News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pfooti

Re:XPS 16 Creator Edition Laptop on Sunday October 25, 2026 @09:51AM (#50231590)
I have an xps15 that yes, runs hot when I really use it, but it is otherwise fine. May be a model year situation. I have a 9510 from 2021 and it still suits fine as a daily driver for node / angular / postgres etc running in containers as I do dev work.
Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:30PM (#49913946)
promo already happened; perf is about 6 weeks away.
Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @12:32AM (#49178582)
Fair enough- outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly. In the US, many service workers are in a system where the employer has externalized the cost to pay those employees to the customers. The system is awful, but I'm also not going to not tip if I can afford it.

FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.

Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @10:58PM (#49178069)
I dunno. Hard to say "I tip my Uber driver because I understand how little the drivers get paid" if I'm also moving to waymo instead. Hard to find ethical consumption under capitalism.

But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @09:23PM (#49177488)
Waymo is more until you factor in the tip for Uber. Ive also found that waymo is a lot more correct in estimating time to pickup in SF. Because Uber/lyft drivers can turn you down (presumably) I find that "your Uber can be here in 4 minutes" when I open the app turns into "but it will actually be 20"
Re:A History of IDEs at Google on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @10:28PM (#48130422)
I use mondrian/ instead of cr/
Yeah, I don't use any community plugins. I take notes in obsidian. And it turns out, having multiple years worth of notes and todos in a tree of crosslinked markdown files is pretty handy in this AI era. I take notes in obsidian and run the Gemini cli from my vault. Works a treat.
Re:Men Who Stare at Walls on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @09:25AM (#47934254)
I do this all the time. Hold your kindle or book far enough away that you have good peripheral vision of your surroundings. Practice widening your view so you can use your peripheral vision to guide your steps while you walk. Look up at intersections.

I can only do this with books. With my phone I am too focused on the phone to work in two visual modes at the same time, which I guess supports the claims.

Re:Sad Story of My Google Workspace Account Suspension on Sunday April 05, 2026 @12:09PM (#47650838)
Make a primary super admin (admin@ whatever) and only log into it for admin purposes. Make an actual user (you@) for day to day line of business work. This has the benefit of making some categories of spear phishing and xsrf attacks harder if the account that gets compromised doesn't have root.
For reasons of gyroscopic precession I suspect that they will remain largely science fiction for the foreseeable future.
Hah, I had one of those. I paid $50 for a "lifetime email service" that later they wanted me to pay monthly for, so I had to bid goodbye to my null.net address
I have had an apple id problem myself, for the past N years. Mine is an old mac.com account, which has my Gmail address as the backup email (and the primary one now that mac.com isn't doing email anymore). Because of this, I cannot sign up for a new account with my Gmail (it is tied to the older mac.com account).

I've managed to reset the password, but I must answer a security question to log in. I mean, I answered those security questions probably a decade ago and I do not know what they are anymore. You can reset your security questions, but to do that you need to use an iPhone (last one I owned was a 4) that is still logged in, or, answer a security question. Which is as we established, the problem.

So every couple of months I log in, try a few other possible answers, get them wrong, and get locked out for a bit.

Anyway, I need to get this fixed my march, due to apple being the formula one streamer in my country now, so I have to actually solve the problem of logging in to my apple account. Or, I guess, making another random email just so I can watch f1. Sigh.

But if anyone knows how to reset security questions, I'd love to know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to torrenting the races.

Re:30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" on Thursday December 04, 2025 @01:18PM (#46150885)
For a while you could write OSX stuff in Java. I did. They also had some pretty okay JNI bindings for stuff like quicktime, so I was able to write a java application that used quicktime to load and display videos. I needed to analyze video streams for my dissertation, so I wrote some custom visualization stuff in java that used the quicktime bindings. Good times.
Looking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.
Re:Ground stop at JFK due to staffing on Friday October 31, 2025 @12:48PM (#45774074)
I presume that the court knows what it is doing, which is playing a partisan game. Last administration it invented a whole new legal doctrine (major questions) to fabricate a way to block the biden agenda, this administration it is doing its best to give the trump administration a huge amount of power _without_ ceding that power indefinitely to the next administration via precedent.
Re:Ground stop at JFK due to staffing on Friday October 31, 2025 @09:34AM (#45771817)
Yeah, I think too many people (especially dem leadership, but also a lot of centrist Republican voters) are waiting for things to "go back to normal."

There's a kind of mental trap (Frances Fukuyama and the end of history) where you consider the modern liberal capitalist democracy an attractor state of such strength that anything like the current admin is a temporary aberration,that we can wait it out.

And just like the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, I think the populist demagogue class can retain power longer than the liberal institutions can endure. I certainly hope I'm incorrect about this.

Re:Ground stop at JFK due to staffing on Thursday October 30, 2025 @11:25PM (#45768054)
Yeah, I think the actual underpinning support that broke this time is recission. In the past, of congress passed a budget with money for the some department or line item, that money would be spent. Now the president has claimed that he doesn't have to spend money he had been directed to spend by finding bills, and (importantly) the supreme court has upheld this stance.

This means that there is no longer the ability to negotiate a budget in good faith. The Dems can fight for more health care funding (or whatever) and the compromise can happen, and then the president can just say "sike!" And not do it.

And, political leanings aside, this president has shown that he will indeed break any agreement he decides to, so there doesn't seem to be any reason to negotiate. So I'm thinking this shutdown lasts a Long time.

Re:Rivian's Also E-bike is like nothing you've ever seen on Thursday October 23, 2025 @11:29AM (#45682993)
While this is true, I've dealt with a sudden battery failure on my old model ebike (a kalkhoff from 2018 or so) and I can tell you that without any motor assist the bike might as well be stationary. It is quite heavy.
Re:Show HN: Autism Simulator on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @09:27PM (#45445520)
This is also fascinating from the perspective of me, someone who is autistic and open about it at work. My work collaboration profile comes out and says "I'm autistic", and sets out a few things to know.

When I hit the workspace rearrangement event I felt it in my bones, since my employer did that. However because I have a doctor's note about my noise and light sensitivity, they were able to accommodate me with a dedicated desk in a quieter area.

It isn't the quietest, and I still get shuffled around, but I get to preview the new location and pick the best spot for my sensitivities each time I've moved. So in my case, being open with my management (and reports) about my autism has been a very helpful thing.

Re:Microsoft PowerToys on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @02:53PM (#45202075)
It is a little annoying that I had to install this in order to remap the capslock key on my laptop to a control key. That's all I use from powertoys, but I guess I'm glad it is at least feasible.
Re:Zoox launches its robotaxi service to the public in Las Vegas on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @02:41PM (#45201941)
These little front-back symmetric buses (as well as engineering-outfitted minivans) are pretty common in the mission in SF as well. I see them all the time in a very small (four or so blocks around 16th and folsom where my pottery studio is) area, but I think they're all still just test driving.

As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.

I was a TL and then a TLM in my org, and am now an EM. I'm actually pretty happy about it, personally. I am organizing an eng summit tomorrow between my team and a sibling team (which is onsite and visiting from elsewhere) in my org, and I noticed that about 18 months ago, I would have been the person to give 4 out of the 5 main talks at the summit (as the expert / TL on that system). Now it's five different eng. This tells me I've been able to nurture / elevate the other engineers on the team, get them all into technical leadership roles, and then have them reach out and be ready to talk about their work to other teams.

Overall: this is a good thing. By taking up less room on the technical side, I've replaced one of me with four strong engineers. Previously, I was split between TL work and EM work and as a result, did a half job of each, leaving too much un-done.

The other thing I'll note is that engineers are basically the only role with this distinction. Product Managers, Program Managers, Sales, Marketing, all those roles seem to combine management with seniority. Only on the engineering side do we have both a TL and Manager hierarchy (while typically the TLs for a team report to the same manager that the line manager for the team does, they exert authority differently). This works out okay on the eng side when there is a strong alliance between the TLs and the EMs, but that doesn't always happen.

Re:The issue of anti-cheat on Linux on Friday August 22, 2025 @03:00PM (#44988432)
A dedicated machine with no other general purpose apps that has minimal private data on it sounds like a gaming console.
Re:Pebble Time 2* Design Reveal on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @03:45PM (#44892914)
Yeah it looks pretty similar to the pebble 2 (2016) in that regard. I had an original pebble and a pebble 2, and the heart monitor on the 2 was super uncomfortable, to the point where I mostly just kept wearing my original pebble. I currently have a pixel watch, and the body is fatter but it is also way more smooth of a transition into the hr sensor.

I can see myself buying one of these new pebbles, but not the one with the hr sensor. I really just want it for the notifications support.

Re:Cow vs. Water Buffalo Mozzarella on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:24AM (#44811666)
I'll give that a try, thanks! I'm currently doing a 10h room temp ferment (from 1/4t of yeast) and a 48h fridge rest. I think I got that from kenji alt. I'm satisfied with some of it, but I wish the crust was a bit more chewy and able to stand up to the sauce. The slices all flop over, but that may also be from over-saucing.
Re:Cow vs. Water Buffalo Mozzarella on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @07:54PM (#44805980)
I make pizza at home in an outdoor pizza oven (gozney dome). My recipe cooks at about 850F. All forms (skim or otherwise) of cow mozzarella scorch fiercely at that temperature before the crust is done. Buffalo mozzarella does not. Some of my local markets carry Buf brand buffalo mozz, which is not from italy but is from the same animal (I think).

The buf mozz is the thing that takes my homemade pizza from "meh" to "actually, this is pretty good". I'm working on getting it to "wow, this is great" but that will require further refinement of my crust technique, I think.

They should just make the pool wider with a big unused area on either side.
I have no idea. I signed up for the music service under the $8/mo plan basically the day they announced it, and i've never canceled or missed a payment, but they've never increased my price. I just hope I haven't jinxed myself here.
I am still paying for mine. My Google music all access I'm feeling lucky subscription turned into a YouTube music one, which includes YouTube premium, and I'm still only paying 8 bucks a month, which seems like a pretty good deal even if I also pay for Spotify.
What makes you think a potential buyer would not be motivated to spy on its own users? Either it is profitable to do this (and therefore the owners will) or it is not (and therefore being forced to sell chrome won't harm googles bottom line).

Older »