Hacker News Reader

Apfelon Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack

Similarly common in the UK, or at least where I am (Glasgow, Scotland).

Completely normal to say "Tesco's", "Aldi's" etc.

Honestly, as someone who is not particularly pro Apple but bought (and returned) the Vision Pro, I cannot stress enough how much you need to try it out.

The issue with the product is entirely the lack of an ecosystem - the interface is unbelievably polished. The eye tracking & finger touch to click feels absolutely perfect. It really did feel like living in the future.

I returned it because the security policy at my work didn't allow me to pair it with my macbook, otherwise I would be using it all day every day.

Apfelon We all dodged a bullet

The one big problem Renovate brings is when it automerges and breaks everything with e.g. a TypeScript upgrade. It's simple enough to handle and prevent but has required quite a lot of developer education for those who are not particularly frontend-focused in my experience.

Apfelon All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair

Wowee! What an unpleasant response. As both a parent and an employee, I found the article extremely useful and shared it internally at my org. Maybe step back from the computer a bit.

Apfelon Electric bikes might just be the healthiest thing to ever happen to teenagers

Sidepoint but they're also a complete gamechanger for the elderly and infirm.

My 70 year old, double-ankle replacement mother who I don't remember ever walking very comfortably bought an ebike a couple of years back.

The sheer joy on her face watching her whizz up a hill made me realise just how transformational these things can be.

Apfelon Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

Twitter only showing a sample of posts for non-logged-in users allowed me to see just how weirdly hung up on "Europeans" that guy is.

Apfelon Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

I think you may be operating under a misapprehension. The word "progressive" is the one people have taken issue with.

China is many things but progressive is not my adjective of choice (I've spent many years living there).

Apfelon Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface

There's at least one easter egg! use developer --color (sorry, I have a habit of digging through source)

Apfelon Making Software

Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.

I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.

Apfelon Our New AI Website Builder

If anyone's interested in the prompts they're using here, they're viewable via devtools.

Full dump of what was showing on my end here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/furnivall/aa95e8d9dc330f3...

Apfelon Show HN: Atari Missile Command Game Built Using AI Gemini 2.5 Pro

Sorry - couldn't find a security.txt but thought I should alert you your API is currently vulnerable to prompt injection on at least a few of the fields in the structured JSON you send when analysing the game.

Happy to give more details if there's any way to get in touch outside this thread.

Apfelon Show HN: Searchable Vim Cheat Sheet with Favorites (Open-Source)

Had a play with this - good idea, well executed and I'll return when you've got more levels!

Apfelon Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace

He's being as helpful as possible, there's no need to go hard on his language like this.

Apfelon Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

Probably the best on the civil liberties front are the Liberal Democrats (they were pretty good at quashing mandatory national ID cards back in the day, at least).

That being said, they still have a lot of folk angry at them for allowing university fees to be introduced 15 years ago when they were in coalition government (a Tory policy!).

Apfelon Let's Encrypt is 10 years old now

Tsb bank in the UK still do exactly this

Apfelon 12 Months of Mandarin

I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).

Apfelon A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

Is this true in a marginal cost sense? I was under the impression most of the environmental impact occurred during the training stage, and that it was significantly less costly post training?

Apfelon Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

I've come across bitwise shift operators literally once in enterprise webapp world, specifically on this precise problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12900504/13238134.

I made a concerted effort to understand the code before I made any effort to adapt it to the repo I was working on. I'm glad I did (although honestly, it wasn't in the remotest bit necessary to solve the task at hand!)

Apfelon Four Thieves Vinegar Collective – Harm Reduction for the Living

Saw these guys talk at DEFCON this year, absolutely fantastic presentation. It was so powerful and important that I'd actually recommend watching it before pretty much everything else from the con.

Apfelon Flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out

I've spent a lot of time in China over the years and most of their tech systems are built on the assumption that only Chinese folk will ever use it. In this case, the vast majority of Chinese people have a 2, 3 or 4 character name ('why would you EVER need 16, silly 老外?')

It's a bit of a 'Foreigner in China' stereotype to whine about how absurdly difficult it is to go to e.g. the bank or a hospital as a non-native because it happens so often.

Apfelon Azure Down?

We've been essentially fully down for approx. 2 hours - since about 12:50pm UK time.

We're a UK Government department, and have been unable to serve any of our pages covered by Azure Front Door since then.

This has probably caused quite a few on-the-ground struggles for our users and caseworkers.

Apfelon Azure Down?

https://www.digicert.com/support/certificate-revocation-inci...

Could it be potentially related to this?

Apfelon DigiCert Revocation Incident (CNAME Domain Validation)

You may be a customer of a customer (e.g. Azure) so you could be affected peripherally via that route.

Apfelon Rust Port for Fish Shell Is Almost Ready for a Beta Release

Agreed. Fish was one of the biggest differentiators in my dev career and am proud to endorse it to everyone!

Apfelon DigiCert Revocation Incident (CNAME Domain Validation)

Is this a potential cause of the current Azure outages hitting western europe? I know DigiCert are used by Azure extensively...

Apfelon AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?

I see you work in the mobile phone industry

Apfelon Dumping Parallel NAND with Glasgow

I have lived in Glasgow for 32 of my 35 years and if you've not seen anyone 'strung out' here I'd be genuinely shocked as it's a multiple time a day thing (even if you live in the West End or other nice areas).

Apfelon Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

This is wonderful! You may be the first group to make me actually create a BandCamp login!

Apfelon Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

Interesting to bring this up - always wondered which way the creative influence went between Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean (if i recall correctly, the game is based off the ride, but the film was allegedly inspired by the game)

Apfelon A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

This is a lot more risky than doing it on a self-hosted model surely? Do you really want to upload your entire message history to a third party (i.e. not Apple)?