News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pflenker

Re:All I wanted was a custom domain email on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:14AM (#50031755)
That’s all incoming, but iCloud plus restricts the amount of addresses for outgoing mails
Re:I'm in a Meeting on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:07AM (#50031711)
I don’t even bother adding the note. People booked over it, they know it clashes with another meeting. No need to tell them the obvious.
Re:All I wanted was a custom domain email on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:27AM (#49961717)
Unlimited addresses is not something iCloud+ offers directly.
Re:When did Google get so f-ing weird? on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:44AM (#49876518)
Search in general, not only Google, has gotten too eager to come up with some results, and with assuming that the user is an idiot. For example, if I search on German Amazon for a box for index cards (German word: Karteikasten), Amazon assumes that I made a typo and changes my input to index cards (sans the box - German word: Karteikarten) . If I search my work chat program for a specific phrase (because I am looking for a specific chat with that phrase in it), it also searches for things which are synonymous to that phrase. If I look for results of the most recent marathon in my city it shows me results from last year, so I have to invest work in finding out if this year's results are simply not yet published, or if they are buried somewhere in the results.

The worst part is that there is no way to identify which results are for my original query, and which are because someone somewhere rewrote my query in the background. You know, the good old "did you mean...?" - that's what's missing.

Folks who work on any kind of search engines: "No results" should be a valid outcome to any search query!

Re:Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf] on Monday September 21, 2026 @04:53AM (#49784808)
Grim Fandango was one of the first games I bought out of my own pocket. And as was the norm back then, this used up all my games budget for months, so I had to stick to this game, for better or worse, for a long time. I remember it took me a very long time to even find the Tube Room, it's easy to miss unless you do the 3D equivalent of pixelhunting to find the place where you need to take a turn. And boy, was I stuck in Rubacava!

I also remember that it was slightly difficult to buy the game - I was at least 13 at the time, the game had an age rating of 12, but (gasp!) there were skeletons on the cover, and the tag line mentioned corruption and crime. So the lady in the shop actually called her boss before eventually selling the game to me.

I didn’t write the previous comment, but I think the point here is that there is a long-running trend aiming to protect users both from malicious intent and to a certain extent from themselves. In the past, viruses had it easy to infect and spread computers because of both inattentive users clicking on mails claiming someone loved them, and the default access mode for any user granting them admin access.

Even though review processeses generally do not exist for computers, they are part of that same trend.

Re:“I just chose words carefully” on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:56AM (#49522823)
The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones: An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.
Re:Saying No on Sunday August 09, 2026 @03:48PM (#49235068)
It feels to me as if the author got it backwards - in turning the AC back on, they didn’t „say no“ - the person who put up the note has „said no“ in the first place (to the practice of turning the ACs off) and the author was ignoring this clearly visible outlined boundary that other person has drawn.

Don’t get me wrong, the note itself wasn’t great either, but ignoring it wasn’t some great sign of „saying no“ - it was needlessly escalating a conflict instead of trying to resolve it.

Re:Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor on Monday July 20, 2026 @02:27AM (#48974958)
That’s not it in this case, because the book is mostly a recounting of what happened. I narrowed it down to two things: One is that every aspect of the story is treated equally - unimportant facets get an equally profound sounding prose like the really important bits.

And the other one is the repetition of phrases. Everything is worth slowing down on.everything is load bearing. That’s so annoying.

Re:Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor on Sunday July 19, 2026 @10:36AM (#48968556)
It’s great to have the entire topic brought together into a cohesive book - but wow, I find it very annoying to read.
Re:How to Read More Books on Monday July 13, 2026 @05:25AM (#48889963)
I find it very hard to find books worth reading. It’s so difficult to separate Signal from noise - there are just too many books and too few reliable curators. Amazon ratings, goodreads, some book awards, best seller lists - they all are sometimes hit, mostly miss for me.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odigo_Messenger

Re:Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @06:10AM (#48568156)
This doesn't work for everyone, for example, if I get motion sick, closing my eyes makes it far worse, almost immediately.
Re:Commodore Releases Flip Phone on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @08:30AM (#48554203)
Yeah me too. It felt like it was designed exclusively for me, it ticks all the boxes in what a dumb phone should and shouldn't have in terms of functionality.
Re:Commodore Releases Flip Phone on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @08:29AM (#48554192)
> If it had an option to install a messenger of choice (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp etc)

It has that capability. From TFA: > A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps, rideshare, a great camera for the moments worth keeping.

As a parent, what I find effective are content rating systems, be it for movies, games or apps, along with the ability to control and fine-tune them.

For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations)

This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation.

Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible.

Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.

You confuse ease of using a tool with quality of output. A skilled carpenter can work both with high and with medium quality tools and prefer one over the other with no difference visible in the craft they produce.
Re:The User Is Visibly Frustrated on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @04:44AM (#48276919)
One skill that I still possess and that LLMs haven't been able to replace (yet) is to ask good questions, for example:

- Rephrasing the original question to validate my understanding - Asking "why" a sufficient amount of times until I understand where the other party is coming from - Asking open questions aimed at generating insights

et cetera.

Instead, LLMs (often badly) guess what the background of the question may be, answer with that in mind and find it very difficult to let go of what they have made up.

Re:I Miss Terry Pratchett on Saturday May 23, 2026 @10:09AM (#48247874)
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.

That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.

Re:Google changes its search box on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @12:38AM (#48203162)
The part where data providers lose traffic because their own data is displayed directly on the google premises is what repeats.
Re:Google changes its search box on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @03:11PM (#48197951)
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.

This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.

History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.

Re:Don't become an engineering manager on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @02:13PM (#47237272)
I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.

Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.

A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.

I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.

Re:No Bookmarks on Saturday February 28, 2026 @12:39PM (#47198053)
For me, this misses the point of bookmarks - it’s not about remembering where I have been but getting there extremely fast.
Re:Letting Claude Play Text Adventures on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @04:23PM (#46711759)
For a game like anchorhead, which is famous in its niche, shouldn’t Claude already know it sufficiently to just solve it right away? I would expect that its data source contained multiple discussions and walkthroughs of the game.
Re:25 Years of Wikipedia on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:45PM (#46637167)
I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!

While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.

Re:Show HN: Website that plays the lottery every second on Saturday January 03, 2026 @01:21AM (#46473301)
A teacher of mine used to say:

Lottery is a tax for people who don’t understand statistics.

Re:Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn on Monday December 29, 2025 @09:05AM (#46420875)
When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years
All this costs money for little return of invest. As long as the collateral damage is below a threshold that causes reputational damage, there is no business incentive to solve this.
I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.

At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.

To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions are … AI powered.

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

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