Top all-time · #3394
Alex Cabal
Personal blog · alexcabal.com · on HN as acabalprogrammingdesign
Alex Cabal's personal blog at alexcabal.com covers programming and design. Since 2011, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Creating the perfect GPG keypair”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Cabal's post on a simple, JavaScript-free classic web, which one commenter calls a perfect example of simple tech. Other links cover PGP key handling and Linux Mint downloads.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Commenters wish articles like this one were more common, calling it the web they want, and a perfect example of simple tech that does its job.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal website and blog of Alex Cabal.
Most-linked posts?
- Creating the perfect GPG keypair11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2013-09-14
- Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-02-11
What Hacker News says?
We've been front paged before without problems :) See https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (Though that article is now out of date, as we now have a database running that handles things like patron registration, though it still doesn't index ebooks.)
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “Standard Ebooks”Submitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair as a story · 95 points
HN discussionEditor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as de…
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “Standard Ebooks”Submitted The cult of design dictatorship (2012) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionThank you, that was indeed a typo I wrote as I rushed to get out the door earlier. I obviously meant to write "if you're downloading the public key" (indeed, I referred to "download the public key of the signer" in two paragraphs up, so I suspect that was clear to most people reading). The hashes for each new version are what are signed, obviously (with the private key of the maintainer). My sentence about "trusted…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
on “Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised”Submitted Creating The Perfect GPG Keypair as a story · 64 points
HN discussionI have a 2015 Razer Blade Pro and it worked very well under Ubuntu 16.04. The touchpad, touch screen, wifi, etc. all worked well, at least on newer Linux kernels (the trackpad had issues on older kernels). I did some 3D graphics work, and the Nvidia drivers were much better than other drivers I've used on Linux. There wasn't really any "sorcery" involved from my experience; I just installed from the official iso. I…
Comment linking /get-a-working-touchpad-on-a-14-razer-blade-running-linuxubuntu/
on “Warning: 2016 MacBook Pro is not compatible with Linux”Submitted Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS as a story · 34 points
HN discussionThe offline masterkey stored on an encrypted medium is the approach that makes most sense. This[1] guide is pretty decent, and somewhere on the Debian wiki is essentially the same information (but less nicely presented). The OP's complaints boil down to two IMO: 1) poor UX; 2) trust is difficult to manage. 1) Seems solvable to me again with subkeys for encryption and signing (which I believe are created by default f…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
on “What's the matter with PGP?”Submitted Standard Ebooks Serves millions of Requests per Month with a 2GB VPS (2022) as a story · 24 points
HN discussionAt Standard Ebooks we serve a respectable number of page views and ebooks each month - and have been on the front page of HN three or four times - all of it done with a single 4GB VPS. And the only reason we upgraded to 4GB from 2GB is because we needed more RAM for the server to build the extremely large Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ebook - if it weren't for that, our 2GB server would still have been just f…
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “Majority of web apps could just run on a single server”Submitted Standard Ebooks serves requests per month with a 2GB VPS as a story · 19 points
HN discussionEncryption is also supported via a browser plugin, so it's not necessary to upload the private key to the server. Regarding your questions: 1) yes, you can revoke the key by generating a revocation certificate and publishing it on a public keyserver (of course, your correspondents would need to refresh the public key from the keyserver to know it was revoked, which is something they might not do); 2) sent and receiv…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair
on “Roundcube Webmail 1.2.0 released with PGP support”Submitted How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS (2022) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYes, you can revoke the key and publish the revocation. This means that it will be flagged as revoked in the server keys and assuming that senders keep their GPG keybase up to date with server keys, they'll get a warning that this key is out of date. All e-mails already encrypted with the key can still be decrypted though. As for the second part of your post, you're probably asking about this: https://alexcabal.com/…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
on “Roundcube Webmail 1.2.0 released with PGP support”Submitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI wrote about this last year on my blog. It would be cheaper to fly to Colombia and spend 7 days there while having a mole removed, than to have it removed in Chicago, with an ACA health insurance plan. The round-trip flight to Colombia alone, excluding any actual care or other expenses, was the same price as having an American dermatologist spend 30 seconds taking the initial biopsy. https://alexcabal.com/today-i-h…
Comment linking /today-i-had-a-weeks-vacation-in-colombia-instead-of-having-one-mole-removed/
on “My adventures in medical tourism”Submitted Standard Ebooks serves requests per month with a 2GB VPS as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I wish articles such as this one were more common: > https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... > This is the web I want and love. Worth noting that according to their article, Standard EBooks does not use javascript on their page. This might work for them, and it might work for you, but in many cases users want SPAs and interactivity (Google Maps, Google Docs, etc)
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “Build your own web framework”Submitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat a sad state “modern” web dev is in. I’m glad that I’m living in a much faster and simpler world, but I fear, for end users and developers alike, that it is an ever shrinking one. I really can’t understand the appeal of what, to my eyes, amount to endless layers of needless complexity. I wish articles such as this one were more common: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... This is the w…
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “Build your own web framework”Submitted The results from our pay-what-you-want ebook pricing experiment as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've had good experiences with Yubikeys thus far. I still have two of the Symantec VIP tokens from years ago that I've never had issues with. I recently bought a Neo to test out NFC (NFC support on the HTC 10 seems deplorable for smart card reading btw). I also purchased a few 4c tokens and so far they've worked great although I haven't been using them for very long. The gotchas I've encountered while using them on…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
on “Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?”Submitted How I made $1000 in 5 hours with an idea, a sales page, and a tribe as a story · 2 points
HN discussion…I’ll just leave this [0] here. A perfect example which just popped up in my feed list of “simple but does this job” tech. No js, no database, a $10 a month vps. [0] https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...
Comment linking /posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
on “A new blog for 2024”Submitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote a short guide called "Creating the perfect GPG keypair" < https://alexcabal.com/creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/ > some time ago. I mainly wrote it for myself as a sort of step-by-step reminder on how to create an ideal key, but it seems others have found it useful. In particular it borrows from the Debian guide on creating subkeys for use on a laptop (or other device that has a high chance of being stolen/…
Comment linking /creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
on “GPG is awesome; GPG is terrible”Submitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating the perfect GPG keypair (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Please Stop Trashing Gnome as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
