Terence Eden

The Treedix cable tester is awesome. Ordered one after reading Terence Eden's positive review* and went through all my cables the day it arrived. My favorite was the cable with only the ground connected; went immediately into the bin. *) https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/gadget-review-treedix-usb-cable-teste…

This quote is attributed to Oscar Wilde, but it seems like he never said it. In fact, there is no direct source for this particular quote by anyone. Even the shorter version "Imitation is the greatest form of lattery" is much older than Oscar Wilde. The full quote apparently did not appear on the internet before 2012. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/no-oscar-wilde-did-not-say-imitation-…

Snap! The US only keyboard is a bit of a pain, and the trackpad sometimes glitches, but when travelling light this is excellent. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/gadget-review-chuwi-minibook-x-n150-l…

It's been shared here many times, but Terence Eden has a great anecdote about how the UK's GDS standards - lightweight, simple html - meant the site was usable even on a crappy PSP https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim…

I got the much smaller usb-c keyring Heat-It, and works so great . Previous submission, https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/usb-c-cures-mosquito-bites/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41548336 There was a study recently on it, which feels fairly encouraging. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3257884/ The real winner this year was the $30 (rainbow, because it's cool) mosquito net. It's been shockingly hard setting it up really well, some still get through, but I can sit outside all day & break out the electric swatter two or three times & be fine. And I keep tuning the net a little... (I used to lug a bunch of fans in and out of the house, to keep them off me, but that was only semi-successful & made it a project each time.)

I enjoyed reading yesterday’s post about the rice cooker with push notifications [1]. This was an even better read, thanks for sharing! I got a rice cooker for Christmas and use it every day now. I find brown rice for lunch is a great way to lose weight: it’s a filling whole grain you can do almost anything with. Does anybody know of a book that covers general history of the famous Japanese firms: Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, Casio, Yamaha, Seiko etc? [1: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/03/receive-push-notifications-from-your-…

I think this is your blog, so I'm going to post it here because it is so great to look at! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/where-is-the-original-overview-of-sha…

For anyone thinking that this is an insignificant saving of "only" 32kb, it's really important to remember that many of the site's users will be amongst the poorest in society. Many of them will be accessing it using the oldest, slowest devices; things far slower than the average HN reader's last few phones. Anything that can be done make the site work better for them is worth the effort. Terence Eden has a really good blog post about just this topic: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim…

Worth pointing out that HTML is more ubiquitous than you're making it out to be: just plop a WebView in your native app, and you're done. I know, for example, that the Uber app does webviews in some places; you probably wouldn't even be able to figure out where just from looking at it as a user. Another case in point: is your dev team going to support PSP devices[0]? [0] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim…

Not always strictly dev related, but nice: https://codinghorror.com https://shkspr.mobi

Ah, the site where somebody proved himself to be Leonardo da Vinci, I remember. [0] Another great victory for Blockchain. [0] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the…

It's probably more like, "let's lock ourselves into an early design decision that makes it hard to expose input remapping without realizing that's what we're doing because the architecture looked so much cleverer that way". The OP isn't asking for some beautifully engineered UX with GUI that walks you through every possible disability modification. He's more than happy to go through a long procedure [1], as on Linux, to get that memory block to point to a different address. He just wants it to be exposed at all. Others have claimed that this is some kind of full-featured thing. Well, as best I can tell, his Linux workaround just involves xinput and lsusb, both of which are available on Alpine Linux, the ultra-minimal distro. [1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/05/using-the-evoluent-vmcr-c-series-vert…

See, also, the followup post from 2014: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/02/i-still-dont-want-to-be-part-of-your-f… (and its discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304488)

Quick google search [1]. TaskMessenger.com did a write up on March 1, 2013 [2] about this very thing, which led to 8,040 page views and 6,111 unique visits. JetStrap.com did a write up in October 2012 [3] about this very thing, which led to 20,000 new users. http://shkspr.mobi did a write up in November 2012 [4] about this very thing, which led to 30,000 extra visitors.. p.s. Getting on HN front page is hard! These people had cool topics and a bit of luck. Do no be surprised if you post and you get 1-2 up votes and that's it. [1] https://www.google.ca/?q=hacker+news+front+page+stats [2] http://taskmessenger.com/blog/index.php/google-analytics-after-our-pos… [3] http://blog.jetstrap.com/2012/10/20000-users-in-a-week-hn-front-page-p… [4] http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hackernews-wor…

I have to admit I get very disappointed when I see new form abstractions that don't take this seriously — especially if they make bold claims like 'the new paradigm'!. The whole point of forms is that they're part of HTML. You should not need JavaScript to submit a form, period. I think about the woman in this story — https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim… — as an industry, we've lost our way if we don't care enough about people like her to make our apps work reliably. Not everyone has JavaScript: https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html Moreover, validation is something that belongs on the server. Client-first approaches to form validation are at best duplicative (because you need to repeat the validation on the server) and at worst dangerous (because it tricks you into thinking that's unnecessary). I also notice that one of the first forms on your website doesn't adhere to common accessibility guidelines — the email field is marked invalid as soon as you start typing. Ordinarily, you shouldn't validate a field until it has been blurred. So what I'd like to see from people building form abstractions is a) a full stack approach, b) progressive enhancement, and c) adherence to accessibility guidelines. FWIW this is how we think about forms in the Svelte project: https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/remote-functions#form

Its interesting to see this author's historical takes about AI https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/ai/ - I'm OK being left behind, thanks! - Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you - This time is different - How close are we to a vision for 2010? - AI is a NAND Maximiser - Reputation Scores for GitHub Accounts - Agentic AI is brilliant because I loath my family - Stop crawling my HTML you dickheads - use the API! - Removing "/Subtype /Watermark" images from a PDF using Linux - LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks - Books will soon be obsolete in school - Winners don't use ChatGPT - Grinding down open source maintainers with AI - Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI? - Large Language Models and Pareidolia - How to Dismantle Knowledge of an Atomic Bomb - GitHub's Copilot lies about its own documentation. So why would I trust it with my code? - LLMs are good for coding because your documentation is shit

It's been going on for years. I've personally tried to report phishing scams to Namecheap and get the laziest action on it (for example, I report 30 domains, and only one gets taken down and the rest + the account stay active) or totally ignored altogether after one or two exchanges. This laziness in response despite their platform being abused this heavily suggests they don't want to give up the revenue they're getting from it. The CEO is incredibly defensive about it and suggests that the security theater is evidence that they actually want to do something, but it's been years and they're still heavily used. This is despite not being the cheapest out there, which suggests that scammers prefer it for other reasons. https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/1duy4cn/constant_spams_and… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603615 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/ And last but not least: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/ncsc_active_cyber_defence_repor…

From a quick search right now, the term seems to have come from that same system, but the first reference appears to be older than 1988. It looks to be possibly 1985. Following this link here: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/where-is-the-original-overview-of-sha… In a comment at the bottom it references a paper published by a few people working jointly with Computer Corporation of America, MIT & Boston University. If you view that referenced paper "Correctness Conditions for Highly Available Databases" by N. Lynch, B. Blaustein & M. Siegel (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA171427.pdf), and look at section 1.2 it clearly describes "SHARD: (System for Highly Available Replicated Data)" as being underdevelopment at CCA. It also says if you want to learn more about Shard, see the paper's reference [SBK]. Checking out the references section of that paper it lists the following for [SBK]: Sarin, S. K., Blaustein, B. T., and Kaufman, C. W., "System Architecture for Partition Tolerant Distributed Databases," IEEE Transactions on Computers C-34, 12 (December 1985). pp. 1158-1163. Which means there was a paper published in 1985, describing the in development Shard system. It is possible that in 1985 they hadn't yet named the system "Shard", and it only got that name by 1988 - but it'd be interesting to check out that 1985 paper and see if they used the term Shard at all.

> On medication for ADHD, it helps in the short term, but I still struggle to commit to working on things in the long term. I either get bored or forget or find a new shiny. Could just be that you're a "scanner" rather than you having some condition. Barbara Sher wrote multiple books about the subject of "I want to do everything, what's wrong with me?" and while the book I read ("Refuse to chose") is filled with lots of empty platitudes and overly positive language, I think the core idea discussed in the book is reasonable. A somewhat neutral/borderline negative (but realistic) review of the book can be found here: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/book-review-refuse-to-choose-a-revolu… I'm not saying it'll solve the problem, but maybe there are "issues" that shouldn't be considered issues, related to you getting bored and so on.

> "there's a lot of thermal energy that does not get used in a cost-effective way" Reminds me of a discussion in the comments on Terence Eden's blog[1], where a commenter argues that photovoltaic panels on home roofs are not the best idea, and solar-thermal panels are better; an edited summary: "solar thermal, 4 square meters of roof space will generate 1500kWh per year; to achieve the same with PhotoVoltaics [PV] you would need 16 square meters. Solar thermal would roughly address water heating for showers for a family of 4 for using 4msq of panels. If that doesnt represent a useful amount of energy from a small amount of roof space I don't know what does! And with a lower environmental cost, lower CO2 emission, than PV for that energy." i.e. it's sad that government subsidies are making PV cheaper than solar-thermal, even though it makes worse use of roof space, with worse CO2 profile. [1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/free-money-from-the-sky/ - comments by 'ben'

As others have pointed out, IE is a poster child. There are many, many outdated browser versions and devices beside IE. If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers. And when it comes to government agencies, "afford" does not mean "profit" because you can't measure everything in terms of profit. And no, not every "boomer" has the money to upgrade their 2012 Android phone bought for them by their kids. And not every millenial sports the latest iPhone. Etc. --- start quote --- In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable... Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim… --- end quote --- There's a reason ADA exists: it's because people only view everything through the lenses of "how much profit do I get from these people even if I am government"

> 2020: UK National Cyber Security Centre: Figure 1 shows that NameCheap became the most popular host of UK government-themed phishing during 2020. By December 2020 we found that it hosted in excess of 60% of phishing in this category. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/ https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Active-Cyber-Defence-ACD-The-Fourth-Year… > 2017: As of today around 38% of the domains reported to us since we began recording on 8/23/17 are sponsored by NameCheap INC. These domains are allowed to continue to scam consumers long after they are reported. An example of this is “ecojetexpress.us” which has been reported repeatedly by both petscams.com and victims who have lost money. When victims of this scam filed an abuse report NameCheap did not “take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate”. Instead they forwarded the abuse report with the victims information to the criminal. 5 months later, ecojetexpress.us was still online scamming new victims. https://petscams.com/news/namecheap-hurting-internet/ > Facebook sues Namecheap to unmask hackers who registered malicious domains. The social networking giant claims that Namecheap has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered through its service and which impersonated the Facebook brand. > Some of the sample domains included the likes of instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com, and whatsappdownload.site. > Dubois said…

Tying a blockchain record to a physical object is impossible. This stupidity has been tried many times by various conmen with no success. Here's just one of many failures: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the… The reason blockchain works for cryptocurrencies and NFTs (that is the token itself, not the art that the token claims to represent) is because the entire source of truth is on the blockchain. When it comes to physical objects, the source of truth is now split between the physical world and the blockchain. If your token must represent a physical object then you need some way for the real-world state and the blockchain state to always be kept in sync. That is impossible. The best approximation is to rely on a trusted authority for this, but then you don't need a blockchain anymore and can just have that trusted party maintain its own database.

As an admirer of Paul Butler's TreeVerse.app (@paulgb), I have to say this is some amazing work done here and also what was done in the past by OP in this same direction. Working with mulidimentional Graph/Tree presentation is so possible now and just makes everything easier to approach as a user confronted with Too Much Information to process. I definitely think TreeView would benefit from some Three.js or Babylon.js WebXR visualization in VR/AR Headsets. There is a lot left "to-be-done" on the UI side to make that a proper useful experience, but it is a much better fit than trying to keyboard/video/mouse your way around a 4000 tweet force-balanced network graph node cluster in normal 2D pancake land mode. Anyway, Thank You So Much OP for making my new favorite opensource project ! Look forward to playing with this as it develops... PS- I'm basing this mostly on the blog posts/video links [1] as the site may be going through a HN_Hug-of-Death moment. Minor Aside: the link to Lucy Pepper on GitHub is broken the updated one is [2] [1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/visualising-twitter-conversations-in-… [2] https://lucypepper.com/ptf/ EDIT: There is some work already using A-Frame (Three.js frontend) only for AR but it's a start !! [3] [3] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/augmented-reality-twitter-conversatio…

Yes, of course, that goal is utopian (well, I hope we don't follow the definition too closely and actually reach the dream). But the good thing is that they don't depend on time, money or anything else. It's a belief, and the people's mind will change over time. You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading. > How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible" This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field,…

> A Pixel 8 Pro (running GrapheneOS) > Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it. In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar? [1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/review-pebblebee-clip-universal-and-a… [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4079

This doesn't happen without a lot of hard work. Want to help? See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/07/how-i-got-the-uk-government-to-adopt-… for inspiration.

The phrase "unreasonable effectiveness" is used here in the context of AI. Where "we put a whole bunch of markup characters in the context" not messing up the output significantly could be considered unexpected. The actual performance impact is unknowable, given the difficulty of measuring LLM performance. And whomever pays for your tokens won't be pleased either. While it has been used in the context of HTML before, it's a bit of a "meme" as several papers used that phrase. Much like the "X is all you need" snowclone. The HTML version dates from 2021 (https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-sim… when client side rendering and web apps were still their peak.

From the update: "Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower-case letters?" https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02/why-are-qr-codes-with-capital-letters… (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149077)

Related: NHS Goes to War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973710)