News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

throwaway7679

Re:UN approves new world map [video] on Saturday September 05, 2026 @04:22AM (#49574365)
Finally, the racist and anti-africa map projection conspiracy of 1569 has come to an end. /s

Absurdly, that was the actual motivation behind the resolution. How embarrassing for all involved.

Choosing maps for political reasons is nothing new, of course. The UN's own emblem features a azimuthal equidistant projection, which is meant to present a balanced depiction of all the nations. It is strange to see them now pick one in order to promote a nakedly africa-centric message.

Re:2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @12:42AM (#49518043)
The evolution for Old School RuneScape was to just make cheating a built-in feature. It only takes a couple clicks every ten minutes to "play" the game.
Such licenses are not actually used. Their existence is anti-nuclear performance art.
They should stop pretending they aren't shills, and link directly to "nytimes.com/subscription".
I see electron in the repo but there is no mention of it on the main page. Providing desktop builds is essential, as Discord communities based around desktop activities may have little interest otherwise.

Fluxer is another discord clone that is AGPL, self-hostalbe, etc. How does that compare with Armada?

Re:Remote Attestation on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @09:59PM (#48840015)
Maybe you could do a post on... remote attestation.

That is, the thing that people are actually talking about when they use that term: The means for companies and governments to usurp the ownership of consumer devices.

Sibling comments are right. Refusing to hurt people is a crime against money.
Grieving parents clamor for laws that will allow surveillance companies to surveil even harder, and for laws that force all people to be subject to their schemes.

Apparently companies can just kill kids to turn parents into their biggest advocates.

The incentives here should probably go in the other direction.

This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

The ideal is the owner being able to use TPM/SecureBoot/etc to ensure that the device is in the configuration they want. That means resisting tampering, and making any successful tampering become obvious.

The problem is third parties using TPM/SecureBoot/etc as a weapon against the owner via remote attestation, by preventing them from configuring their own device, with the threat of being cut off from critical services.

Having the upside without the downside would be nice, but how could it work? Is a technical solution feasible, or would it need a law/regulation?

Re:Apple Vision Pro upgraded with M5 chip on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:17PM (#45597862)
Let's not hand-wave field of view. Glasses cannot display anything outside the bounds of their frames, and therefore cannot have a field of view as large as a headset. No amount of miniaturization will overcome that limitation.

Contact lenses having the capability of a headset? That's just magical thinking.

Re:Apple Vision Pro upgraded with M5 chip on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @11:54AM (#45594505)
There are several gaps in capability between headsets and glasses, which cannot be filled by any existing technology.

For example, consider field of view, which is a critical measurement of these displays. Typical specs are 120 degrees for headsets, 40 for glasses.

Headsets also perform very high performance rendering compared to glasses. The tiny <1Wh batteries in glasses are insufficient for that amount of work.

Glasses can't be expected to compete with headsets, much less eliminate them from the market entirely within a few years. It makes more sense to think of VR headsets and AR glasses as completely unrelated product categories.

Screwing customers with sabotaged crap is standard Nintendo behavior. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30773214

But I wonder if they have run afoul of the EU Radio Equipment Directive in this case, by refusing to receive power from some devices.

To get AI to fix a specific issue, simply have a human fix it first.

If that doesn't sound very useful, well...

Re:Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost on Monday June 23, 2025 @05:56PM (#44360584)
> NEITHER DISCORD NOR ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE APIs, API DATA, DOCUMENTATION, OR ANY DISCORD SERVICES.

The existence of terms like this make any discussion of the other terms look pretty silly.

Their policy is simply that they do whatever they want, and that hasn't changed.

Re:Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost on Monday June 23, 2025 @05:12PM (#44360168)
There are lots of details about the technology, license agreements, service history, comparable platforms, and whatnot, which all form reasonable support for botghost.

None of that matters in the slightest. They're dealing with an indifferent, capricious, unaccountable company. And trying to do it without enough leverage to even get a response.

It seems like it's about to end the way it was always going to.

Re:Satanic Text Generator on Thursday June 19, 2025 @11:08PM (#44324400)
https://zalgo.org/

Zalgo and unzalgo text

Configurable craziness level

> It needs to be screened by someone

The people using this stuff want plausible deniability. If there's a problem with the slop, the computer did it, not me.

Screening it is contrary to that, so they won't do it.

> Anyone can stop using gmail at any time

True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.

Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.

Re:Fortnite Made a Crypto on Sunday February 23, 2025 @11:32PM (#43155861)
Stealing from children is the MO of Epic Games
Re:New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats' on Monday February 03, 2025 @10:59AM (#42919487)
There are garbage bins in NYC. Here's one: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7238555,-73.9968645,3a,75y,5...
A shameless betrayal of user intent.

This article calls it "a genius move".

Repulsive.

Re:DOOM CAPTCHA on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @12:14PM (#42567390)
It's doom, so hell for everyone
A trillion dollar company is screwing me again. Any tips on how I can keep supporting them?
Re:The New Test Images – Image Compression Benchmark on Thursday September 05, 2024 @05:31PM (#41460576)
(2008)
Re:Roblox Open Sources Real-Time Voice Safety Model on Saturday July 13, 2024 @07:13PM (#40957593)
Discussing the effectiveness of the technique requires believing that the system has a legitimate purpose and was made with genuine intent.

Is it good to automatically record, transcribe, analyze, and censor all private conversations? Is their goal even censorship, or is that a false 'child safety' justification for mass surveillance?

Re:Texas just got an enormous 1.1M panel solar farm on Saturday February 24, 2024 @01:23AM (#39489572)
> a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas [...] will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually

452 MW nameplate * optimistic 0.3 capacity factor = 135.6 MW

8760 hours annually * 135.6 MW = 1187856 MWh

1187856 MWh / 14.112 MWh per Texas home = 84173 homes powered

190000 / 84173 = 2.257 lying factor

Re:Ask HN: What will be obsolete in 10 years? on Monday February 12, 2024 @02:32AM (#39342435)
> There has been a significant decrease in desktops in the last decade.

Indeed, but not because phones have gotten any closer to desktop work.

What good is a phone, today, when using multiple monitors for 3d modelling, video editing, programming, spreadsheets, flight sims, or some such? None whatsoever.

And there's no apparent trend toward it, so it doesn't make much sense to predict when it will be reached.

Desktop usage will likely continue to decline as phones, tablets, VR, and whatever other devices continue to supplant them _in certain areas_, but that's insufficient to render them obsolete.

Re:Ask HN: What will be obsolete in 10 years? on Sunday February 11, 2024 @06:57PM (#39340062)
Phones have highly integrated parts, lack of IO ports, toy operating systems, and other major trade-offs, for the sake of size and power usage, which would all be disadvantages or total non-starters in a desktop environment.

This situation hasn't changed in the slightest during the last 10 years. Is there any reason to think it will change during the next 10 years? Even if a future phone could be used in the place of a tower to run a set of desktop peripherals, how is that even useful?

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