Hacker News Reader

fenceposton The workers have spoken: They're staying home

With no specific location you should be sought at and more butts than desks nobody should expect to be able to find you anyway.

fenceposton The workers have spoken: They're staying home

This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse

If you're required to hot desk you might as well do it someplace more pleasant.

fenceposton Show HN: A source-available billing system I've spent 18 months building

That's probably not uncommon since municipality borders don't follow county borders.

fenceposton Windows 11 is now enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

That's likely more a question of sales channel and business vs consumer devices.

fenceposton Windows 11 is now enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

You can but it's more expensive ($100 vs $35ish?) and is done through the Microsoft Store and a Microsoft account which is what some people are trying to move away from.

fenceposton Windows 11 is now enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

Or if ordering a new PC you can get one with Windows 11 Pro for a few $$ more, choose the option to domain join (during initial setup) to create a local account, and create user accounts with no Microsoft account.

Makes it easier to do minor little things like drive encryption as well.

fenceposton They make USB-C cables with displays now

It's not that they're cheap cables - it's that they look like cheap cables (or better, middling expensive higher-quality ones).

fenceposton SSD death, tricky read-only filesystems, and systemd magic?

ddrescue might be a good change for you, in particular specifying to not retry (because you're going to come back later) and to specify the 'log' file that's actually a map of every sector on the source drive and whether it's been successfully imaged.

I don't think I've ever imaged an SSD, but for HDDs your ideal is a single pass through with no retries on bad blocks, possibly skipping ahead if you hit a bad block, and a log file writing to the destination drive where you're also storing the image in a file (NOT doing direct output of the input disk). This gets you everything you can get with minimal disruption of the source.

After that first run you'll specify the same log file for every time you run it, and (on HDDs) you can tell it to do things like trying to read the higher-numbered sectors first (so if you got an error on block 10,000 and told it to skip 100 on errors, now you start at 10,099 and work backwards, perhaps getting down to 10,005 before you get another error. Basically, get the dropped fruit, then the low-hanging fruit, then work harder for anything remaining.

Before you do those followup runs though, it's a good idea to look at things with the 'ddrutility' tools to see if you even need to bother. ddru_findbad will let you use the image file and 'log' file to identify what files might have pieces missing so you can decide if you need to progress further; ddru_ntfsfindbad does basically the same thing for NTFS volumes. It's always nice to determine that 1) yes there's a chunk of bad blocks and 2) we don't have to care because they're all in the Hibernation file so we can restore that image to a new drive, boot, disable and re-enable hibernation just to be cautious, and have no concerns about lost data on the old drive without having to beat the crap out of the drive hoping that on the 1000th attempt it's finally going to read that one failing sector.

sorry if the latter part of that got preachy, I've seen some bad advice in the past on imaging failing drives and it's made me sensitive....

fenceposton Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job

This is a situation where running within the context of the EMR and having access to the existing chart data is likely to make a lot of difference. My bigger concern is that there are a lot of different things being lumped together under "AI", and this is going to hit a bunch of different areas of machine learning.

fenceposton Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024

As with every time these come out, Remember that Backblaze's usage pattern is different from yours!

Well, unless you're putting large numbers of consumer SATA drives into massive storage arrays with proper power and cooling in a data center.

fenceposton The IMEI Code: Your phone’s other number

I think I’m more concerned with the fact that the carriers know the IMEI of phones and claim that they can do nothing about stolen phones.

Maybe once upon a time, but I'm pretty sure stolen devices can be blacklisted from networks these days.

fenceposton I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

Not necessarily and it depends a lot on what the materials were. IEEE publications were mentioned, it was founded in 1963 and there's a good chance that anything from the first 10 years may no longer be in archives unless donated back by a recipient.

fenceposton I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

I was surprised at how low some things were at my parents' estate sale, though they're still alive and kept some things downsizing to assisted living. I also did keep some things of value (or that I could see immediate use for, like replacing my dishes with my mom's massive amount of Corelle including discontinued items).

Also if you know people starting out suggest that they visit an estate sale or two for dishes, pans, silverware, etc.

And anyone who wants fine china should just go buy people's complete sets on the last day for $15 or less.

fenceposton Beeper acquired by Automattic

Also worth noting that some past Automattic acquisitions have also been open sourced, e.g. Pocket Casts back in 2022. There's a LOT of stuff in the >900 Automattic repos on Github: https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories

fenceposton How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways

The Bolt EV/EUV are apparently very slow chargers, and I got it with maybe 1/3 charge. Around town would have been no problem but it was evening and I was headed for an 80+ mile drive through national forest with +4000 foot elevation change. When it didn't get enough charge for comfort while I stopped for dinner it was time to swap it out.

fenceposton How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways

Worth being aware that not all Hertz locations are really set up for charging. I rented one way to a fairly small town where the local Hertz was in a body shop and was very happy to receive a car. If I'd had the Bolt EUV I was originally going to use (had low charge out the door and slow charging) they'd have been stuck plugging it into an adapter on a 110 outlet in the shop, or would have needed to leave it elsewhere to charge.

fenceposton Cable ISP fined $10k for lying to FCC about where it offers broadband

Seems like a simple fix - require them to provide service at a normal installation fee at any location they've claimed within 10 days or be on the hook for the cost to that end user of getting equivalent or better service installed. Throw enough zeros at a different provider and they'll build out to you, and if that buildout is being paid for by a nominally-incumbent local provider? Even better.

"You don't actually have to provide fiber service within 10 days at the location you said you were already servicing - but if you don't you're going to be paying $100k+ to AT&T for their expedited buildout to that area."

fenceposton How I replaced deadly garage door torsion springs (2002)

The page in question predates the founding of YouTube by ~3 years. It's in the middle of the Geocities time period, back when video distribution on the Internet was probably via Usenet and digital photography was probably on a Sony Mavica writing to floppy disks - or maybe to compact CDR if you were lucky.

fenceposton Feds want to ban the Flipper Zero – Experts say it's a scapegoat

I've been at a conference where someone decided doing this would be amusing. I'm pretty positive there would have been widespread support for addressing the issue with a little property destruction, with the alternative being "Congratulations, you've shown you can't play nicely. Your admission to the conference is revoked, you're blacklisted from our future conferences, and we'll let the organizers of other local conferences know your name and why you're banned from our conference so they'll be forewarned."

As for courts, if this hadn't already been resolved (at least on iOS) I wonder if you could request that jurors and the judge turn their phones on for a demonstration. Given the state of Android updates in the general public, it'd probably still be effective on a significant percentage of people.

fenceposton Feds want to ban the Flipper Zero – Experts say it's a scapegoat

People use them to essentially DDOS cell phones with BLE connection requests.

That's one of the situations where I'd feel justified in taking a device and stomping it to bits, and I'd support anyone else doing the same.

If anyone does encounter this in the wild with Apple devices, first, install your damn updates because I'm pretty positive this is now blocked, but in the meantime turn on Lockdown mode to keep this from interfering with you.

fenceposton The failure of self-checkout technology

My last few trips have required an employee override because I left the paper ad circular in the cart. Put it in a bag and get dinged for bagging something not scanned, don't bag it and get dinged for something in the cart.

fenceposton The failure of self-checkout technology

There's likely a way to use cash, but it probably requires an employee override and a receipt that you take to a customer service desk to continue the transaction.

fenceposton VMware is now part of Broadcom

A spiral ham is actually a spiral sliced ham. This is the butt end or shank end of a whole ham and yes, typically probably 3kg at a minimum. The 'spiral' part is that during processing it's been sliced in a spiral that leaves slices roughly 5-7mm thick. These are typically a little more expensive than unsliced bone in hams, but the convenience factor is huge.

Hams like that often go on sale around US Thanksgiving and Christmas, with prices for them around US$4.50-6.50/kg last week and probably as 'loss leaders' around US$2-3/kg the week before Christmas. Ham is a regular part of 'traditional Thanksgiving' but not as much as turkey, whereas the 'Christmas ham' is definitely a thing.

fenceposton VMware is now part of Broadcom

One caution: SPAM isn't actually cheaper than ham, it's just shelf stable without refrigeration. You can get a decent spiral ham for well under $3.29/lb (Costco earlier today), but 12oz cans of SPAM work out to around $5/lb.

fenceposton Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip the line

An artificial lake created in part by damming a river system.

If you don't think that would have much impact, start advocating to alleviate western US water concerns by pumping from the Great Lakes and reversing the course of the St Lawrence River to flow from the Atlantic into the lakes. I'm sure people will be very receptive.

fenceposton Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip the line

Keep in mind that water flows downhill free but you have to pay for pumping to go uphill.

Climate change CAN impact availability of fresh water in the form of rain since warm air holds more moisture, but that's double edged - there's more evaporation from freshwater bodies as well, and the rain can be unpredictable and dangerous since some will be in the form of major storms dumping water nobody's equipped to store along with all the other storm damage.

fenceposton Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip the line

They could likely retrofit to do so but there'd be a lot of ecological concerns along with the infrastructure and energy cost of pumping billions of gallons of water from sea level.

Ecological concerns wouldn't just be pumping seawater into a large freshwater lake but questions of where to intake water, cross contact between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there at a new location, etc. Not a trivial set of issues.

fenceposton Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

I wouldn't expect them to help with reopening, but if a bank is investigating an unexpected large deposit and determines that "Oh, it's coming from a law firm's escrow account" it gives at least one obvious possible explanation - and may also indicate to investigators that the account holder is someone with legal representation so don't be sloppy.

fenceposton Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

I'm very far from dealing with 500k personal banking transactions, but my immediate thought is that if you're doing so you're probably making mistakes. If it's revenue from sale of a company or similar, move it through escrow with your attorney. If it's a legal settlement, do the same. If you don't have an attorney but are dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars, get an attorney. If it's income from trading or investing it should likely be a transaction from a recognized brokerage which shouldn't raise red flags - and if it's a private investment, see above about an attorney.

And of course if it's business transactions, do it with a business account.

fenceposton Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

Given the grandparent was talking about Bytedance, perhaps you're the floor supervisor for dozens of disposable people watching reported or flagged content to identify porn, violence, etc. on TikTok - disposable because depending on what sort of banned content actually gets posted, you might have a lot of mental trauma and burnout that the company would really rather just replace people than deal with.