Hacker News Reader

davbon Your "simulation" might not need state

The stateful example is much easier to read.

davbon How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene

I played the games when they were first released and loved them - they’ll forever be amongst my favourites. I’ve also really enjoyed the TV show.

I know very little about TV production and set design but I, too, was blown away by the amount of work and attention to detail. That the studio worked with experts in the retro arcade community was really cool. I found the description of the of the playout system for the MK machine fascinating, and reminiscent of the staged UIs I’ve read about being created in Unity and friends for other productions. Staged, but not green screen staged. And on the other hand, the description of the photo booth setup was just as fascinating - and that one was a green screen!

What a wonderful crossover career that seems to be.

davbon How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene

That’s a great point. Even if it’s not the real reason, it’s plausible and better than “we took one of the brands currently popular products”, especially when they’ve tried so hard (within reason) to get everything else just right.

davbon How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene

It’s amazing how much work went into making it look like an abandoned 2003 arcade, even down to the team worrying about the color of the legs of a machine that might give it away as a more recent release. Then HBO stuff a Papermate Inkjoy RT pen in Sarah’s hand right in the first episode. The Inkjoy brand didn’t appear until around 2012 (and the retractable one was a little later). I’m assuming it was a product placement thing but it was quite in your face.

https://productplacementblog.com/tv-series/inkjoy-gel-pen-in...

davbon The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled

Aggressively pushed snaps. Apt and MOTD ads. And now this.

Look, I get it, no-one is entitled to free labour. But OSS runs on goodwill. Canonical profited obscenely from the rich open source community and diverse set of packages. And that’s OK - it’s the nature of open source. They get to differentiate with their orchestration tools and premium support. But the expectation is that when it comes to security patches, we all chip in, in the name of collective safety. If you’ve benefited from packages being part of your ecosystem and you patch a vulnerability, you contribute it back

davbon Personas

In a similar vein, GDS (govuk) published details of their accessibility personas a few years ago at https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2019/02/11/using-persona-p...

davbon Nintendo 64 Java

What a wonderful project to read about. It’s too easy to get into a mindset where you auto-filter your ideas based on whether or not it’ll make money, or directly help you reach some career goal (especially in the HN bubble). This is fun. This is art. I wish I took more time to do “pointless” (in the least derogatory sense of the word) projects like this one. Bravo.

davbon JetBrains invites developers to join the Fleet Public Preview Program

It’s so slow to startup. On a laptop with 11th gen i5, 16GB ram and a fairly fast NVMe SSD running Windows 11 and I see ~10s startup time. I really hope it succeeds but for a lightweight editor it’s just too slow to start.

davbon Apple Announces iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus

Yes. Even for domestic travel. I’m travelling to a remote island in my country for a short holiday. My network doesn’t have coverage there (only one of the “big four” has decent coverage) so I’ve picked up a prepay SIM to use for a few days. No networks in the UK support prepay SIMs (other than some quite dubious international roaming MVNOs).

International travel usually involves stopping by a kiosk or store at the airport to pick up a SIM. They’re absolutely universal.

davbon Ubuntu: “How are we improving Firefox snap performance?”

An honest benchmark would include the non-snap startup times for each of their test platforms.

That said, the performance issues aren’t as bad as the fact that it’s unusable on machines with NFS home directories mounted with root_squash (as documented [0] by someone at another institution).

We’re a University CS dept with a few hundred lab machines and have been using Ubuntu for the past decade or so, but fighting against the increasing snapification every LTS is frustrating. Next LTS we’ll probably just switch to another distro. Most of our users don’t really care which distro they use - they just want Linux with NFS home, a browser, JetBrains, VS Code and a Bash shell with access to our standard compiler and tool collection Our HPC team recently switched from Centos to Alma - though I’m more inclined to stay with a Debian derivative (or more likely Debian itself).

[0] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SnapsVersusNF...

davbon Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeting meme

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-62352502

> Hampshire Constabulary said, after initially visiting the property, officers agreed to return on Thursday.

> When they returned they were prevented from entering so arrested the 51-year-old suspect so they could interview him about the alleged offence.

> He has since been released and will face no further action.

davbon Librarian's Letter to Google Security

Perhaps the solution is for libraries or local authorities to setup their own email providers. An email address “for life” with your library card, with the necessary support and in-person reset verification that their patrons need. I’m not suggesting this would be an easy or inexpensive undertaking, but maybe that’s just the next step in service evolution for a public information service like a library group.

davbon UK Amazon Prime subscription price raised by £1 a month

And with runaway inflation and Paramount Plus and Disney now further diluting the streaming market.. I’m surprised by this.

davbon Usborne computer and coding books from the 1980s

I, too, miss the days where it was possible to understand every component, every bit, every abstraction inside a computer. It’s virtually impossible now, not least because there are so many microcontrollers and microprocessors running proprietary firmware in any given PC or smartphone. I’ve thought about this a lot recently, and understand that a lot of this complexity comes from the security landscape today (we run far more programs concurrently, and don’t want them spying on each other while we use our computers for sensitive operations like banking and communications); I wonder if we’re on the cusp of a solution to the complexity of learning to code with modern sandboxing/containerisation - rather than target the underlying hardware or even the host OS, the 99% will target a common, inherently secure sandboxed VM of sorts (with first class support on the host OS, sort of what Sun hoped to achieve with Java’s “write once, run everywhere” idea). Sure, there would always be software that would have to run on the underlying platform but I theorise that 99% of software could target the sandbox. The pieces are all there - containerisation, immutable operating systems, etc.

I would happily trade all the complexity I have to deal with daily, if there was a common, cross platform, secure, open and well integrated sandboxing solution.

davbon Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

Those illustrations are gorgeous.

davbon Apple acquires UK open banking startup Credit Kudos

I don't particularly trust my bank, but I do try to minimise (as much as possible) the number of organisations with which I share my transaction data.

It's probably worth clarifying that there are no institutions that would be categorised as "open banks"; Open Banking [0] is an umbrella term for a set of technologies (primarily APIs), regulatory frameworks and standards which allow easier integration between businesses in the financial services industry. The bar for getting access to those APIs is high enough that it would generally exclude customers who'd like to query their own accounts from their own software, but not so high to stop the proliferation of startups keen to monetise and analyse customer transation data. For the most part, in the UK you can't just ask your bank for an API key and use it to pull transaction data from your own account but your mortgage lender can require you to share that data with a third party as a condition of extending a line of credit.

I believe this is how Experian Boost works in the UK; you can "boost" your Experian credit score by linking your bank account via open banking and allowing them to analyse your transaction history. However you would need to read (and fully understand the breadth of) their privacy policies and terms and conditions to understand how your transaction data is used (and how it may be used in the future).

One of my primary concerns is around data being shared on, and on, and on. Regulation helps a little, but I'm afraid that we'll end up in a similar situation as we have with other types of data online (analytics, advertisement targeting and telemetry) where you may opt out of certain types of data collection but find that next tab on the opt-out dialog lists hundreds of partner organisations with a "legitimate interest" in your data. And with financial services, it's even more sensitive - it would be disastrous if people were excluded from applying for a mortgage because they refused to share incredibly detailed transaction history with a third party credit risk firm. And worse still if, upon sharing that data, they were denied a mortgage because placing an occasional bet online, subscribing to an OnlyFans creator, spending thousands at the Apple store and trading some disposable income on eToro fit a pattern that a black box algorithm deemed high risk.

It would be better to have credit decisions not rely on such invasive analysis of personal data.

[0] https://www.openbanking.org.uk/

davbon Apple acquires UK open banking startup Credit Kudos

Unfortunately it seems that the biggest application of open banking (beyond "see all of your accounts in one app") are these type of credit risk analysis products with opaque (to the individual) algorithms responsible for informing decisions that have a potentially massive impact on a person's life. To apply for credit (such as a mortgage) you're required to connect your bank account to these services via Open Banking, allow them to extract all of your transaction data and trust that they make reasonable, unbiased and fair recommendations based on that data.

While I understand that high value lenders (e.g. mortgage providers) made similar assessments based on submitted paper bank statements, the massive proliferation of these services using Open Banking (or worse, screen scraping after requesting your account credentials) is concerning. Especially in cases where they use difficult to reason about AI/ML algorithms. The volume of data that can be gathered far exceeds the n-months bank statements typically requested by a mortgage lender, and it seems that most lenders use third parties like Credit Kudos rather than doing the same risk analysis in-house. Generally speaking, I don't trust them and their networks of partners and contractors to keep my data secure.

And it looks like it's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid these services when applying for a mortgage.

davbon Lessons Learnt Moving a GTK Application from Go to Ada

The demo on the Gio page is badly broken for me (Chrome 99 on Windows 10) - it’s mostly black, with what appears to be a text area in the middle with black text on black background. Triple clicking text doesn’t work. There’s no right click menu (as in native text areas) to show copy/paste/select all. There’s no visible scrollbar so it wasn’t obvious I could scroll down to see more UI controls.

Overall it’s a terrible advertisement for the UI toolkit and seems typical of most immediate mode GUIs.

davbon MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows

davbon There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives

OT/meta, but I love those handwritten style diagrams. If the author notices this, I'd be interested to know how he made them.

davbon England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

Unless you are a young person (or look like one) and decide to have alcohol with your meal. As much an optional act as going to a restaurant in the first place.

davbon England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

Indeed. Bear in mind that that before becoming Health Secretary, Javid was very recently Chancellor of the Exchequer. Perhaps his motivations lie somewhere other than public health.

davbon Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

It would seem to be the case. lshw reports the controller on my 970 Evo Plus as "NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983"

davbon We Switched to Mattermost

Yeah we (a University CS department) had the same experience. We've run Mattermost for a number of years but the advisor bar was a bit of a blunt instrument. The only way to dismiss it permanently was to share your email address with their sales team and consent to being contacted. We'd have had a similarly unfavourable view if Nginx, Ubuntu or Thunderbird done the same thing.

And now when you enter the system console, the very first thing you so is the Upgrade to Enterprise Edition CTA button. It concerns me that they'll keep pushing free (OSS) users towards the paid product. They've eroded some of our trust and given the choice we'd probably go in another direction in the future.

davbon Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?

I absolutely love this approach to feature inclusion and usability. User research showed that for some number of users (presumably not the majority) this is a familiar and comfortable interaction. All too often we see companies cut features (or whole products) because the metrics/analytics indicate most users don't use them - ignoring the fact that those features may be really important to the small minority.

I understand that every feature and product carries a maintenance burden, but I believe that the barrier to cutting them should be really high (especially when users build workflows around them).

davbon IT Without Software

Ah, the Mix 'n' Mojo [0] lives on!

[0] https://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/monkey-island-2-mix-n-mojo

davbon Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

I expected scrolling to feel janky and "non-native" but it was fine. Text rendering, on the other hand... it was a bit of a blurry mess, compared to Chrome's native rendering (on Ubuntu 21.04).

davbon Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

> but internet is unbearably slow anywhere but in a few major cities

There's only one city in the Highlands - Inverness.

davbon Firefox replaces Google Analytics with fake no-op in strict tracking protection

Unfortunately it is indeed used for non-ad scripts. For example, Hearthstone on iOS fails to render the login page if GTM is blocked at DNS.

davbon Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

I've had a similar experience. Every time I get a glimmer of an idea of something I'd have fun building, my thoughts immediately go to my devops workflow, hosting, cross platform, updates, testing, security, tax, patents, viability assessment... and my professional experience has suffocated my idea before I've even built a fun prototype just for myself.