .desktop file you want to launch and just update that bad boy. Most DEs have a GUI tool to manage this for you without having to resort to manual editing...

forgotmypw17•

on April 22, 2021

What does it mean that I don't have the desktop file?

on April 23, 2021

Then you don't have a program that can handle the URL scheme, at least according to desktop-entry-spec[0], which is the source of data that xdg-utils consults.

[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entr...

On my (Debian) system, firefox and chromium ship their .desktop files.

on April 23, 2021

nod and the .desktop file is just an INI-style file that one can hand create for anything at all, the launched app just needs to accept the URL as a parameter input as if typed on the CLI for this scheme.

on April 22, 2021

•on: Converting Markdown to ePub or Mobi Using Pandoc

I use pandoc in a CD pipeline, the version in the repos is stale compared to upstream (normal, that's how it is) unless you're on a rolling distro like Arch.

I have reported pandoc bugs and had them fixed (great dev team), pulling the latest single-DEB install (no deps, unlike the one in the Debian repo) and using it gets all the latest updates which matter to a process like this.

In this particular case your needs to use the latest pandoc lead to the wget pull and install, which thanks to their DEB design is easy and clean to do in an ephemeral CI container.

coreypreston•

on April 22, 2021

Do you have any more details about how you integrated Pandoc into your pipeline? A post or something?

on April 22, 2021

Sure thing, it's pretty simple and straightforward I can post right here. In your CI/CD runner, you add a "before" script like so (Gitlab YAML example):

    image: debian:latest

    before_script:
        - bash myscript.sh

Your myscript.sh can be as simple as four lines (one to install curl, it's not a default on Debian), example:

    apt-get -y install curl
    VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")')
    curl -sLo "pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb" "https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/${VERSION}/pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"
    apt-get -y install "./pandoc-${VERSION}-1-amd64.deb"

The Github API used above has the nice default of listing the latest release as you see used there in the grep on the right, one could enhance that with `jq` for higher intelligence but this very simple setup is functional as a starting point to develop your own style.

on April 17, 2021

•on: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet ...

If the author is reading this, you've hit/stumbled on "HTTP Live Streaming" radios which are sort of the next evolution of classic Shoutcast/Icecast generated streams. There are better clients for it out there than Chrome which could probably enhance the experience (proper audio controls, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients

on April 17, 2021

I am reading this, just been busy with some errands last hour :)

Thanks for the tip, a dedicated application in combination with Stream Deck sounds even better.

on April 18, 2021

You can do an http based live stream of any video or audio using ffmpeg as a server, and VLC as a client. With the right scripting VLC can be launched in a non interactive mode and begin playing immediately.

on April 18, 2021

The author is using random online radios so they don't get to choose the server end - as a client, VLC is powerful but I prefer Audacious for the user interface. (random user survey :) ) - I have the same problem with VLC on my Android, it works but I much prefer other streaming clients for the better (subjective) UI.

on April 17, 2021

there are some audio clients with http interfaces - I know VLC does, for one. So depending on how fancy you want to get, there's quite a lot of buttons a dedicated app could push on an audio client to get it to do exactly what you want, just by sending some HTTP requests (although just plain command line may be fine).

on April 17, 2021

•on: Are top websites using WebGL for fingerprinting?

I've had WebGL disabled forever, I don't use Twitch (as the other comment describes a valid use for) and really have never missed having it enabled for many years.

It's frequently included in "secure yourself" tuning guides: Firefox -> about:config -> webgl.disabled: true

on April 17, 2021

Ironically, disabling WebGL in a browser that typically has it on is itself a pretty valuable signal when fingerprinting.

on April 17, 2021

Well that’s inconspicuous

on April 17, 2021

It's been awhile, but IIRC the recommendation to disable it is based on security, not privacy. Other comments here explain it better than I could, not a programmer by trade.