Hacker News Reader

TazeTSchnitzelon I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

That's true in broad strokes, but looking into it, it turns out NTSC's variant of YUV is called YIQ, and SECAM's variant is called YDbDr. They are however all more or less the same thing, and the digital YUV used by the Wii hardware in this case is presumably independent of the video standard.

TazeTSchnitzelon I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

The Wii settings menu is an HTML webpage. Yes, even 2006 games consoles were not spared the web.

TazeTSchnitzelon They're made out of meat (1991)

You're interpreting it overly literally. Cinema can be as abstract as theatre or the written word.

TazeTSchnitzelon Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.

Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.

TazeTSchnitzelon Proton Meet isn't what they told you it was

Switzerland has a unique deep integration with the EU even though it is not a member. It is not like the UK.

TazeTSchnitzelon Textstring

I am very confused by the behaviour once the first line has been pulled down.

TazeTSchnitzelon Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

That bug would only affect a conversation where that magic string is mentioned, which shouldn't be common.

TazeTSchnitzelon The bee that everyone wants to save

There's also the massive problem of fake honey (i.e. manufactured sugar syrup illegally sold as honey), which is much cheaper than real honey and pushing actual beekeepers out of the market.

TazeTSchnitzelon US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects

https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/avslag-pa...

The Swedish government is not blocking all offshore wind, but it is blocking a lot of it, specifically wind parks in areas of the Baltic Sea that could cause trouble for trying to detect Russian military activities.

I don't know what the situation looks like for Finland.

TazeTSchnitzelon The RAM stick is dying, and the replacement is something most have never seen

The big change here would be that you might only be able to have one of these modules? I don't think that will be popular…

TazeTSchnitzelon An x86-64 back end for raven-uxn

There isn't ROM per se. The “ROM” image is always loaded into RAM and is free to self-modify as much as it feels like.

TazeTSchnitzelon Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360 (2018)

This article is from 2018.

Previously:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16094925

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27480448

TazeTSchnitzelon It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

They weren't standard yet. Sending messages containing Unicode Private Use Area glyphs that not even other Apple products could display, let alone other vendors' (non-Japanese) phones, would be an interoperability nightmare.

TazeTSchnitzelon It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

I think I remember using one of these apps around 2010 or so, and I think it just triggered the emoji keyboard to appear somehow? And once it was opened once, the ability to use it persisted. But that was just my guess as to what was happening as a user.

I really doubt Apple's sandbox would have permitted editing a global preferences file like that. That might have just been the first, and not the only, method to enable emoji that people discovered.

TazeTSchnitzelon It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.

TazeTSchnitzelon Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral

If they have the predisposition for it, a month or two of bad sleep and a particularly compelling idea may be all it takes to send a person who has previously seemed totally sane into an incredibly dangerous mental and physical state, something that will take weeks to recover from. And that can happen even without sycophantic LLMs, but they sure make this outcome more likely.

TazeTSchnitzelon Data has weight but only on SSDs

Lights in video games are real, but only if you're using an OLED or CRT.

TazeTSchnitzelon Bet on German Train Delays

Someone wrote a satirical article in 2017 around the same concept: https://www.der-postillon.com/2017/12/bgh-bahn-gluecksspiel....

TazeTSchnitzelon MyFirst Kids Watch Hacked. Access to Camera and Microphone

I guess some folks at KTH have been looking at this topic for a while now, there was a story about it on SVT (Swedish equivalent of the BBC) two years back: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/sa-latt-hackas-ditt-barns...

Same professor, Pontus Johnson, is mentioned that story.

TazeTSchnitzelon MacBook Neo

That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.

TazeTSchnitzelon MacBook Neo

Speaker grilles, one on each side. Shame it's not an SD card slot.

TazeTSchnitzelon MacBook Neo

The 2015~2017 MacBook (I own one and love it) was a similar thing, but with a passively-cooled Intel chip. With Apple Silicon this will be amazing.

TazeTSchnitzelon Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal

Stripe and PayPal have pretty different sets of tradeoffs. There's plenty of reasons to dislike both, but at least right now you get a choice between them. I really hope they won't merge.

TazeTSchnitzelon QRTape – Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision (2021)

In a sense this is reinventing digital sound-on-film, but without the continuous feed and with a much lower tape speed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film

TazeTSchnitzelon Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS

Is the lack of a perspective projection option deliberate? CSS can do that too.

TazeTSchnitzelon LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

What is an “actual file format”? Every file format is a serialisation of some kind of data-model. I'm sure the OpenDocument data-model might be simpler and cleaner in some ways than the Office Open XML one. But for something with the complexity of an office document, you can't escape the fact that every file format is full of assumptions about the application interacting with it. I find the examples in the article from [0] unconvincing, it reminds me of arguments about programming language syntax.

(I do not doubt that the OOXML standard is a mess though.)

TazeTSchnitzelon LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

LibreOffice, descendent of OpenOffice, descendent of StarOffice, has a project leadership that believes OpenDocument is the best and most open format. That's very convenient for them, considering that OpenDocument is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.

Microsoft Office has a project leadership that believes that Office Open XML is the best and most open office format. That's very convenient for them, considering that Office Open XML is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.

Now, OnlyOffice is presumably something written from scratch, unrelated to those two lineages. They chose to prioritise compatibility with the market leader's standard, and the second place in the market is upset that a competitor isn't favouring them instead.

I think this is a bit silly.

TazeTSchnitzelon Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

Apple already had that "strategic moat" with Objective-C. It was already a language you could effectively only use on Apple platforms (the runtime and the standard library only run on Darwin) and for which Apple controlled the compiler (they have their own fork of Clang).

TazeTSchnitzelon Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32

Go famously tried to bypass macOS's libc and directly use the underlying syscall ABI, which is unstable, and then a macOS update came out and broke everything, which taught them the error of their ways (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490). I wonder if this will happen to Zig too.

TazeTSchnitzelon Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

Another example of tiny details being used to catch sex offenders is this story about marks on people's hands: https://www.wired.com/story/sue-black-forensics-hand-marking... / https://archive.is/89vOJ

It turns out that, even if all you can see is the assailant's hands, that may be enough to identify them.