akovalenko / akovalenko is on Nostr

lnurl-pay.me (also t.me/kovalenko_anton)

Last Notes

2026-09-10 03:46:46 UTC

When people say, "I'm not religious about something" (like programming languages, or text editors containing programming languages, which every worthy editor does), they really mean "I'm not philosophical about something", which really means that they are slaves to some defunct philosophy, usually that of pragmatism. They willfully disable the part of their brain which can think "here is Truth and Beauty", "here is Lie and Ugliness", "I won't do this because it's a sin", etc..
This thing seems to fly, that project seems to work, is an initial phase of pragmatism, which is at least, hmm, practical and kinda gets you somewhere. The next thing is socially-guided pragmatism, like here are people and resources and money, and there are none, that thing is cool, and that is unpopular so I don't use it. Boring and dumb, and tends to disable the rest of the brain.
I'm deeply religious about programming languages (though I tend to be more super-ecumenical in languages than I am in religion itself, even within Christianity). Preachers and zealots can teach you many useful things that people who are "just filling their toolbox" can't even start thinking about, because they have disabled half of their brain.

2026-07-24 20:33:47 UTC

If you build censorship-resistant tools, first, thank you, and second, maybe you'll be interested in some actual censorship first-hand experience.
In Russia, they've gone mad in fighting against VPNs. On my home connection, basically half of the internet is restricted to something like 16KB upload or download, then the connection is terminated. Popular facilities like cloudflare or AWS suffer first, against any logic of collateral damage. Obscure LN hostings usually fare better.
Today I've published my first repo (tclnostr) with ngit, using my VPN, after several unsuccessful attempts to do it directly via my home network. I expected ngit to take HTTPS_PROXY from my env (which points to the tunnel to normal internet), but it did not happen.
If you build censorship-resistant tools, consider supporting proxies from environment, or some other way to specify an outbound SOCKS5 or CONNECT proxy. For me, there is not always a default route that works, but there is always some tunnel.
Consider openssh: it ignores the environment, which is a minor inconvenience, but with its ProxyCommand I can connect via any tunnel, thanks to socat (and netcat).

2026-07-24 20:03:11 UTC

There are a few lightning-aware services that I use for exactly this reason. They are fine, but I'd probably never hear of them if they didn't accept LN payments.
And there is https://kagi.com, a search engine that works fine for me for a couple of years, which I would use even if they required a credit card. But fortunately, they also accept LN — not bragging about it anywhere, so you just discover it when you're about to pay for the first time. Balance topped up by LN can be also transferred to prepaid API/MCP credits.

2026-07-24 16:08:25 UTC

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@npub180c…h6w6 well, as I'm here finally, looks like it worked. However if I was supposed to be DM'ed about invitation, then no, it did not work.

2026-07-13 01:38:15 UTC

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Nostr support for TCL: we did this together. https://github.com/akovalenko/tclnostr
#nevent1q…7u9n

2026-07-13 00:30:15 UTC

Amethyst by @nprofile…pt5w is a great nostr client.
But what it does not give you (or I just fail to find it) is the right to rename your contact. If someone in the DM has no profile at all, he will forever be an npub***, even if I'd like to see him as "myserver monitoring script".
In the beginning of Nostr, AFAIR, there was an idea of users giving "pet names" to other users, with a way to represent things like "@fiatjaf believes that this profile is @akovalenko". Would be great by starting with one-level contact renaming, at least.

2025-02-19 18:41:03 UTC

I probably don't qualify as a Bitcoin maxi, because I don't believe that humanity will ever converge on a single kind of money.
It's always statist projects forcing "their" societes to accelerate toward a supposed convergence. They always fail, producing divergent fiat standards instead.

2024-05-30 15:33:45 UTC

I've just built a new thing for forwarding local http applications to an https subdomain.
- ssh app@ssh.my-ns.me with your key (your key is the only identity I ever need)
- pay 1000 sat invoice (once per ssh key, lifetime membership)
- ssh -R80:localhost:5000 app@ssh.my-ns.me to forward the application running on http://localhost:5000 to https://<your four-letter subdomain>.app.my-ns.me

2024-05-23 17:47:42 UTC

An obituary to lnurl-pay.me
https://on.lnurl-pay.me/lnurl-pay-me-is-dead

2023-03-20 19:02:44 UTC

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Unfortunately I don't remember details and dynamics of dollarization and dedollarization from that time. I believe dollar price tags were illegal, and У.Е. price tags became illegal at some point (i'm not sure if they did vanish before or after that).

2023-03-20 19:00:40 UTC

Post-Soviet Russia, 1993-1998. Expensive goods are priced exclusively in the У.Е., which is Условная Единица, which is a codename for US Dollar. You could also pay with dollar cash, at least somewhere. In 1997 I've got my first serious job, was paid weekly in USD cash.

2023-01-25 19:43:50 UTC

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#[0] did you have to get through any compliance hoops to get amethyst into Google Play? It'd be interesting to hear. Do they understand that actually decentralized network makes many things they want impossible?

2023-01-25 19:39:11 UTC

The developer of moera.blog has shared some experience of getting the client into Google Play Store. First they required removal of Lightning/Bitcoin donation button, then they wanted privacy policy, account deletion, content flagging etc.

2022-07-17 19:11:59 UTC

Is there anybody out there? (np: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrOQC-zEog )