Hacker News Reader

fitzroyon Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

Obviously, one cuts a small hole in the ziploc bags and runs the cable between them so that each connector can be in the correct bag.

fitzroyon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

Timeless tactic!

"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...

fitzroyon Show HN: CheapFoodMap – A map of good meals under $10

Would love a gluten-free / dietary restriction filter, or at least a filter where gluten/wheat is not an ingredient (separate from cross-contamination). Unfortunately, cheap-ish food is harder to find with dietary restrictions. Even filtering by Asian, Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, etc., would be helpful.

Also, a way to verify or link to the menu item, hours, etc., at a place would also be helpful.

fitzroyon The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use

Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.

fitzroyon I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk

https://xcancel.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

Government: We will destroy any company that refuses to create the Torment Nexus

fitzroyon VR Design Unpacked: The secret to Beat Saber's fun

Beat Saber was the reason I bought a Quest 2. Now I actually find Synthriders to be a lot more fun. In Synth, if one person has purchased a song/map, everyone can play and players can create/share/upload maps and songs (there used to be a great free repository of songs that got taken down recently unfortunately).

Synth also removes some anxiety about playing in smaller spaces because AFAIK you're not encouraged to aim for big swings.

fitzroyon 23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount

It sold for $8.5 million... ..."The auction was for the building itself, not the land. That is owned by a publicly traded real estate firm, which collects a monthly lease. But the rent from the building’s current tenants is not enough to cover those monthly payments, which are set to increase every five years and do not expire until 2123."

fitzroyon Apple patents suggest future AirPods could monitor biosignals and brain activity

When my AirPods actually stay in my ears, I'll worry.

fitzroyon Office Cubicle Manufacturing (1954) [video]

As kids, we were usually in the back of a Ford pickup on I-95 bouncing around in a sea empty beer cans. My mom was very safety conscious, however, so we were forbidden from sitting on top of the wheel wells.

fitzroyon Apple passwords deserve an app

I use this Menubar short cut for Passwords, so it's only 2 clicks and fingerprint away.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/22133925f3e34579b22951d6593...

fitzroyon Run 100B+ language models at home, BitTorrent‑style

And we'll institute aggressive countermeasures and discover that millions of real people can no longer pass a Turing test.

fitzroyon The Death of Personality (2017)

The problem with ubiquitous apps (or almost anything) having "personality" is that a large number of users may not like that particular "personality" and, from a UX standpoint, it may not serve a large number of particular use cases. Instagram is no longer a niche project.

I would argue the death of personality is more attributable to growth and optimizing for mass market dominance. There's a reason mom and pop business can be quirky and Citi and McDonalds can't.

fitzroyon The Camera-Shy Hoodie

Aren't traditional (non-LED) lightbulbs that get hot much higher in the IR spectrum since they're dissipating most of their energy as heat?

fitzroyon We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability

I keep thinking of a service that sends famously long books in short chunks.

"Infinite Text" or "War 'n Pieces"

fitzroyon My bad habit of hoarding information

How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ mo)?

fitzroyon Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

If your favorite song is by Pearl Jam you get an extra layer of security:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLd22ha_-VU

fitzroyon Show HN: Create a paid link to anything

Does the buyer need to setup an account?

How does this service prevent the actual (free) URL of the content from being visible / shared after a user pays? It seems like this would be difficult for some of the use cases presented (YouTube, Wordpress, etc) without managing the backend.

And how long does the buyer have access? How do they regain access to the link later?

fitzroyon How to rebuild social media on top of RSS

Isn't this idea basically FriendFeed (which Facebook bought to kill)? I've always wondered why nobody has simply recreated it.

fitzroyon Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth

I knew this was true for nuclear weapons. It was just surprising that a smaller asteroid could be that much more dangerous than a larger one due to potentially exploding in the atmosphere.

fitzroyon Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth

I'm confused. A 100 ft asteroid that explodes 2.2 miles in the air seems to result in far more deaths from a 0.6 mile wide fireball compared to a 200ft asteroid that would hit the ground in the same location (Fort Lauderdale, FL).

100ft = 211,172 deaths

Is this correct? https://imgur.com/a/Elst6Q3

fitzroyon CT scan shows there's still lots of toner left in an “empty” cartridge

Empty Ink Cartridge has Better Medical Access Than Most Americans

fitzroyon Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

I'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to. (Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)

fitzroyon Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

Deep Space 9 was also shot on film. The editing, effects, and mastering were completed on video (same for TNG). This is true for nearly every 1-hour US prime-time drama of that era (Buffy, X-Files, etc).

https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-spac...

fitzroyon Hacker-News.news

If Poe's law was a design template.

fitzroyon Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds

Not exactly the same, but rats eating the power cables has been a problem with cars built in the last decade because of the switch to soy-based insulation.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/20878/rodents-are-feasting-on-...

fitzroyon The record player from the engine bay of an 80’s Datsun car [video]

More record players in cars:

https://thevinylfactory.com/news/amazing-photos-of-a-time-wh...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/automobiles/collectibles/...

fitzroyon Facebook’s Retirement Plan

Just as a counterpoint, I've sold almost 200 items on CL in the last 5 years in NYC as part of a decluttering project — everything from pro cameras to $3 adapters and cables to furniture. I have a process for when I switch from email to text, when I give my cross streets and train stop, and when I give my exact address, as well as boilerplate about cash, pickup only etc.

On the other hand, I'd been looking for a used car on FB Marketplace for about 3 years and couldn't find a single listing that seemed like it was from a legit owner (i.e. someone who wasn't selling a bunch of random cars parked on the street or a dealer posting fake prices).

fitzroyon Please stop disabling zoom

Also sites where zooming in slightly causes the elements on the page to explode into layout-less CSS soup and then zooming back out puts you at a completely different location on the page.

fitzroyon Infinite Mac

The Warcraft startup options are reminiscent of the 'about to edit video" ritual of the time. Just need to disable all extensions and plug in a "certified" (i.e. heavily marked up) SCSI drive.

[] Quit other applications [] Quit Finder also [] Switch to 640x480 [] Hide desktop [] Turn off File Sharing [] Disable screen saver [] Hide Control Strip

fitzroyon Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

The "Chief Freemium Business Officer" seems an odd choice for a quote about consumer billing.