hayleox

Google operates http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204 and http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204, both of which return a 204 No Content response.

Apple operates http://captive.apple.com, which returns `<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Success</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>Success</BODY></HTML>`.

Microsoft operates http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt, which returns `Microsoft Connect Test`.

Mozilla operates http://detectportal.firefox.com, which returns `success`.

These are what these companies' respective browsers/operating systems use to check if they have an internet connection and are not stuck behind a captive portal. Given the enormous quantity of devices out in the world that are relying on these URLs to stay up, you can probably feel comfortable using these in your tests. If they do go down, good chance you'll see news articles about it before you notice your tests failing.

Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry device.

If they ever figure out how to get Linux onto a phone with a good camera, I'd pounce on it. I would be willing to put up with app issues and weird bugs and all the jankiness that comes with early adoption, but I simply can't give up being able to take really good photos with my phone.

This seems like perfectly correct enforcement of that rule. Yes, it's a terrible rule – it always has been. I am baffled that someone would think this is any different from how the App Store has been managed for the last 18 years. Walled gardens gonna walled garden.

I've definitely seen it happen in meal delivery apps, though whether those count as "legitimate businesses" is up to interpretation.

Trying to shut down a site by going after their domain names will always be a losing battle. As long as the link on their Wikipedia article keeps being updated, it'll remain easy to access. And it would be a pretty shocking attack on free speech if a U.S. court tried to order the Wikimedia Foundation to take that down; I suspect the public response would be similar to when the movie industry tried to get the AACS encryption key taken down in the 2000s.

Sure, I can see that to a degree. And there definitely is a bit of chaos during the transition period as everyone scrambles to figure out what the landscape looks like now. I could understand if they decided to temporarily do less-frequent code releases, or maybe release their code on a delay or something, while they wait for the dust to settle. But I don't think permanently ending open source development is the right move.

I wonder if there's an advertising law angle here. If a company sells multiple products in the same product category, they really shouldn't be allowed to have them branded so that they seem like multiple companies. The main name/logo on these products should be required to have something that makes it clear that they're all from the same company.

They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.

The tools are available to everyone. It's becoming easier for hackers to attack you at the same speed that it's becoming easier for you to harden your systems. When everyone gains the same advantage at the same time, nothing has really changed.

It makes me think of how great chess engines have affected competitive chess over the last few years. Sure, the ceiling for Elo ratings at the top levels has gone up, but it's still a fair game because everyone has access to the new tools. High-level players aren't necessarily spending more time on prep than they were before; they're just getting more value out of the hours they do spend.

I like simple no-frills function-first websites, but I don't consider it a good thing when an old-style website has text running across the entire width of my 1440p monitor. It's just not pleasant to read, and given that the fix is often just two CSS rules (max-width:800px;margin:auto), I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for. You can still design your website like we're in the era of 800x600 displays, but please, take the tiny step to make it play nice with larger screens too.

That dollar sign is awful. I kinda dig some parts of this, but my brain simply doesn't parse that as a dollar sign; it requires extra thought to recognize it.

Agreed. When I redid my portfolio site recently, I specifically sought out a static site generator that wouldn't require JS, and picked a basic no-frills prebuilt theme. But I found out the theme didn't handle disabled JS gracefully.

The fussiest part of the whole site setup was getting light/dark mode to work in what I thought was the most obvious way. To me, if a website has light and dark modes, it should default the user's device's preferred color scheme, and as an added bonus for users with JS enabled, you might also have a toggle button. But by default, the theme just started in light mode no matter what until you clicked the toggle button, and they also didn't bother to make the button hidden if JS is disabled.

Same with the button for the built-in search feature; it would be visible even if it couldn't work. It's not that it was terribly hard to modify the theme and fix this – add `class="nojs"` to the body HTML, add a JS one-liner to remove nojs, and add a CSS rule to hide the buttons if they're inside `body.nojs`. It was just disheartening to see that this was the theme's default. Anyone making a website these days has to make extra effort to support what should be considered normal browser behavior.

It's less like having the house taken away, and more like having your house's street address reassigned to someone else's house. Sure, no one's taken your land. Your deed gives you ownership of parcel #530453080, not of the identifier "123 Vine Street", so nothing you legally own has been taken from you.

But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.

And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.

If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.

I think there is so much potential for AI in healthcare, but we absolutely HAVE to go through the existing ruleset of conducting years of research and trials and approvals before pushing anything out to patients. Move fast and break things is simply not an option in healthcare.

Yeah, I find the "we showed those idiots!" attitude kinda dumb when a lot of these concerns are completely real and valid. Like all of the comments about Tailwind are just "hey this is not a great way to do things"; it becoming popular doesn't disprove that. And for Warp, "No one should use a for-profit terminal emulator, especially one created by a VC-backed startup, full stop." -- I still agree with this!

Also the claims they make about the success of some of these technologies are very dubious. TypeScript is definitely not used by 80% of JavaScript developers, not even close. I know your average WordPress or Drupal developer is not using a compiled language. Perhaps it is used by 80% of GitHub repositories, but there is a lot of code that is not posted to GitHub.

And P.S. the scroll hijacking is no less annoying on desktop.

On their forum, an Ars Technica staff member said[1] that they took the article down until they could investigate what happened, which probably wouldn't be until after the weekend.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

What the hell is this?? If the product has terrible issues, just leave! Why are you grovelling before a corporation, begging for fixes, when you have other options?

I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.

> Can I play non steam games with the Steam Controller? > The controller can work with any game compatible with the Steam Overlay.

Ughhhhhh. Looks like they're doing the same nonsense as the last controller, and it won't work without Steam running. Such a disappointment; have to hope someone makes an open-source driver.

Ah yeah, that's a tough position to be in. Perhaps keep the old data but flag it as stale somehow?

Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.

Seems to be dead? I went to report the misspelling of Columbus, Ohio, and discovered there's been an open ticket for 5 years. https://github.com/stevage/OpenTrees/issues/58

The "75% of Debian archive builds" claim is exactly the same 7 years ago. In fact, look at this slide from the 2019 presentation: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/roadmap_for_t... (page 8)

It is barely distinguishable from the first slide featured in the Phoronix article from today: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2026&image=gnu_hurd_1 It seems like there has been progress on other fronts, so I'm not sure why Phoronix ran a headline focused on very old news.

Interestingly, the 2018 version of the slide claims "80% of Debian archive builds"; I wonder what caused the regression. https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/microkernel_h... (page 26)

It's just a convenience app, but it's a pretty nice one. When I moved my main PC from Windows to Linux, I was definitely sad to lose the ecosystem of nice launcher apps (GOG Galaxy but also others like Playnite, Launchbox, etc). The dream for me is to have all my games in one cohesive library, and that's what these sorts of apps offer. On Linux I use Lutris for this and it's fine enough, but I'll definitely be taking a look at Galaxy when it comes to Linux.

First, they probably wouldn't win. Oracle lost Google v Oracle. Wine is pretty serious about clean-room principles -- they won't accept a patch from anyone who's ever so much as looked at Microsoft-owned source code.[1] Valve has the means and motive to fight a lawsuit to the bitter end.

Second, it would be a PR disaster. "Microsoft sues to kill the Steam Deck" is an awful look for the company. Their strategy in recent years has been to say "actually we like Linux now" and play friendly to try to win developers; this would run completely counter to that. There may not be much of an immediate consequence to this, but in the long run I think we'd see developers try to reduce their reliance on Microsoft/Windows.

Third, I don't think it would actually stop the tide. Wine and Proton are a big piece of the movement away from Windows, but they're not the only piece. The legal process would take many years to play out; during that time, we'd likely see tons of movement on making it easier for developers to create native Linux builds, and perhaps even new projects that try to find other ways to do Wine-like things without actually reimplementing Win32. Losing Wine would be a huge blow, but I don't think it'd be the end of the story.

[1]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Submitting-Patch...

I am more likely to separate two thoughts with space-endash-space than with an em dash and no spaces. It just feels weird to not type spaces, and I don't want to do space-emdash-space because that would feel like an enormous gap; if the two clauses need that much distance from each other, why not just split them into two sentences?

I'm sure this goes against many style guides, but for everyday use it's what feels most natural to me.

This comment isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite comment on Hacker News.

It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

*GNOME features, not Linux features. No such issues over here on KDE.

I have often felt like GNOME is the most Apple-y of desktop environments; they're very form over function. Not surprising to me at all that both would pick a design that seems beautiful until you try to use it.

Instead of saying "don't use libxyz", say "use only native functions". Instead of "don't use recursion", say "only use loops for iteration".

The full press conference is worth checking out for more details (or do what I did and read the transcript): https://www.youtube.com/live/ffcV3jCwwPk?t=607s

They won't breach the crewmember's privacy, but they've said the medical issue was not related to any mission operations. There had been some speculation online about it being related to spacewalk prep breathing protocols, but they have confirmed otherwise.

The crewmember is stable and they're not calling it an emergency evacuation. They could potentially evacuate in hours, but they're going to return "in the coming days" instead. They said it's a precautionary measure; they don't have the equipment onboard to do all the checks the doctors want to do.

Apparently they've done statistical models in the past that suggested the ISS ought to have had a precautionary medical evacuation every three years, so the fact that it's taken over 25 years for a single one is pretty incredible. (The NPR article mentions that it's a first in 65 years of NASA spaceflights, but that seems silly to say. Before the ISS, NASA had very few missions long enough for a precautionary medevac to even make sense.)