Hacker News Reader

doleon Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

They recently re-released the Accutron with actual tuning fork movements, but at $6k ofc you’re better off buying vintage:

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/introducing-accutron-314

doleon My ridiculously robust photo management system (Immich edition)

iCloud Photos Downloader isn’t user friendly or pretty, but I finally managed to rip my entire collection without having to install any apple software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578921

doleon 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt: "figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.

doleon Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.

doleon San Francisco Graffiti

Commentary is graffiti. We're all selfish dogs marking our territory, advertising that we exist.

doleon Playing Arcade Mahjong at Home? Or is it just a Mirage?

I’ll guess the computer at the bottom is an NEC PC-98/9801.

doleon NASA announces unprecedented return of sick ISS astronaut and crew

Exposing STDs and mental conditions is part of what HIPAA’s for. Putting everyone in glass houses just creates a massive panopticon.

doleon Chase to become new issuer of Apple Card

Great for jimmying locks, so not completely useless

doleon The Target forensics lab (2024)

In 2012, Target operated a "couple of forensics labs" and at least 23 "investigations centers" for surveillance. OP's article kinda sugarcoats it. Since it's been verified Home Depot does checkout facial recognition and builds profiles, silly to think most any other major retailer wouldn't.

https://privacysos.org/blog/target-is-really-really-into-sur...

doleon Soho 1851: The Greatest Christmas Meal Ever Cooked

This is one of the times where I wouldn't mind seeing some decent AI recreations of the event... my attempt: https://imgur.com/a/H58O5Jm

doleon We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video]

All of the ones I've noticed have been pointed directly towards streets for mostly license recognition but it's notable that they record whatever objects a typical real world AI image model could. In my area, we have Flock, Shotspotter, Stingray devices, free Ring camera programs from law enforcement departments.

Our Lowe's have the mobile parking lot camera/light units, I wasn't aware if these were Flock but either wouldn't be surprised if they were, had access or plans to buy in.

doleon We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video]

Many police cars now have ghost graphics.

https://gdigraphics.com/police-car-ghost-graphics/

There were laws in many places where you could fight a traffic ticket because you couldn't plainly recognize a police vehicle, especially when a taillight or headlight is out, but now we pay for graphics to make them more invisible. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." I like the plausible deniability angle, myself

doleon We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video]

Flock data retention is defaulted to 30 days, but can vary up to a year or longer depending on the terms of the municipality contract.

doleon We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video]

https://deflock.me/ deserves a mention for its crowdsourcing of ALPR camera data on https://openstreetmap.org and on the site. Recording even one camera may be the only notice a resident has that Flock and ALPRs are operating in their municipality.

doleon Super Mario 64 for the PS1

imho, Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES and saw the PS1 got modded within a year, even with the special black coated discs to hide the tracks. There wasn’t a lot of optical/compact disc copy protection magic at the time and, cd-rs and writers started getting popular quickly as well. ps1 in 1994, n64 in 1996, backwards Dreamcast GD-ROMs and beginnings of larger discs and DVDS in 98.

doleon Leaving the U.S. for the Netherlands

America rich perhaps, possibly not Swiss rich.

doleon Dark Mode Sucks

My current problem in Windows is there’s at least 3 system functions, PowerToys and screensaver places vying for control somewhere that I have to manually turn on the Dark theme on when signing in every morning.

doleon McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

You eat at McD's or most fast food places these days, you need the app to get reasonable prices, usually at a 15-20% discount. The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.

They've been pushing $5 value meals recently because the dollar menu's just not fiscally feasible anymore and $10-12+ for the normal value meals isn't a value to most people.

doleon Laptops with Stickers

I've always tried to apply "The Internet gives a fuck about what you don't like" when it comes to commenting, but it's also helpful to remember it's not just the Internet.

doleon The Art of Atari (2016)

Contrasting this with the similarly fantastic and ridiculous GPU Box Art from the 90's kind of shows how in 15-20 years at least back then, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/relive-the-d...

doleon YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs

I’d blame this behavior on Office OpenXML becoming the standard in 2007, legendary for generating unnecessary nested tags.

doleon Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots

Dominion is licensed in various online incarnations anyway.

With limits on expansions and other rules, it is possible to get Dominion competitive enough to study games and optimize for turns, the original isotropic had a decent ranking and rating system (RIP and add’l shoutout for their implementation of the Innovation card game):

https://dominion.isotropic.org/leaderboard/

doleon Commodore 64 Ultimate

I wound up typing that entire listing at least three times before I gave up and never saw the errata. Definitely worth the satisfaction of youtubing or googling the output decades after.

doleon Space Elevator

Grateful it wasn't as long as Infinite Paperclips or Cookie Clicker, but still worth it. Great site!

doleon Animalese.js Demo

In Animal Crossing, the characters' audible speech seems like it's speaking the first syllable or two of each word in the text dialog and sped up, and the pitch control varies between characters, so while it generates amusing gibberish, some of it is lightly comprehensible and interesting and OP's link is a pretty good replica of it.

doleon Framework supporting far-right racists?

Dude, you're getting a Dell.

doleon Why George R.R. Martin Broke the Cardinal Rule of Hollywood (2024)

Coppola secured a lot of funding for Apocalypse from United Artists. Megalopolis still follows the rule.