codalan

Kagi (paid) and Brave search have both been good to me.

I never really liked DDG or Bing. They both suffer from the same SEO gaming that Google does.

There are also a number of smaller search engines that have been posted to HN that are kind of interesting for certain niches.

I think what will happen over the next five years is that instead of Google being the one-stop shop for search, it will be a number of smaller players + the different chatbot engines like ChatGPT and Bard and others.

I know this guy. He's kind of a dirtbag. I'm friends with someone who worked at his hostel in Austin; he was in charge of various events and hanging out with the visitors, along with all the other hostel duties. After a few years of working for less than minimum wage (there was lots of unpaid overtime), he was denied a raise. This was in spite of the hostel turning a very healthy profit every year. He wised up and ended up getting a much better paying gig elsewhere.

He could probably get away with this at the hostel (which is in a popular city), but hiring people for minimum wage in the middle of nowhere is a different story.

Touch is supported with both. Haven't tried the stylus, though.

Ubuntu and Mint work pretty well on the SP4 Pro. It's a good mix between hardware and a much better OS. Probably as close as you will get to having an independent, open source tablet.

Amazing what our priorities are. But it shouldn't be surprising to outsiders, either.

Even better is not doing it at all.

There's so many things I'd rather do than mow. Like getting drunk and listening to podcasts with my cats.

Or just get rid of grass entirely.

Part way through a project to replace part of the yard with gravel and native plants, mostly because I hate mowing.

I'm guessing private mercenary/security companies will become more common in the future, e.g. Blackwater

Yeah, the Sprinter or some of the other clones come to mind.

The problem with the Maverick (as others have mentioned) is that they squander valuable bed space by adding a cab to the design.

To me, a pickup truck is a pretty utilitarian thing. I don't need a cab. I have other vehicles if I need to take passengers.

I remember pricing out a pickup a few years ago, and it was hard to find one that wasn't already configured with a cab. I guess the market demand is larger for people who have kids but still want a pickup for whatever reason.

Sprinter vans are more practical than modern pickups. You can fit a few sheets of drywall into it, lock up your stuff, and keep everything out of the elements. If you have a windowless van, you have everything out of sight, as well.

They probably share a lot of the same drivetrain/engine/etc. parts from vehicles of the same era. If you are mechanically inclined and have the right tools, you might be able to do some of the work yourself. Most auto mechanics familiar with older Japanese branded vehicles should be able to work on them like they would on a regular US import.

The biggest issue I have is that they are right-hand drive. I'd be hesitant driving a mini-truck on streets and highways, even if it's licensed. This would be a non-issue if the intent is to leave it on private property, unlicensed.

I wish mini-trucks had a bigger demand here. I'd like a pickup, but I don't need the monster trucks that are on the market these days. Just something to move furniture, appliances, and junk around town.

Rider is pretty good. I haven't fully switched over yet, just because the rest of my team uses VS2019/VS2022.

My elderly parents use a Xubuntu laptop just fine. It ended up with Xubuntu because I got pissed off at the Win 11 Home Edition registration bullshit, and all my parents really use is the web browser.

If I did it again, I'd probably use Linux Mint Cinnamon.

IMO, Windows UI/UX has gotten so bad, even Gnome seems like an drastic improvement.

It seems like they'd be better off bypassing VS altogether and just do the builds on the command line.

Presumably, there were a lot of lifers at MSFT during the Windows 7 years, yet I would consider the software being delivered during that period as being pretty good.

The decline happened after they fired off their SDETs and turned their customers into testers. The hyperfocus on cloud didn't help. Neither did the move towards clunky Electron apps, instead of first-class Windows applications.

MSFT seems to be a lost cause these days. Whenever I open up VS2022, it takes almost an entire minute to load. As I recompile things, it will fail to report errors, which means restarting the application (which seems to "fix" it).

If I open SSMS, it also takes upwards of a minute to load. Some things I used to take for granted, like being able to see the cursor when scrolling with the arrow keys, instead makes the cursor invisible, so now I have no idea where my cursor lands when I release the key. When a connection to a DB bonks out (which happens at least once a day), it takes another minute to close out my open windows, because each one had an open session and it needs to prompt me on close.

If I open Excel, another minute passes before it loads. If I stupidly decide to change the font for some cells, I expect to see the app lock up for another minute or two. If I want to save the document, I have to go through several layers of menus and garbage just to save to my computer and not the cloud. And then I will still get an alert in Excel that indicates it was unable to save to the cloud and that I need to take some action to resolve the files. The best part is now I can't simply scroll the rows in a spreadsheet in the background while I have another app in the foreground. I have to make another click to bring the spreadsheet into focus to scroll.

If I go into the Azure Portal, I can expect no sane or consistent interface. Components seem to be cargo-cult designed without regard to how they are used. I was looking at some app service logs today, and I'm stuck using their ugly UI, which truncates/hides important data, like the actual log message. The UI is so antithetical to what a logging user interface should look like (think Splunk or Sumo), you'd be better off just downloading the CSV file.

The same goes for build logs in Azure DevOps. It doesn't word-wrap, so now you need to scroll all the way across the screen, line-by-line, to figure out the message. If I click on the Raw Log link, I get the logs, but polluted with ANSI escape codes. If I try to copy the text as is, the UI may or may not select all of it.

And this is just the very start for the disaster that is Azure Portal/DevOps.

And Teams, lol.

When you have to deal with all these problems, all day long, it really starts to sink your productivity. MSFT badly needs a leadership shakeup, but I doubt that will happen as long as Azure is profitable. Until then, I expect to see more decline in the quality of their developer and productivity applications.

Nobody's safe when the Potato Crew comes to town.

Main thread, with link to original Medium post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799308

It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail/calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.

These are probably invalid by now.

https://grep.app/search?current=2&q=api_key%20%3D%20%22%5Ba-...

As others have posted, Github implemented an alerting system for keys/passwords/etc. that have been checked into the codebase. My guess is most of these will be invalidated by now, either by the developer requesting a new key (and not publishing it), or the provider invalidating it for them.

Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell Baker and the product team are paid by Google to destroy their own browser.

I switched to Vivaldi for most of my browsing. I was a Firefox users for over a decade, but had to quit after they kept rearranging the UI every six months.

Vivaldi isn't perfect. It takes a lot of searching around the internet to find out how to enable or disable certain options (and there are a lot of them), but right now I consider it the best of the worst for 2023. It's the most customizable, and the browser sync feature works pretty well.

Yep

Payment via digital gift cards sold on Amazon, e.g. Mullvad

Granted, this would probably be a very miniscule amount of their users.

It was back in 2019.

https://twitter.com/AWSSupport/status/1186735657387003904

I forget the details. I do remember half of our internal tools not working at the time due to DNS issues, though. Good times.

Netflix probably lost a lot of viewers when they didn't follow through with their original content.

The OA and Glow were really interesting shows that got cancelled prematurely, without any resolution to the storylines. When this becomes a trend, it makes me not want to get into any new Netflix series, and that usually ends with me cancelling my Netflix subscription.

TBF, Amazon Prime has also done the same with some of their shows (e.g. Forever).

I think their target audience isn't the typical HN reader, but the rest of the industry, where multiple staging environments are still a common thing (including my current employer).

The biggest issue we had with preview/review environments was resources not being cleaned up properly after destroying the environment (along with the associated costs), but that was more an indictment of our IaC code than anything else. It also didn't eliminate staged environments for things like the non-standard DB that we were using. As long as the changes on the DB side were net-new, it wasn't really an issue, though.

The main reason to attempt to stop aging is to prevent other illnesses from taking effect.

People who are physically young are at a much lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes/Alzheimer's, etc. Stopping/reversing the aging process kind of fixes the root cause of a lot of those diseases.

We're probably not far off from that reality, either. Then we move onto more controversial questions, e.g. Do physically healthy people have the right to end their own lives? Not everyone want to live to be 300 years old, especially those who have lost most of their family and friends over those years.

Canadians kind of get the best of both worlds (at least for dualies) living in the US. You can max out your 401k on a pre-tax level; IIRC, you pay taxes both ways when investing in an RRSP.

If you have a Nexus card and live close to the border, travel between the two countries becomes a non-issue.

When you hit retirement age, you can move back to Canada and get provincial health care.

As of today, $1.00 USD == $1.36 CAD.

I will probably be depositing a lot more money back into my Canadian savings account over the next few years, just because I'll probably move back at some point in my life.

So yeah, Canadians in the US definitely get a lot of advantages over other immigrants. The only trade off is filling a 1040 every year, but even that is reduced to one additional form when residing in Canada.