HN user

akirk

568 karma

web programmer from Vienna, Austria

i18n developer at https://www.automattic.com/

https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=akirk

Posts34
Comments143
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alex.kirk.at 3mo ago

Why My WordPress?

akirk
2pts1
alex.kirk.at 9mo ago

Proposal: An Interactive Mode for Phpcbf

akirk
2pts0
www.sean.co.uk 1y ago

Lego Retro Radio #10334 – play your own music using a Raspberry Pi

akirk
7pts0
alex.kirk.at 1y ago

Enhance Your WordPress Plugin: Add Live Preview Using WordPress Playground

akirk
2pts0
www.theverge.com 1y ago

Canva says its AI features are worth the 300 percent price increase

akirk
1pts0
alex.kirk.at 2y ago

Your WordPress as Your Personal Mastodon Instance

akirk
2pts0
alex.kirk.at 2y ago

Mastodon API Tester

akirk
2pts0
alex.kirk.at 2y ago

Prototype: Create a Website from a Screenshot and Refine It, All in the Browser

akirk
2pts0
alex.kirk.at 2y ago

New Unit Tests Need to Fail (Running the Old Code)

akirk
4pts0
wpfriends.at 4y ago

Subscribing to RSS Feeds on your E-Reader

akirk
23pts9
alexander.kirk.at 5y ago

We’re all using RSS Readers all the time

akirk
3pts0
blog.getpebble.com 10y ago

A Gift for Every Pebbler: Introducing Pebble Health and Firmware 3.8

akirk
4pts0
www.theverge.com 10y ago

The Pebble smartwatch finally does real fitness tracking

akirk
47pts12
stackoverflow.com 12y ago

PHP's own password_hash() should be used more

akirk
2pts0
alexander.kirk.at 14y ago

New Feature for HN Collapsible Threads: Collapse Whole Thread

akirk
1pts0
blog.thinkery.me 15y ago

Thinkery now has Bulk-Edit

akirk
5pts2
alexander.kirk.at 15y ago

HN Collapsible Threads now supports NinjaKit: Greasemonkey for Chrome/Safari

akirk
1pts0
alexander.kirk.at 15y ago

Possible reason for the iOS alarm clock bug

akirk
2pts0
alexander.kirk.at 15y ago

Title Junk: Solve it with Javascript

akirk
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Review my project - reportaproblem.at

akirk
25pts22
www.stevesouders.com 16y ago

10 highest rated sessions at Velocity 2010

akirk
2pts0
colorillo.com 16y ago

(Re-)Watch how artists draw their pictures on Colorillo

akirk
4pts0
alexander.kirk.at 16y ago

Bookmarklet: Reddit-like Collapsible Threads for Hacker News

akirk
81pts12
isithackday.com 16y ago

Rotating a map with CSS3 and jQuery

akirk
3pts1
www.amazon.com 16y ago

Amazon Kindle DX is now available internationally with Global Wireless

akirk
1pts0
www.0xdeadbeef.com 16y ago

People drawing together on Colorillo.com

akirk
3pts0
dooce.com 16y ago

Monetizing Hate Mail

akirk
2pts0
colorillo.com 16y ago

Colorillo: real-time action painting

akirk
3pts2
www.xaprb.com 16y ago

How to find un-indexed queries in MySQL, using tcpdump

akirk
38pts10
php100.wordpress.com 17y ago

PHP Performance Tips from Stanislav Malyshev

akirk
39pts7

Great work! Good to see what only it takes to run on Android! On the other hand it also shows how much comes "for free" or made easier by using the provided sdks. For example volume control doesn't work while running this. Also resuming the game after switching away. Maybe that's relatively easy to save and restore state, though.

You can't do this natively on a Kobo, Nook, etc.

That's correct but there are other e-readers that support a similar technology, such as Pocketbook, or the Arta Tech Inkbooks.

While not supported by the plugin (yet), many readers support syncing new content via services like Dropbox, therefore you could use a service that uploads file via e-mail to Dropbox.

Overall the workflow part of converting an RSS feed item to an E-Reader format (i.e. ePub or Mobi) is covered, it seems viable to add more delivery mechanisms. Due to the market I am in (Europe) I've investigated the possibility to deliver to the Tolino platform via libraries like https://github.com/hzulla/tolino-python, but also adding Dropbox might be a possibility.

The title of the submission originally continued: "using your own WordPress blog." This is kind of important, since one of the goals of the plugin is to reduce dependency on third parties.

The dependency on external feeds remains of course but you have control over your own blog, where you host it and what software you install there.

While one of the main goals of the plugin is to provide an infrastructure to connect to your friends' blogs and potentially exchange private posts with them, an important aspect is that it is a versatile RSS Reader (see https://wpfriends.at/consume-the-web-your-way/) that can be used with another plugin (like demo-ed) to then send new articles to your E-Reader (converted to .mobi or .epub).

I've been actually building something like this on the side with the Friends plugin for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ (source at https://github.com/akirk/friends)

It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request).

The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process).

Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts.

The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?).

Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it.

Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to.

The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)!

You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...

I would be awesome if there were a plugin (for your favorite text editor) for that. It should be easy to add automatically and remove when you uncomment it.

War in the womb 12 years ago

I think it is a very important detail to understand that new life has to grow in water.

When life moved out of the water, different life-forms discovered a way to take that environment away from the water to have their embryos grow: Birds keep the water in eggs, mammals in their womb.

While egg-laying animals create self-contained environments, mammals need much more energy to develop therefore have to be live-fed. So they feed this separate, new creature. Of course they have to protect themselves from them.

This should be renamed: WordPress.org secret-key service

As it says in the default wp-config.php of a WordPress installation:

    /*
    * Authentication Unique Keys and Salts.
    *
    * Change these to different unique phrases!
    * You can generate these using the {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/ WordPress.org secret-key service}
    * You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies. This will force all users to have to log in again.
    *
    * @since 2.6.0
    */
    define('AUTH_KEY',         'put your unique phrase here');
    define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY',  'put your unique phrase here');
    define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',    'put your unique phrase here');
    define('NONCE_KEY',        'put your unique phrase here');
    define('AUTH_SALT',        'put your unique phrase here');
    define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
    define('LOGGED_IN_SALT',   'put your unique phrase here');
    define('NONCE_SALT',       'put your unique phrase here');
This page is meant to generate the code to be pasted into a new wp-config.php

I agree. It would be very useful to conveniently have HN, reddit, etc comments already there when I visit the site. Then I could comment on those.

On the other hand it should automatically submit the link to my preferred site, e.g. HN, and post my comment, thus creating a new source for comments.

Maybe something like this already exists?

Unix Tricks 12 years ago

Which is fine if you never need to generate characters using the Option key. For example on a German keyboard you need the Option key to write { or }.

Unix Tricks 12 years ago

You can get any parameter of the previous command by using "Esc, <number>, Esc, .". If you repeat pressing "Esc, ." you get the n-th parameter from the command before the previous one, etc.

More details in this Stackoverflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4010170/578588

I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the case most of the times.

What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?

I believe that there should be a higher burden for beginners to ask their question, before it can go live.

New users need to prove that they have done research, this can be done with a few questions like "name the three google search terms that you have used to find a solution", "how much time did you spend on researching?" (easily faked, but maybe it gives people a hint to step back and try harder).

There could also be a new-user queue where higher reputation users would review a question (but are unable to answer it) before it can go live, with the possibility to go back and forth before the question goes online.

In my blog post I have detailed what I'd propose: http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-...

I always wished there were a service where you could go to several weeks after a news story and ask the question "I wonder what happened to x".

This service was getting my hopes up but I am afraid it will just list me 100+ news stories around a topic which I would have to sift through. Actually I suppose I'd need something like tldr.io, where people write a summary that I can read several weeks after the story broke.

Ok but how so? I see screenshots which seem to come from a web page.

I think you need to explain that before I would be willing (would I be using gmail) to register with your service.

I have a little trouble understanding whether you are actually a web-based pop/imap client or whether I would get a @lightermail.com address. (I assume the former, as it says " Gmail Support with more to come..." but I think you should explain that better)

[dead] 13 years ago

I think you need to make a better job at explaining what webshell is, I only see buzzwords where I understand it actually is a "one javascript interface to many different apis" which is really awesome.

Also, I think you should show more prominently the APIs you currently support, there should be a link in the sidebar of the page you linked in HN.

[dead] 13 years ago

On a side note, your page specifies

    <meta http-equiv="Content-language" content="fr" />
but is in English, therefor Chrome offers to translate it from French to English.
Sublime Text 3 Beta 13 years ago

Did you once do a calculation of the price as to the percentage of the money it costs in relation to the money you generate using this tool?

Sublime Text 3 Beta 13 years ago

I think it is a valid point. If it provides the value to you.

I don't get these price discussions. If you earn your money by programming, I think it is crazy to be cheap on your tools if you can get the job better done using them.

If you program occasionally, then use some free open source editor.

People on construction sites don't use the cheapest tools available for a reason. If you use it to earn money, you shouldn't be short sighted.

Squash 14 years ago

As I understand it, it acts as a reporting tool for errors that occur in your web app.

For example, when a user encounters an exception you get notified about it while at the same time squash gives you a nice interface to view how many times the error occurred, where in the code it occurred, etc.