HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

endgame

5,540 karma · joined April 7, 2010

I care a lot about build systems, because nobody else seems to.
submissionscomments
endgame··on Building my childhood dream PC
One possible reason: to achieve the performance improvements, we are seeing more integrated and soldered-together stuff, limiting later upgrades. The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules.

If the product succeeds and the market starts saying that this is acceptable for desktops, I could see more and more systems going that way to get either maximum performance (in workstations) or space/power optimisation (e.g. N100-based systems). Then other manufacturers not optimising for either of these things might start shipping soldered-together systems just to get the BoM costs down.

endgame··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
He's talking about concert tickets and similar entertainment events, where several of the major providers no longer provide PDF tickets and instead only send them to a phone app. It is possible to make enough of a stink and collect tickets on the day, but that option is increasingly difficult to find.
endgame··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
It really isn't that bad. I've never owned a smartphone, and can do everything I need through websites and the occasional phone call.
endgame··on An Update on Pytype
On top of all this, pretty much everything depends on Python (even glibc's build system depends on it now), and Rust is relatively hard to bootstrap. So bootstrapping a usable Python on glibc could one day involve bootstrapping all the way up to Rust on musl (including e.g. llvm) just to get Python just to build the final system's libc.

That doesn't feel great to me.

endgame··on The End of Handwriting
I agree. The thing with fountain pens that many sibling commenters miss is that they run the ink so much more smoothly, which means you can use much less force when guiding the pen. It's not just pining for the old ways but that the writing feels completely different with a different class of tool.

I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.

endgame··on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
The experience of watching local LLMs produce text has a similar vibe to those old modem links. Everything old is new again.
endgame··on Compaq’s Rod Canion broke IBM's hold on the PC market
While we're wandering down memory lane, we should remember the Stacker/DoubleSpace ripoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
endgame··on British man claims he's unable to watch porn as tattoos confuse age check system
As a reasonable thing to ask a citizen to do? No.

As a reasonable form of civil disobedience? No - better to use Garry's Mod or whatever to bypass it entirely.

endgame··on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
It's only unnecessary if you assume the goal is actually protecting children, as opposed to entrenching even more data collection and identity tracking.
endgame··on Solid protocol restores digital agency
They said that about OpenID and now you have the choice of ~three bigtech ID providers.
endgame··on The Promised LAN
Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.
endgame··on Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from a beetle infestation
This isn't reddit.
endgame··on Ask HN: Any resources for finding non-smart appliances?
I think because you're a new account and you're posting a lot of links, your posts are likely getting hidden. I've vouched for them where I can and hopefully other people with showdead on will see them and vouch for them too.
endgame··on Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...

> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties

Even if the bigtechs don't "officially" make the passkey standards require bigtech involvement, it seems very likely to me that conservative businesses like banks will only accept bigtech implementations. And then you're sunk.

Similarly, look at how OpenID turned into "Sign in with AppleGooFaceSoft".

This ZKP+hardware secure element stuff seems even worse, because how are you going to make it work on old hardware, or with free software, or with open devices?

endgame··on Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell
Haskell operators are generally well-chosen to have a consistent visual language:

* $ is "function application" - f $ x = f x, but lets you elide nested parens: f $ g $ h x = f (g (h x))

* & is "reverse function application" x & f = f x. This reads nicely in pipelines as "and"

* <$> is "fmap" what is like a lifted application over a structure: f <$> [1, 2, 3] = [f 1, f 2, f 3]

* <&> is "reverse fmap", which is nice when you have a big lambda

* Anything in <_> brackets is generally a "lifted" version of some operator

* And so on

endgame··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
The ACCC did win a $3M AUD judgement against them for their refund policies:

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.

endgame··on Retrobootstrapping Rust for some reason
Last time I tried to build guix without substituters, I got hash mismatches in several downloaded files and openssl-1.1.1l failed to build because the certificates in its test suite have all expired. Bootstrapping is really hard, really valuable, and (it turns out) really unstable.
endgame··on How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes
I feel this is too hardline and e.g. eliminates the useful things people do with SAT solvers.
endgame··on Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31
I don't follow that scene much, either, but I do subscribe to https://www.masteringemacs.org/ which has good roundups when new major versions come out. I also have several open tabs from there about various libraries I need to fold into my own emacs configuration.
endgame··on Why Fennel?
Focusing on the runtime's parser is a red herring and I think a common error in lisp advocacy.

Even if I didn't the full power of a lisp macro system, it is an absolute joy to manipulate programs written in s-expressions. Being able to cut/copy/paste/jump-[forward/back] by sexpr is really convenient, and often done nowhere near as well in other languages. I think this is because until the invention of tree-sitter and LSPs (and the former isn't yet widely adopted in editor tech), most editors had regex-based syntax highlighting and some kind of ad-hoc "parser" for a language. This makes them less aware of the language the developer is editing, but was probably a pragmatic design decision by editor implementers: it's easier than writing a full parser and means the editor can still assist even if a program is syntactically ill-formed.

endgame··on Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31
This undersells gptel.el, because IMHO it does a really good job of feeling emacs-native: you can read from the minibuffer or active region; send outputs to the message area, another buffer, or replace the marked region; use buffers or files as context sources; build "tools" out of elisp, ...
endgame··on Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31
My favourite emacs-is-for-old-people joke is the backronym "Editor for Middle-Aged Computer Scientists".
endgame··on 20 years of Git
Sounds like it's also halfway to a version of Nix designed specifically for D toolchains, too, using GUIDs instead of hashing inputs.
endgame··on I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud
GP is probably in a building with shared laundry facilities.
endgame··on Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)
Especially since the HDMI people have made open-source video drivers effectively impossible.
endgame··on Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default
Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only? I think they would have preferred not to provide source at all, but the enormous base of GPL code entangled with everything make that impractical.

I think we're really going to miss having the fundamental parts of the system available under strong copyleft, and it will be very hard to go back.

endgame··on Solitaire
What's interesting to me is that despite all that (the escalating lights and noise as your score ticks up, and the hypnotic effect of the sound slowing down and speeding up when you fail/restart the run, are two big examples), I seem to be the only person who hit a wall with Balatro. I enjoyed it for a few days, saw what grinding out all of the jokers/stickers would be like, and put it down. Not in an insulted way, but in a "I've had a good meal, I'm full, and I'm happy to leave the rest of my plate" way. I find this particularly interesting because other games do have an ability to grab me by the throat.

Perhaps it was too overt?

endgame··on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
"technical capability notice" under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)

Sounds a lot like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets forced into to building the intercept capability.

Now that Apple has caved once, I expect to see other providers strongarmed in the same way, as well as the same move tried in other countries.

endgame··on Q2DOS – Quake 2 backported to MS-DOS
I think the search term you want is "svgalib" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVGALib

It looks like at least some versions of Allegro and SDL supported it as a backend.

endgame··on U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts
> Technical Capability Notices

> The 2016 law [Investigatory Powers Act] is nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.

> "Apple can appeal the UK capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government's needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal," the Post wrote.

Sounds like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets to build the intercept capability.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →