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jhy

172 karma · joined February 26, 2009

Hello! I'm Jonathan.

jonathan@hedley.net

http://jhedley.com/

(Feel free to reach out, I'm happy to meet you.)

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jhy··on Sydney Marathon medal mistakenly depicts Munich stadium
And they just flat out told everyone who pointed it out -- nope, you're looking at it wrong; and anyway we already paid those consultants so we'd better use it, what?
jhy··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
But it sounds like it wasn't Testdrive's fault; iD implemented it incorrectly. Their phone support weren't issuing the decrypt code, just a simple checksum:

> Described as is, there is no flaw in this process. The secret seed comes from the unlock server, tied to a CHALLENGE/SERIAL that could not be reused. But the hacker team GNOMON found a way.

> The QUAKE unlock program FLOW.EXE that ships on the CD is capable of generating the SERIAL from the CHALLENGE on its own. All it does is check that its own locally-generated SERIAL and the SERIAL entered by the user match! The entire protection mechanism relies on security by obscurity.

jhy··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra...

which has some different coverage.

I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt

User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /

jhy··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it?

Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

jhy··on Slumber a TUI HTTP Client
> Slumber is a terminal-based HTTP client, built for interacting with REST and other HTTP clients

I wonder what that means -- I looked around the docs but didn't see that it interacts with other clients. I thought maybe it would show a generated curl command or something along those lines. But perhaps it's just a typo for HTTP servers?

jhy··on Why is Inkwell stuck in review
With a previously registered trademark -- the article says it has been "listed as 'dead”' by the US Patent & Trademark Office" and unused for decades.
jhy··on Stop using icons in data tables
It's perhaps a confused reference to their old company, Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g).

https://www.nngroup.com/about/

jhy··on BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech
New? You haven't been able to buy a new Holden since '21.
jhy··on AWS CodeCommit Returns to General Availability
> We’re not just maintaining CodeCommit—we’re investing in it.

Thanks, AI blog writer. Did the AI product manager see too much customer pushback hitting your AI account managers?

jhy··on My dad could still be alive, but he's not
Health services are state based in AU; would be great to hear which state you're talking about
jhy··on What's your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x?
"O", you're on a typewriter! :)
jhy··on FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support
Sometimes, late at night when I'm trying to sleep, and I hear the grumble of a Harley, or my neighbors staggering to their door, I wonder: why do we not have earflaps, like we do eyelids?
jhy··on Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole
Thanks, I found that version much more engaging and understandable.
jhy··on Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole
Well, perhaps it's an AI writing about a tool...

> No API routes. No request/response cycles. No DTOs. Just… objects that magically sync. It kind of feels like cheating.

jhy··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
Making slippery slope arguments like this is not discussing in good faith. I was providing the context of someone who lives in that geo-political area.
jhy··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
Because folks don't want to enable drink-drivers and speeders? Maybe they want to use their roads with some basic level of safety?
jhy··on A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
My guess (it would be nice if they actually said...) is that they were missing the required lang attribute on their HTML.

  <html lang=en>
If not defined it will default to unknown (not to the user's locale) and so this makes Chrome guess. And there wasn't much text in the lightbox (which might be a different page?) for the browser to infer from.
jhy··on Don't use cosine similarity carelessly
We used to have this problem in AWS Rekognition; a poorly detected face -- e.g. a blurry face in the background -- would hit with high confidence with every other blurry face. We fixed that largely by adding specific tests against this [effectively] null vector. The same will work for text or other image vectors.
jhy··on I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet
What IRC network(s) do you like nowadays?
jhy··on Looking Glass' new lineup includes a $300 phone-sized holographic display
And it was only parallax pseudo-3D. It wasn't anything like the 3DS lenticular stereo effect. Four (!) head-tracking cameras on the front tried to understand where you were looking, and then the UI would shift about in response. There was no convincing 3D effect.

The intention was that the UI would reveal extra info (like meta-data about a photo, or calendar details) when you shifted your head POV. Like a gesture that you could do one-handed while riding the bus. (But not discoverable, and twitchy, and tail-wagging-the-dog.)

Given how coarse the tracking had to be so that the UI wasn't constantly shifting, it would have been far simpler and more energy efficient just to use the accelerometer instead of the fancy camera setup. And just use that for some nice parallax effects in the launcher; not as a core UI interaction.

jhy··on Tell HN: Server error (5xx) in Google Search Console may not be 5xx at all
Cloudflare does offer rate limiting - it's in Security / WAF / Rate limiting rules.

On the free plan it is perhaps a bit limited in the rules you can create (match based on bot or URL regex, limit by # requests per IP per 10 seconds). But still pretty useful for slowing stupid requests.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/rate-limiting-rules/cr...

And / or you can use Transform Rules to better normalize the Origin URLs so that the query string or other path info doesn't create new origin requests. Or more simply, enable Ignore Query String in the Cache Settings.

jhy··on Gmail using too much RAM: 1-2GB per tab in Safari
I run an 8GB M1 as my main desktop for Java development and it's 70% fine. I needed a replacement for my previous PC during covid/cpu shortages and in AU, there were no 16GB versions available. (So the upsell argument is not the only part of the story).

For running Chrome, IntelliJ, Spotify, Terminal, fuzz tests etc at once, it's fine. But running YourKit profiling or Steam etc, everything else swaps out and grinds.

So: it's amazing to me that you can do so much with just 8GB,and egregious that Apple can't put in a couple of slots for an extension.

jhy··on Open AirPlay 2 Receiver
If it was decompiled, that's not really reverse engineering though. So I'm not confident that the DMCA carve out would apply here.
jhy··on The Poor ROI of Autonomy (2020)
And that one driver now carries all the responsibility. To automate them out, you need 100% accuracy which closes in on impossible to achieve. Any lack of perfection would be down to the automator. So it's a very scary piece to take on when there's no human in the loop left to hold the bag when something goes wrong.
jhy··on Why Is Wine (Almost) Always Made from Grapes?
Sounds great! Do you remember the name / city of the winery?
jhy··on A different kind of keyboard
There are definitely electronic Braille reading devices. They're called refreshable braille displays, and are often also combined with a specialized keyboard.

Wider adoption could conceivably improve these interfaces through more users and commercial interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

jhy··on Keyboard Latency (2017)
Push down a little bit
jhy··on Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?
[Self-reply] I ended up getting the L size and am very happy with it. The XL was only a little taller (1cm), but wider.

Still getting used to it, but first impressions are that it's comfortable, helps give good posture, and the rocking & recline options are great to mix things up.

It's my first gamer-style chair vs a regular office chair. The side bolsters and head rest are a great addition. I have often felt more comfortable in my car than in my office, and this is a step towards that kind of setup.

jhy··on Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?
Those look decent, and I had a similar outcome with my Aeron back in the day. Which size Titan did you get, the L or XL? Am same height as you and am guessing the XL would be better?
jhy··on Feds asks Tesla to recall vehicles over failing touchscreen displays
Really? My 2020 Outback 3.6 has dedicated buttons for driver's and passenger's heated seats. They are four stage, depending on how hot I want my bot.

Maybe different trim levels move more things to physical buttons than touch screens?

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