News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Anon4Now

When I think of "old web", I always think of "Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics". Thankfully, it still lives:

https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

Re:Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @06:23AM (#48568249)
It's gone. So are many services that the city provided.
Re:Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @06:21AM (#48568227)
I'm with you there, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't impacted residential prices.
Re:Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @05:26AM (#48567862)
If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.

For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.

Re:What Happened to Fry's Electronics on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:02AM (#47147533)
If you find business autopsies interesting, YouTuber Michael Girdley does pretty decent videos about them. Here's his Fry's one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPRkOdBmck

From the operator post:

> Your a scientific programming God!

Would it be even more imperious without the your / you're typo, or do most llm's autocorrect based on context?

Re:15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @03:50AM (#47058803)
> everything is moving very fast right now

Now that's an interesting comment for him to include. The cynic in me could find / can think of lots of reasons from my YouTube feed as to why that might be so. What else is going on at Microsoft that could cause this sense of urgency?

Re:Over-Regulation Is Doubling the Cost by Peter Reinhardt on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:27PM (#46001225)
Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
Re:Who Still Uses Cash? on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @11:36PM (#45910674)
They didn't speak English, and I speak a little Spanish. I got to know a lot of these guys, so I asked them. My boss immigrated from Mexico, and he explained the under-the-table pay setup. Many landscapers and contractors in the area pay workers under the table because a lot of them under report income to the IRS. Plus, my stepmom was illegal before my dad and her got married, so it's no big deal to me.
Re:Who Still Uses Cash? on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @11:29PM (#45910644)
I only brought it up to customers who had tap symbols on their cards. The surprising part wasn't that they didn't realize that they could tap, it's that they didn't even know that the technology existed.
Re:Who Still Uses Cash? on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @08:07PM (#45895207)
During Covid, my business slowed way down, and I took a part time job at a gas station convenience store (because selling cigarettes made be essential). The store was in a suburb of Portland with an average household income in the top 10 of Oregon, but there were also a lot of trade workers, undocumented immigrants, and generally a good mix of income levels.

Some relevant observations:

- Lower income customers used cash much more than higher income.

- Men used cash way more than women, with the exception of retirement-age women buying their smokes / wine / beer.

- Undocumented workers almost always used cash. Most were paid in $100 bills on Fridays, so they were probably paid under the table.

- Phone tap-to-pay was almost exclusively iPhone. In fact, I don't think I ever saw an Android user pay by phone tap.

- A surprising number of people didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip.

- If the till ran out of pennies for change, no one gave a shit.

All I want from Google Workspace is a single-user email account tied to my domain name. Instead, I have an overly complex system where I need to grant my own phone permission to watch YouTube videos. It would be nice if they had a more basic version.
Re:The Importance of Offtopic on Sunday August 10, 2025 @04:25AM (#44853688)
It's a phrase coined by Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline. As far as I know, it never had a basis in science but was a common belief.

During the Cold War, with the possibility of fighting in the USSR, the US Army conducted experiments with soldiers doing extended bivouacs outside in cold weather to see whether there was increased likelihood of sickness. They couldn't find any evidence that it did.

Let's not over-complicate the issue. It's 98F today where I live, and I'm sitting comfortably in my room, without any AC, because I have a big tree outside blocking the sunlight. Shade works wonders.
Re:Chairs, Chairs, Chairs on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @06:13AM (#44114432)
I'm not going to milk this joke any further, but that would be a good Veo 3 prompt.
Re:Chairs, Chairs, Chairs on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @05:01AM (#44114055)
Nice site, but where's the 'Add to Cart' buttons?
> - Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.

You've essentially described the Jumble puzzle, which appeared in daily newspapers. It's been around since 1954, but I'm not surprised to see it reinvented since few people get a daily newspaper anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumble

Re:Hacker News for Gamedev on Friday January 31, 2025 @07:18AM (#42886910)
> hacker news aced it with the clean look

It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.

Re:Making the Video That Made Gorillaz on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @04:32PM (#42871453)
I loved that song and never saw the video. I don't think a video made any band famous since the MTV era.
Re:A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @10:43PM (#42252701)
He had to close down his cooking school during Covid, so he started making YT videos. I watch a number of chefs on YT, and he's easily my favorite. He's a wonderful teacher, and I've learned more from him than any other because he always reinforces concepts without being repetitive and dull. It also helps that his meals are practical for home cooks, and, overall, he's just a charming guy.
Re:A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @09:47PM (#42252429)
I prefer the Chef Jean-Pierre method [1] because he keeps it simple. He also shows why the horizontal cut really doesn't make much sense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjZ1LFqNWRM&list=PLnujfCpADf...

Re:CrowdStrike to Delta: Stop pointing at us on Monday August 05, 2024 @08:26PM (#41166830)
That's an important distinction. CrowdStrike probably did, in fact, CYA in the licensing terms.
Re:CrowdStrike to Delta: Stop pointing at us on Monday August 05, 2024 @11:20AM (#41162188)
One issue that hasn't received enough attention comes from a comment on Dave Plummer's video on the CrowdStrike outage. Dave Plummer is a former Windows engineer and runs a YouTube channel call Dave's Garage.

@zug-zug wrote:

> While this is technically what crashed machines it isn't the worst part.

> CS Falcon has a way to control the staging of updates across your environment. businesses who don't want to go out of business have a N-1 or greater staging policy and only test systems get the latest updates immediately. My work for example has a test group at N staging, a small group of noncritical systems at N-1, and the rest of our computers at N-2.

> This broken update IGNORED our staging policies and went to ALL machine at the same time. CS informed us after our business was brought down that this is by design and some updates bypass policies.

> So in the end, CS caused untold millions of dollars in damages not just because they pushed a bad update, but because they pushed an update that ignored their customers' staging policies which would have prevented this type of widespread damage. Unbelievable.

Link to video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAzEJxOo1ts

Re:Shoplifters Love Lego on Saturday July 06, 2024 @02:59AM (#40888636)
Not always. Maths will never sound right to me. Even my spellchecker hates it.
Re:KidPix on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @05:18AM (#40726443)
Re:Why people are angry over Go 1.23 Iterators on Monday June 17, 2024 @10:42PM (#40713585)
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers.

I take that to mean that they're searchers, not researchers. I.e., "Googlers" here means they use Google to search for answers, not that they're Google employees.

As an Army vet, this sounds ridiculous. You don't roll around anywhere daily, let alone on poison oak/ivy/sumac. What's your source on this?
Re:They Live on Sunday May 05, 2024 @06:33AM (#40263735)
Redditor /u/SanderSo47 posts a weekly analysis called "Directors at the Box Office". Last week they covered John Carpenter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1cepji9/director...

I was surprised to find out that most of his movies were box office failures. Didn't matter to me, though. They weren't critically acclaimed, but they were a lot of fun.

Re:The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows on Wednesday May 01, 2024 @05:33PM (#40229790)
> Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now

You might be living in a bubble.

Re:Google lays off its Python team on Monday April 29, 2024 @11:09PM (#40206841)
NadellaSoft?

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