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This is exactly the type of uncommon solution I was seeking. Thank you so much!
Got it. I think the trouble is our building is only 5 units, 2 of which are occupied by elderly people who likely don’t care. So feels unlikely that Spectrum / AT&T would undergo construction for just 3 new subscribers. (We’re surrounded by much larger apartment buildings, which is probably why they’re wired and we aren’t). Perhaps worth checking on though.

Re: fixed wireless, would that typically offer higher speeds than my current 5G home internet? Verizon advertises my plan as 25-75Mbps upload, but I never see that. I worry it’d be the same with any over the air service, but I haven’t really explored fixed wireless.

Ask HN: How can I get decent internet speeds in my apartment?

I feel like I’m going crazy.I live in a dense metropolitan area (Hollywood, Los Angeles), surrounded on all sides by buildings with fiber and high-speed cable. Yet I can’t get any wired internet service in my small, old 5-unit building.Right now I’m forced to use Verizon 5G Home Internet. Download speeds are fine, but latency is bad and upload speeds are abysmal (5 Mbps), which is a real...

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Re:Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview on Friday November 21, 2025 @09:38PM (#46011567)
Direct link to the interview: https://youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8

(I was locked out of the embedded player on suspicion of being a bot)

Show HN: Riff – minimalist tool for shareable thoughts (MVP, seeking feedback)

https://www.riff.page/

Hi HN! We’re Alex & Dan, two solo founders building (https://www.riff.page) – a minimalist space for sharing lists, notes, and ideas.It’s like a stripped-down Notion, focused on simplicity and sharing. You can create bite-sized posts, structured lists, or even entire lightweight sites by linking riffs together.Some ways we’re using it:- Shareable lists like “Books that changed my life” or...

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Full disclosure I'm not a production designer, but have worked in the art department on some smaller film productions.

These individual parts are likely used to build larger props that a production can't otherwise acquire. For example, assembling a cyberpunk plane interior, or the control panel in a time machine.

They can also be scattered around a set where those individual parts would belong (like a mechanic's studio) to make the space feel real and lived-in.

Lastly, they can be used for close-up shots (with just a little bit of production design built up around them). This is a lot cheaper than renting an entire interior.

Re:After Dark Screensavers in CSS on Sunday March 05, 2023 @05:02PM (#35034538)
For those on Mac who want to configure these (or any web page) as your actual screensaver, you can use WebViewScreenSaver[0].

[0]: https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

I recently threw together a simple website for this purpose – love those YouTube playlists, but having YT open during my work sessions was hurting my overall productivity.

https://radio.writing.fm

Re:Writing for Engineers on Sunday May 01, 2022 @06:21PM (#31229291)
This is one of the best – maybe the best – videos I've seen on effective writing. I rewatch it every couple months.
Re:Things I don’t want to do to grow my side project on Sunday May 01, 2022 @06:15PM (#31229244)
Quick idea: what might be nice instead of (or in addition to) an After Effects animation would be some interactive HTML sliders and buttons. When a website visitor slides them, they can see what effects the settings would have on their monitor -- potentially even applied to the website itself. Just a thought!
This is great!

I wrote Margin[1] for similar reasons. But because I wanted to be able to incorporate notes as well as to-dos, absolutely anything can go between two square brackets in Margin:

[ ] denotes a to-do item

[x] denotes item marked as done

[anything] denotes an annotation of type "anything"

At first blush, it would appear Margin and [x]it! are compatible, with some very minor differences. Feel free to draw inspo from the Margin spec, and hit me up if you want to combine / collab.

[1] https://margin.love

Honestly, I can see validity in both your comment and the parent comment that you're arguing against. But I'll press you a little, if only to understand your point better:

> Microsoft's share of the desktop market at the time was very close to unity.

> Apple's share of the smartphone market is around... 55% within the US.

At what percentage of the market should Apple be required to loosen their grip over their platform / open up their marketplace? Is there a specific number they could reach where you'd feel comfortable placing more restrictions on these practices?

Re:Jimmy Wales’ Final Email on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @02:56PM (#29166652)
> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.

Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.

Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.

(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P

Just want to flag that, in addition to all this fun and exciting new tech for disabilities, we really do just need better basics.

As the partner of a wheelchair user, these exoskeletons are a great toy to have on the horizon – but the promise of this has been around for a long time, and while the hope of a better future is exciting, we need change on a much quicker time scale than this. (Not saying people shouldn't be working on this – it's rad that they are).

On a day-to-day level, my partner would much more benefit from:

- A better wheelchair (this will mean something different for every body – for them, someone who uses a wheelchair for chronic pain, an exoskeleton wouldn't even help – much more useful would be a wheelchair where every bump of pavement doesn't rattle your whole body).

- More accessible shops and public spaces. We don't really get to go out much – most often blockades include cracked sidewalks, friend's houses that require a step (or stairs), and inaccessible shops.

- Better safety nets for those with disabilities (it's VERY expensive to be disabled in America – consider how much more these exoskeletons will cost than already expensive wheelchairs).

tl;dr These technologies are exciting and deserve attention and energy – just keep in mind that the notion that these emerging technologies will someday wipe out all of wheelchair users' problems in one fell swoop is both false and does nothing for the many millions prevented from participating in society right now. We need better access today.

> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art.

I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings).

For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves.

The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.

Re:Ask HN: Getting Better at Storytelling? on Saturday June 19, 2021 @02:08PM (#27562811)
This single best book on storytelling that I've ever read is 'Invisible Ink' by Brian McDonald [1].

Of all the concepts in my comment above, the one it covers most in-depth is "theme" (the book calls it "armature," but same idea).

The main argument of the book is that storytelling is an evolved survival mechanism, and that every great story conveys a single piece of survival information (think the morals of Aesop's fables).

Every other technique discussed in the book is built atop that fundamental truth, and exists to help the storyteller prove that piece of survival information.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Ink-Practical-Building-Reso...

Re:Ask HN: Getting Better at Storytelling? on Saturday June 19, 2021 @03:45AM (#27558628)
I've been studying storytelling for about five years, as a way to improve my writing. Here's what I've learned so far.

The simplest unit of storytelling consists of...

  (a) A character who attempts to achieve a specific thing.
  (b) A conflict standing in the way of that attempt.
  (c) A conclusion to that conflict.
Together, these three things form a Simple Dramatic Unit. For example:

  (a) Sally tries to swim back to shore.
  (b) But two shark fins emerge from the water.
  (c) She gets pulled under.
Do you notice how, even though there's nothing particularly inventive or original about the above scene, you're leaning in a little? Wondering what happens next? That's the power of the Simple Dramatic Unit.

Technically the above is a complete story, but it doesn't feel totally resolved because it doesn't have much of a punchline. We want to know what happens to Sally, and we even hope for a happy ending -- how might she get out of this situation?

As a storyteller, you continue to string together these Simple Dramatic Units til you reach the punchline of your story (also known as the "resolution").

Once you master the Simple Dramatic Unit, and tying multiple Dramatic Units together, there are numerous additional variables you can weave into your stories to improve your storytelling:

  - Stakes (Sally is a mother of two children, both on the beach that day.)
  - Strong Characters (Sally is a risk-taker who feels a strong command over nature. Not once in her life has she ever feared the elements.)
  - Theme ("Those who don't fear nature are all the more at its mercy.")
  - Tone (Her children watch the shark attack from the shore with keen interest, but without alarm.)
  - Style ("The beach was placid that day, the smell of salt rendered sweet in the humid air....")
  - Originality (The shark fins aren't grey, but a fluorescent pink.)
  - Etc, etc.
But all those things are secondary to the Simple Dramatic Unit. Master that first. It will serve as a very solid foundation for any type of story you want to tell.
Re:Show HN: A simple time conversion site for developers on Saturday June 19, 2021 @12:05AM (#27557657)
Wow, thank you for this detailed feedback! Some of this was on my list, but most of it wasn't even on my radar.

I've been planning to make it auto-select just the time for easy copying, but auto-copy may be better. I'm always somewhat hesitant to hijack the user's clipboard (what if they had some text copied that they needed?), but maybe it's expected enough these days that users wouldn't mind.

Thanks! Never heard of timefhuman, but now I'll look into it.

To parse human-written dates, time.lol currently uses a combination of the JavaScript libraries Day.js [1] and Sugar [2].

If Day.js can't determine a valid date from the given input, then Sugar is invoked to try even harder :) Seems to work well so far, but indeed it falls short with complex input (e.g. "The Tuesday after July 4th").

[1] https://day.js.org [2] https://sugarjs.com

As someone who maintains an eCommerce WordPress site, I find writing code that deals with datetimes to be extremely onerous.

I’m always bopping between various conversion sites to debug my outputs. I wanted a simple, uncluttered page where I could do all my conversions in one place. I’m hoping https://time.lol becomes that spot.

I'd appreciate any feedback you have to offer!

Planned improvements:

- Make copying outputted dates easier

- Add a timezone picker for the input

- Add an output row that allows you to see the date in any timezone you wish

- Make the design more legible / aesthetically pleasing

Re:Rethinking the computer ‘desktop’ as a concept on Monday May 31, 2021 @09:48PM (#27349981)
> Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it?

Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online?

It seems like one solution to this problem would be a document that stores an editable copy locally and a revision hash in its metadata, then decides whether to serve up the local or cloud copy depending on whether the user is connected to the internet.

Sure, this could cause conflicts between online / cloud files if someone else edits the file at the same time as you, but that's true of any cloud sync service like iOS Notes.

I guess in retrospect I'm just describing Dropbox which, while it's more a container for standard files than a file format in itself, has largely the same effect.

Pain and Suicide: The Other Side of the Opioid Story

https://watermark.silverchair.com/15-3-345.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAqowggKmBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKXMIICkwIBADCCAowGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM01A91_T5xmQHPT3lAgEQgIICXdLyae869ZdSpR7Ee9NPKhaQCSW4kPhToyJInqDOVqES46Y-CPH0HBFZIFpOp3mdHuNTl5-qhXxvDFuIYAsTpywjIuGCSflzDfpJDna4zTiSYDPzMuWk-MW-bdebMXjQ6E-yCLRciGRQbWKUKvXzsjgtJjv4GM-DYc8Nt433k21gn9-xIQJaJ-Kgs1DvD8jozmwHfGStKrWEv44nHG22a-SDpNZq710QZJvO680KvuYez6XfZ6mvAgbKDlJ05RmQb4mlXjjpVE50XVOoFJyhoocIdLTsOm8BIx1XvCLMwLGvHIHuKs7aNKLsxINvOLqErBIkIWCNkYkgGFKA27hSCI5uZk4lsTmJSMCtEHAJtgTM1YqkwhkKWMtusYNza8Mi0nZIyq6O5RAGronqqif8YG7BkV_sJ6lqm4IzKua64I4QT0FYpPfkdSJ2030Vfj7R0lVsQlEFmtyssw6clf_bCLboPF0DEJ-onU6SK5tQFaSkRxB879b5nMDX_WByDCl227_kxtIH1ZX5AOzypvnQp5ZckuwHYrVGKMax0SR_G4C0ELInICxr0QFFRngQTK-WVKkuK1ieg_Myy0mJYTNGAL3t-NeV5vR03xAQLAr6ZtRePgN1SMrWGihhwVUw5Fl1zjm7GpEkVN9zaOf0VOtpYE_vE8o0iYxmS3an7dsvNtPBpDfq6Qsd8vMjem4_RqyEyPSVrgAkAoLuFIBfig-ccKDk54Rtdcsi1Bsw2beoySfgXl3TW2NfFvRWibzVcX7aA3BJpIxulIyaVgsQBf_zd0zPKCsxyVwwJe4w77cW

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