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DamnableNook

170 karma · joined June 6, 2012

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DamnableNook··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
I think you may have a poor mental model of how GUI apps work, at least on macOS. Perhaps you’re confused because the menu bar looks to be a global OS element, when in reality it’s as much the responsibility of the app as an OS where the menu bar is visually drawn inside the app window.

Even if the OS “renders” the menu or “owns the pixels”, it’s still being driven by procedural code within the app in order to create those menus. This is not some declarative spec that apps just hand off and wipe their hands of. The app “owns” the menu bar, it just uses OS libraries to help with it.

If the app code misbehaves or doesn’t follow the API contract, it’s completely possible to have bugs with the menus. For example, if an app just deadlocks, the menu bar hangs with a spinning beach ball the same as any other GUI element drawn inside a window. Switching to another app will cause the menu bar to work (because that other app is now rendering the menu bar), but it will remain frozen if you switch back to the frozen app.

DamnableNook··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
Not working for your particular preferences isn’t a bug; your preferences are just wrong for the vast majority of users.

The hubris of HN posters never fails to astound me. The most niche of workflows, then wonders why regular users don’t all learn esoteric keybindings and use TUIs.

DamnableNook··on Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed
Did you expect to get a Windows Defender warning on macOS?
DamnableNook··on Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
Eric Berger has a strong pro-Musk bias (having literally written a fawning book about him). To him, Musk can do no wrong, it seems.

I also dislike Dan Goodin’s reporting. He tries to talk the talk, but nearly every article he writes has some tell that he doesn’t really understand the thing he’s reporting on. Which is fine if he was relying on third-party expertise and quoting that, but he tries to make it sound like he has the expertise and it just comes up short. I feel like he’s a good example of that old fallacy that you think the news is correct about everything, until they report about something you know.

For me, Ashley Belanger is the best reporter they have. She might not have the subject matter expertise some of the others there claim, but she has the best journalism of anybody there. Lots of direct sources, well written, and the right level of depth. I honestly feel like I’m reading a different (and better) publication when I read her articles. More than once, I’ve had to scroll up to see if the article I’m reading was one of Ars’ licensed outside pieces, as the quality bar was higher than I’m used to, only to find her name.

Beth Mole is a close second. She has subject matter expertise, good journalism, and loves to slip in some humor or justified “get a load of this idiot” comments.

DamnableNook··on iOS 26.2 fixes 20 security vulnerabilities, 2 actively exploited
Yes, it’s “spyware” to want you to update an OS. That’s definitely the definition of that. Good job for decoding conspiracy.
DamnableNook··on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move
I assure you, Abloy locks can be picked, e.g. https://youtu.be/oxfUmcMzx08
DamnableNook··on HP Acquires Humane's AI Software
“It looks like you are printing out a document that our AI detected ans urgent. Please subscribe to our Urgent Document print plan for $30/month (billed centennially) to re-enable printing.”
DamnableNook··on M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS
But wasn’t macOS the only major gaming-relevant platform still using OpenGL anyway? If you’re already writing a Mac-specific backend, why not just write directly for Metal instead of OpenGL? Or, at the least, write for Vulkan and use a translation layer like MoltenVK?
DamnableNook··on YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
aka “expected value” in statistical terms.
DamnableNook··on Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later
> The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime.

You’ll need to back that up with facts, not “it seems to me…”. It’s easy to say “the data are wrong, think about it,” but that doesn’t make it true. That’s just a nice way of saying, “of course those people are criminals, just look at them, but there’s a conspiracy making reality say different.”

DamnableNook··on FTC announces rule banning noncompetes
Why would you think that? Lobbying organizations exist to advance the interests of their members. Their members in this case are businesses. This will restrict the control businesses have over their former employees. Therefore, they don’t like it.
DamnableNook··on Vice website is shutting down
Gavin McInness? Founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInness?
DamnableNook··on Vice website is shutting down
Out of curiosity, what was the argument against it?
DamnableNook··on Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers
Ironically, their page doesn’t seem to work on Safari. I get a 404 error after signing in, every time. Switching to Chrome on my desktop lets it work.
DamnableNook··on Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support
The limitations and clearly second-tiering of the Exchange connector are what pushed me to move away from Google Workspaces last year. I settled on Fastmail, precisely because they support Push in iOS Mail.app. From my research, they are one of the very few who support the imap extensions required to do that. Have been very happy with them so far, they support all my workflows, and do so a lot better than Gmail.
DamnableNook··on Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]
Anecdotally, I can say that I’ve definitely noticed a negative correlation between affiliate marketing and content quality, though I would be very interested in seeing a formal study of it.

Affiliate links create misaligned incentives between content creators and consumers. This includes on the products listed themselves, where the affiliate is incentivized to select the products that give the most kickback rather than the ‘best’ for the consumer. But it also includes the content itself. Affiliate links create incentive to (a) write reviews, where a site wouldn’t have bothered before; (b) churn out lots of content with lots of links, that can be picked up by search engines; and (c) to not invest much in the actual reviews, and instead generate quick, low-quality content, since the content creator doesn’t actually care about finding the “best” product (which takes lots of time and money to do correctly), only on having readers click their links.

This is why sites with names like Celeb Rumor Central have dozens of articles like “top 10 coffee makers 2024”. They just hire a freelancer to do a few quick Google searches for coffee makers, then churn out 10,000 word articles with sections like “the history of coffee” and “why do people drink coffee?” Then the actual review is “this machine is purported to boil water and drip it through coffee grounds, and has high ratings on Amazon (we may earn a small commission when you click a link on our site)”. Increasingly, they’re just using AI to do it, cutting out the cost of a freelancer.

In my personal opinion, affiliate marketing is one of the worst things to happen to the modern web, and the source of a ton of content farm SEO spam pages.

DamnableNook··on Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium?
I think this is a byproduct of being email first. PMs love to hate on email because they can’t add a bunch of noise, animations, videos. But so far as I’m concerned, that’s not a limitation, it’s a feature.
DamnableNook··on Experian, you have some explaining to do
That’s a great link, thank you for that! Their support page linked from the “email changed” message, under “if you didn’t make this change”, was less than helpful. It just said to log in and change your password, which isn’t really helpful if the attacker changed the password. The link for “if you can’t login” took me to a 404 page.
DamnableNook··on Experian, you have some explaining to do
I luckily only had PayPal connected to my account. I was able to unlink it on the Uber side before the attacker blocked access to my account. I also blocked it on the PayPal side too. So all that work, and all they really got is my ride history and reputation.
DamnableNook··on Experian, you have some explaining to do
Moderately tangential, but I just had my Uber account hacked today. I also used a strong, unique password managed by a password manager. As far as I can tell, my email wasn’t hacked (Google Workspace account backed by a physical security key). My best guess is they scammed support, but I am just taking a stab in the dark.

The worst part is, you can’t even talk to Uber support chat unless you put in the account’s current email, phone number, and last 6 digits of the credit card on the account. I have the attacker’s email address, but not the phone number, so I couldn’t even chat with support. They have an “email support” form, but it asks for the same info. I put in what I knew, but I haven’t heard back from support since the attacker took my account this afternoon, and I fear I’m not going to get it back.

DamnableNook··on Rogers Canada, please fix the damn internet in Canada
Respectfully, this just sounds like the screed of somebody who doesn’t like Trudeau/liberals for political reasons not like an unbiased, cogent analysis of Canadian policy. Though I guess not always a lot of blue sky between those two. But I have a feeling you didn’t like liberals before Trudeau, and nothing was going to change your mind.
DamnableNook··on Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots
Kiwi bots aren't (weren't?) actually AI controlled. They had human drivers in South America that controlled them remotely. If one attacked you, it was either the human driver going agro, or just a problem with the latency of the camera -> cell network -> streamed to South America -> driver inputs command -> sent back to the US -> over the cell network -> back to the bot. And the cameras they have were pretty bad (the ordering app would show you the camera view when the bot was nearing its destination.)
DamnableNook··on Show HN: RootMy.TV
I think the person you’re replying to is more concerned about privacy implications than a security exploit involving an exotic TV airwave signal attack.
DamnableNook··on This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem
This sounds like a nightmare for any downstream users of this library. Any one of those bullet points in that section would be a major concern for me using it in anything other than a hobby project, but all of them together seem almost willfully antagonistic to users.

This is especially true given it’s a security library, which perhaps more than any other category I would want to be stable, compatible, and free of surprises.

“You must upgrade to the latest release the moment we release it or else you risk security vulnerabilities and won’t be able to link against any library that uses a different version of ring. Also, we don’t ‘do’ stable APIs and remove APIs the instant we create a new one, so any given release may break your codebase. Good luck have fun!”

DamnableNook··on Gallery-dl – download images from several image hosting sites
I mean, proxy support is listed in the config docs[1]. Those docs also break down the functionality of gallery-do by module, leading me to believe you either didn’t read or didn’t understand the docs.

[1] https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/blob/master/docs/configur...

DamnableNook··on Gallery-dl – download images from several image hosting sites
gallery-dl has almost all of these features, minus the GUI and desktop integration. Did you read the link?
DamnableNook··on Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
> Apple is already doing that, they removed Pocket Casts and Castro

In china. That is an important note that you left out to make Apple seem worse.

DamnableNook··on Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing
Blockchain backers seem to take it as a given that centralization is bad. But when pressed on why, the best answers I have seen are “because centralization is bad”. Well, I guess that’s not 100% true; the first answer is that we shouldn’t trust authority. Why? Because authority is bad. Why? Because authority is bad.

But as this article articulates so well, that’s a red herring. Like, you can come up with all sorts of wild scenarios where central authority can be bad. But ultimately, these are scenarios you’re unlikely to encounter in the real world, and if you do, there are much simpler solutions.

Blockchain technology always reminded me of that XKCD about cryptographer expectations vs. reality (https://xkcd.com/538/): it’s solving a problem that only really exists in fantasy for 99% of the population.

DamnableNook··on Atlassian's new terms forbid benchmarking
Uh, this is so far outside the norm of every company I’ve ever worked for/heard of that I think they’re safe not worrying about you in their business plan. Unless you’re working with classified data, that is — but those cases have tons of other requirements beyond working air gapped.

Now, there are other reasons you would want on-prem other than air gapped networks, but that’s not the discussion we’re having.

Edit: oh, this guy is a troll. Just read his other comments. Sigh.

DamnableNook··on Zeit.world: free global DNS
The post title and linked page don't make it obvious that this isn't a standalone service; it's a feature of their "now" hosting service. So you can't use it for your app unless you host it with "now".

"now" has a free, highly limited tier for open source projects, but their standard tier is $15/month.