bellyfullofbac

Nah it didn't have a hard disk, and booting up without any floppies inserted resutled in an error message...

> I have started assuming that most of the people here have some kind of side project that makes them money.

I haven't paid attention to it, but probably the people who mention "my side projects" aren't regulars, and it's probably a Baader-Meinhof thing for you.

If you want to be methodical (or me, since I'm just guessing with no data), you could go through the top 10k commenters here: https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-... (it was mentioned on HN a few days ago) and see if they wrote "my side project" or something along those lines...

My PC XT didn't boot into BASIC, I wonder why. It's long gone now so I can't investigate what hardware it actually had.

This boots X11/Wayland and then an SDL app on top of it, I wonder what it would take to write a shell or init that the kernel loads straight after it's done loading itself up. Maybe The systemd folks can make systemd-basic...

Matt Damon was pranking people, one of them was a young Black man. He looked very worried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVHqSpO8Ko

Also a very interesting (long) read from a Black British journalist, who even had an episode of being clueless about racism in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-...

Yeah, seems like so.

Issue: "Black people get less confirmations than white people, we have the data."

AirBnB Solution: "No pictures, initials only."

Data after a few months: "Black people have comparably equal acceptance rates to white people."

AirBnB: "We've solved racism!"

> This thread will be locked if people cannot grow up and rein in their pseudo hysteria.

Hah, welcome to the Internet, A.D. 2022. The amount of forum posts that are either "This happened to me too!" or that plus "I can't believe it, ehat a worthless car manufacturer, I'm starting a 'Ban Honda for life'-group!!!" is way too much.

I've thought of QR-encoding the URL to the Rick Roll video and "pranking" people trying to scan ads.

Here come the righteous downvotes; to defend myself, I never went through with it, and they were ads to promote the city's iniative to invite the corrupt organization the International Olympic Committee so they could feast on our tax money.

Of course there's the "follow the money" issue, I wonder if it's doable using a payment provider in a dubious country, or if Visa/Mastercard would just chargeback, leaving the payment provider to be mad at you (but hopefully they did poor KYC so they'd have no power to send their henchmen to you).

Maybe the fake app can say "Now you need to go to walmart.com to buy a gift card and enter that gift card code's to pay for parking", but that would filter out a lot of people who was looking for convenience in the first place. If I were consulting for this criminal, I'd say "You need to get to their greed by offering them a big prize, e.g. 1 year free parking in $CITY...".

Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?

Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...

The 3d Tokyo website linked here the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188767) also shows you buildings when you zoom in, I'm guessing the guy didn't gather this data himself for such a hobby project, but got it from some governmental survey source.

Capable governments should already have that sort of data, e.g. the Swiss one: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/maps-data-online/maps-geod...

I've read about the Indian "this is IRS, you need to buy gift cards to pay us" telephone scammers, and they justify what they do by saying Westerners are filthy rich anyway, and they got rich by abusing the poorer nations, so what the scammer is doing is justified Robin Hood-ing.

So yeah, that Swiss banker and Arab kid in OP's story is just his justification so he can sleep at night...

Edit to add: OP, so what if you manage to fool^W scam not a rich Swiss or Arab, but a poor person who got fooled into thinking she can better her life by buying NFTs? Seems like your post already has an answer for that, you'll think "Well, I'm here to teach them a lesson, they should've been smarter about things, they need to educate themselves [and I'm part of the expensive lesson].". Rereading your post I think you'll do it anyway, you got that arrogance stemming from insecurity (get on that FOMO train!) already there...

Feels like the cast-iron pot calling the aluminium kettle black...

Netlify has a Forms functionality, that can be used to trigger serverless functions, I was thinking it'd be possible to add the comment to a file, git push it and trigger a rebuild. Hah, rebuilding a whole site on every submitted comment seems like overkill though...

https://docs.netlify.com/forms/submissions/#form-triggered-f...

An interesting feature of some Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Thai, Indonesian) is that in general they use 1 word (I'll write it as "s/he") to refer to third persons. I wonder how that's influenced kids growing up with the language.

Meanwhile in German they're trying to define RegExp, which is also pronouncable, for gender-inclusive words[1], since they differentiate between e.g. Pilot (male) and Pilotin (female) as well as Piloten (many pilots, in the old days this used to mean of mixed genders, but some people felt excluded) and Pilotinnen (many female pilots).

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1049603171/germany-gender-neu...

Iirc with Fyre Festival the dude got convicted of wire fraud for defrauding an investor, not for selling tickets to a sham festival. The joke was, screw the small people, that's fine, screw a rich investor, that's when you go to jail...

I'm pretty sure OP means SWE is "software engineering" and not Sweden...

In places where the employer directly deducts taxes/social security and transfers them to the authorities, they might ask one of the employers if they're the "primary employer" or tell them that they need to contribute less because 2 other companies are also paying into the fund for the employee... at that point the jig could be up.

I wonder where OP works, and if he's wearing some nice Dunning-Kruger glasses...

To nitpick, the YouTuber's name is Linus Sebastian and Linus Tech Tips is his channel...

It was odd how it just went (sunglasses on[1]) viral. But I guess Zoom didn't ask you to register with your email and make an account, and click the link on the email we just sent you, etc, so that's why someone who needed a quick solution just used that, and it spread that way.

Maybe they can find user zero (there must've been that one person who wrote that first "Let's have a call on Zoom" with many outside their company, which introduced the app to many other people in other companies) and give him a big fat check...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uW47jWLMiY (loud)

Damn, it just blew my mind that video calls are now commonplace, keyword: Zoom...

(Yes it was a thing even before Zoom or the pandemic, but I wonder what percentage of the population did their first video call in Q2 2020...)

I don't get your question, do you want to craete art, or do you want to be recognized in the art world? Those 2 goals aren't equivalent... Do you want to be an artist? Just start making art!

If I were a cynic, I'd be wondering if this question, in this forum, is from someone who wants to jump on the NFT bandwagon. Oh wait, I am a cynic!

Their propaganda^W PR fluff about the weight of gold recycled from iPhones has a line that triggered my bullshit alarm: "2204 lbs of gold" [1]. This has been regurgitated by news media[2] as "more than 2204 lbs of gold" without them doing any more fact-checking.

1000 kg is 2204.62262[...] lbs. For them to put the exact number "2204" smells like someone told them "about 1000kg of gold" and whoever wrote that report just converted that to "2204 lbs". And since it's a rounding down, they can claim "More than 2204 lbs". Apple not knowing how significant figures work and giving out a number that was probably a guess to be an exact figure? That's why the alarm I mentioned above got triggered.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ton-of-gold-recycling_n... has a link to Apple's PDF: http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_... where you can search for "2204".

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+2204+lbs+of+gold

I'm going to start calling it googlevista...

Ah, every time I read about vanity TLDs (are they called that? Can I call them that?) I sigh at the brokenness of attaching structure/constraints to domains and TLDs...

At least the country TLDs made sense, plus things like .org for non-profits and .gov for US governments. And then things like bit.ly, look.at, blah.io overrode all of that. I wonder what ".lol" should be for, parody sites? Like whitehouse.lol, google.lol? ycombinator.lol? The first 2 probably can't exist because hey, this is an oligocracy.

Congrats to AOL, I guess, their idea with AOL keywords was actually superior, and we're returning to that. Already on TV ads that I see, they just say "Search for $BRAND/$PRODUCT to find out more".

Hah, make it give out cryptocoins, and take the idea of peasants waiting for royalty to make it rain money to the 21st century, where it all happens digitally/using a smartphone.

Did kings and emperors even do that in the old times?

This was a thing: https://piratebox.cc/start : open WiFi network that's not connected to the Internet, but it had a forum software. I even bought a simple router and got it installed, but I sadly never set it up in public. A friend who was involved with a local hangout got interested in the idea of an "Internet" where you had to physically go to the location to access the content, although I don't think he set it up there either.

Hah, nice "Skyfall" mode (presumably inspired by one "tactical" screen in that James Bond movie)

Having the subways be the appropriate depth under the surface would be amazing, it's probably surprising how deep some subway stations go under ground...

My hunch is that if you compare education levels and health/mortality causes you'll also get a correlation, and there's also one between education and voting preferences. Sadly a lot of pro/anti-vaccination is political-tribalism.

In my view if you're skeptical of government (a problem not unique to USA), you're more likely to distrust the vaccination push, grasping at any conspiracy theory about why there's more to it than the government acting in your interest. So cause and effect are really flipped, for most people - they think cause: govt pushing the evil vaccine, effect: they distrust the govt, but in (my perceived) reality, cause: they distrust govt, effect: they think the vaccine push is evil and has ulterior motives.

And sure if you're vax-skeptical you can cite all the bad side effects and deaths, but I think the numbers speak for themselves, hundreds of millions vaccinated and there hasn't been tens of thousands of deaths; the vaccines are safe!

Of course those who distrust governments can claim the numbers are being fudged...

I remember typing up a paint/simple sprite animation program from a book in BASIC when I was 12 or so. I had no idea what anything meant, but I managed to add color support to it. Geez, this brings up memories of me sitting there on the computer debugging things. It was before the age of popular Internet connectivity as well, so no stupid social media (there wasn't even social media!) to distract me every 30 seconds.

Maybe it's because the chunk should be human-readable, according to the specs? http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Chunks.html