News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

monkellipse

100% agreed, outrageous. Sadly I don’t know what else to say or do, feels like shouting into the wind at this point…
Re:Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker on Monday September 07, 2026 @12:40PM (#49600238)
The bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol
Cool, I’ll give it a try! OCR for printed stuff, device sync and character voices (for fiction) would be killer.
Re:Combustion Engine Web-Based Simulator on Friday July 10, 2026 @03:13PM (#48863961)
I see no declaration that this is a machine generated site, but the aesthetic is a dead giveaway. The language on the “how it works” page is unmistakably LLM output. As a total novice in engines this site had the potential to educate me, but did the author vet the data at all? If the author doesn’t bother telling me they checked any output on this, what assurance do I have anything is accurate on the site at all? If I knew an actual engineer put their focus on this tool I’d feel much better about trying to learn something from it. Short of that it’s just a pretty (but predictable) interface.
Re:Ask HN: Do you believe aliens are visiting Earth? on Monday December 01, 2025 @03:36PM (#46112838)
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
Re:A Test for Life versus Non-Life on Friday August 02, 2024 @02:18PM (#41141208)
Lex Fridman had Cronin on his podcast, quite an interesting discussion.
Re:The accidental tyranny of user interfaces on Sunday May 26, 2024 @12:00PM (#40483186)
For further reading, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman is a great source for a comprehensive look at this subject. I believe it’s probably still required reading for UI/UX folk but also approachable for other people and lays out a thorough case for what the key trade-offs are in interface design.
Professional product photographer here, primarily jewelry. Can confirm, pixel shift is a thing of pure beauty in this application, at least on the Hasselblad medium format system our studio used for years. Was a pain to wait for 16 captures to fire off, we certainly didn’t use it every day, but for high end work it gave beautiful tones and pixel resolution. I’ve never tried such a thing on landscapes, I can see the reasons to avoid it in that case for sure!
Re:The Psychology of Getting High–A Lot on Sunday April 21, 2024 @01:48AM (#40103438)
A survey about how motivated the users felt? I am not convinced by this data. Surely we can do better.
Re:How to copy a file between devices? on Thursday February 15, 2024 @02:28AM (#39380027)
Having just last night gone back and forth with multiple screenshots and careful explanations to guide someone through importing a picture from email to the ios photos app… maybe I’m lazy but it’s just exhausting. I agree that with effort it’s do-able, but it IS tiring :)
Re:How to copy a file between devices? on Thursday February 15, 2024 @01:48AM (#39379831)
As the defacto I.T. support man for family and friends of varied skill levels… sometimes it’s really daunting trying to get them to do things that seem very intuitive to the technically experienced. I’m not saying we should just give up ok trying to show people new tools but I can empathize with the terror of even imagining handing a terminal off to some of these people, hah! A simple GUI goes a long way for people who don’t, for example, know how to write a file path or don’t know the difference between a forward slash and a backslash!
Correct, none. I use Pihole for blocking. But the bigger point I think is that security conscious users are hesitant to employ extensions in general, even if some folks are ok with a couple select extensions they are still spooked by the general field.
I love the idea of browser extensions but they don’t appear to be worth the security/privacy risk for my use cases. I wonder how many others are like me and too paranoid to risk extensions at all?
Re:Optical One-Time Pad Decoding on Monday January 29, 2024 @03:09PM (#39181782)
This project shows how to make a small view screen that uses light to perform the logical operations needed to decrypt the unbreakable One-Time-Pad cypher. The video presents a little history to provide context, then shows the details of how optical logic gates can be made to do decryption.
Re:Bare Bones Software – BBEdit 15 is here on Friday January 12, 2024 @01:55AM (#38964891)
I was about to sit and gripe that the only shortcoming for me in BBedit compared to vscode is built in ssh combined with python venv… but once I started to type that I realized BBedit almost certainly had a solution there too, I just haven’t bothered to look! It’s great software.
Re:Real-time image editing using latent consistency models on Friday November 10, 2023 @05:25PM (#38225384)
The same way you stop people from using a hammer maliciously?
Re:Show HN: Inshellisense – IDE style shell autocomplete on Monday November 06, 2023 @02:33PM (#38167650)
Great idea! Also terrifying :) Given how often I accidentally commit the wrong text in vscode, I shudder to think of the damage I could do with this on my shell, hah! What safety measures are there/could there be?
Re:Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites? on Thursday September 07, 2023 @04:05PM (#37424850)
Their catalog is also brilliant. Often companies seem to struggle balancing marketing desires (“HEY CHECK OUT THIS THING!!”) with serving users what they’re looking for efficiently. Mcmaster leans heavily to the latter in the catalog AND web, to the joy of their users and perhaps the frustration of their marketing team? Great stuff.
Re:Ask HN: What is the most memorable game you played? on Friday July 21, 2023 @03:58PM (#36818860)
Subspace(“continuum”)… top down spaceships pew pew. Elegant physics, high skill ceiling. Multiplayer only, so many hours spent in 40+ player arenas in Chaos Zone. That game was really fun for chasing high-bounty ships that had survived in a single life for hours… half the zone going after one guy/turret, finally popping them was so satisfying!!
Re:Is ORM still an anti-pattern? on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @02:27AM (#36503053)
“At lago we…” Hmmm… as a forced user of Lago’s product at work, I’m sorry but I stopped reading at that point. Terrible software, terrible support, enjoy your ORM hellscape I’ve flipped the bozo bit.
Re:For accountants, AI is like spreadsheets in the 1980s on Friday April 28, 2023 @10:05PM (#35749345)
I was hoping for some domain-specific insight there. Instead, that was a thin article without much more than a blanket assertion. Could have copy/replaced “accountant” with pretty much any other knowledge worker.
This was my solution. It feels like overkill at times but I never have to worry about packaging messes anymore. That being said I can understand the desire to solve it on the metal, it’s a mess.
Re:Parsing the .DS_Store File Format on Monday March 27, 2023 @11:07PM (#35335395)
An informative nitpick, thank you.
I try generally not to be the vindictive type… but Lego being SUCH HAWKS and sticklers when it comes to brand protection, I can’t help but root for them getting skewered for this. I doubt much will really come of it, though.
Re:Show HN: I added autopilot to the lunar lander game on Friday March 10, 2023 @12:56AM (#35090916)
Nice! I also got hooked on the lander thing, really quick to pick up and good replay value! Your autopilot handles a gentle landing well. If I get the lander going sideways at any appreciable speed, then flip autopilot on, a crash is inevitable :) As a human my solution to that is simply slowing down with lots of thrust, though I still wind up turning the lander into scrap most of the time hah!
Re:Brew Is a Bad Neighbor on Saturday September 03, 2022 @03:14PM (#32705083)
Unexpected overwrites of system tools are the problem I’ve faced. Not sure how common that really is but once can be enough to leave a bad taste!
Re:Brew Is a Bad Neighbor on Saturday September 03, 2022 @03:12PM (#32705053)
I really got fed up with Homebrew after something got clobbered, this looks like a nice simple solution to that! Thanks! Curious to know how effective it is in practice. I resorted to abusing Docker for nifty command line tricks on the Mac but it sure is a heavy solution and some things really are better on the metal!
Re:Ask HN: How to Create Vector Art? on Sunday June 05, 2022 @10:08AM (#31631122)
Curves are just plain tricky, and are a skill that requires practice. I recommend tracing a shape in a photograph, especially one that has a mix of soft and hard angles and edges. Be patient with yourself, practice it like an instrument, and in a week or so you’ll have it down!
Re:Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster on Monday May 30, 2022 @01:23AM (#31555720)
Yes, exactly. DNS settings on router makes that easy, just give each pihole a static address and point DNS to them. The address are listed in priority.

Older »