News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

akurtzhs

Lavender is what we see swarms and swarms of bees come grab in the Pacific Northwest.
Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.

To be fair, I had stretches of 2K, XP, 7 and 10 working acceptably.

Re:Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels on Monday July 13, 2026 @11:33AM (#48894295)
Nothing by Adam Warren? He took the Dirty Pair comics somewhere very cyberpunk in the last three volumes.
Re:Winamp Skin Museum on Thursday July 02, 2026 @11:27AM (#48763075)
Reading my skin notes thirty plus years later is a very strange experience.
Re:Banned Book Library in a Wi-Fi Smart Light Bulb on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @01:59PM (#48559287)
"We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding process--the childhood, if you will--that has the most far-reaching repercussions."

- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft

He indirectly called the Pope a simpleton, and the Pope took offense.
Paypal paid people to open an account or to refer new accounts early on. Inspired Dropbox to do the same thing with free storage.
I’ve tried custom launchers but never found anything as good as the Nvidia Shield interface before Google fucked it over with ads.
Re:Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud on Monday March 03, 2025 @11:03AM (#43243055)
Yes, can’t remember the name, but there’s an old short story about alien explorers who find a dead Earth with futuristic buildings.

They revive a knight who attacks them and gets killed, a hippie who they kill off after questioning, and finally a future human with psychic powers who steals the revival device.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @11:06PM (#42943639)
Kids really need to spend time outside.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148707

I used Gandi for a long time and switched after they were bought out and registration prices started rising. HN article from 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777

After that I've used spaceship.com, NameCheap's rebrand, without complaint and most recently porkbun.com due to support in dnscontrol.

Re:Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server on Wednesday December 25, 2024 @11:40PM (#42513154)
If you’re willing to pay for proprietary software, I’ve been incredibly happy with Roon for music organization. Handles 99% of albums I add without an issue, great multi-room support, best suggestions of any existing service (Rest in peace Google Play Music). They added remote streaming a few years ago and it’s all I use now.
Re:We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour on Saturday November 16, 2024 @11:53PM (#42162047)
Ages ago Metafilter was $5 for a lifetime registration. It was a great site and community for a long time.
Re:HTML Form Validation is heavily underused on Monday October 28, 2024 @08:10PM (#41977980)
Unfortunately the number input is lacking and inconsistent. We’ve always fallen back to JavaScript validation.
Other fallen status symbols that come to mind, although lower costs were the reason over better alternatives.

Aluminum before better material science dropped the price. Dishes, utensils, the cap on the Washington Monument.

Pineapples before Dole setup plantations.

Gelatin had two phases: before refrigeration, it needed hours of work in the kitchen. Then the status came from electrification and owning a refrigerator.

Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) on Monday April 29, 2024 @07:03PM (#40205201)
“What’s in the box?”

“Perl.”

YMMV. I prefer hybrid with two days a week in the office.

You can dedicate those days to meetings and conversations and keep the remote days for more heads down work.

And if you can’t make it to the office due to snow or travel, you’re prepared for remote work.

> I've resorted to making an "actual_requirements.txt" file manually listing only direct dependencies and whatever version constraints make sense.

Pip-tools has an elegant solution for this. You write an requirements.in where you list packages and optionally versions, then pip-compile turns that into a requirements.txt with every package including dependencies specified by versions. You can use it to update specific packages as well.

Python Foundation support ended that long ago, but vendors maintained it for longer. Red Hat support for it through RHEL 7 ends 30 June 2024, however, and my guess is they’re the last ones.
Re:Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @12:23AM (#39612615)
Blizzard used BitTorrent for distributing full games, patches and trailers for years.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

Re:Netflix's New Chapter on Monday January 23, 2023 @06:27PM (#34496612)
Plex is aiming for this with their emphasis on universal cross-service search. If you look at the main page personal media is 6 paragraphs down.
The sun won't give out until much longer, but life as we know it has far less than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...

Look at 500–600 million years. The sun's increasing luminosity means rising temperatures and falling CO2, which means no plant life at some point. The high estimate for plant and animal life is 1.2 billion years.

The sun swells to a red giant around 5 billion, swallows the Earth around 7.5, and shrinks to a white dwarf around 8.

Re:API Practices If You Hate Your Customers on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @04:37PM (#21767046)
returning a null array to represent no items

To be honest, that's what I'd expect. What do you dislike about that result, and what would you prefer to see returned? Jump straight to 404?

returning a single object without an array to represent one item.

So an array if there's multiple results, and a bare object for a single result? That's unpleasant.

Re:Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:58PM (#17930353)
They already reintroduced AOL keywords in 2011 with their Direct Connect "feature" for Google+, https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect..., so one could go straight to Pepsi's Google+ page with +Pepsi.

They killed it off in 2014.

Re:Fuchsia is not Linux on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @05:13PM (#16815716)
WSL is an attempt at getting developers to use Windows rather than OS X or Linux. That's a very different situation than coming up with the fundamentals for a new operating system.
Re:Is it time to stop trusting Google search? on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:33PM (#15677456)
I'm still frustrated that Google took away using pluses in searches so they could try to recreate AOL keywords for Google Plus.
His Wikipedia article disagrees with this, saying "Upset that Nasser would not enforce a government based on Islamic ideology, Qutb and other Brotherhood members orchestrated a plot to assassinate the Egyptian president in 1954. The attempt was foiled and Qutb was jailed soon afterwards;"
Re:Private Porn Shoots on Monday November 07, 2016 @02:25PM (#12894092)
At least in the US, this is incorrect.

There is a gift tax, but it's paid by the donor, and they can give up to the annual exclusion amount a year without hitting it. This year, the limit's $14,000.

Once a gift goes past that for the year, the excess starts counting against the donor's lifetime exclusion and needs to be reported on the donor's taxes. Gift taxes come into play once the lifetime exclusion limit is exceeded, and it's $5.4 million.

Re:How to Deploy Software on Tuesday March 01, 2016 @07:35PM (#11207360)
I've used https://opbeat.com/ for a small side project and been fairly happy - they track exceptions, releases and performance.

Older »