Hacker News Reader

jquaston A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo

You can now directly inquire the terminal of its termcap entries using control sequences, “XTGETTCAP”, full for ~23% of terminals, or just keyboard caps from ~15%, probably too little too late, but it is possible to directly ask a terminal and I think it is the correct solution.

https://github.com/yonasBSD/foot#xtgettcap https://github.com/jquast/ttyscan#motive https://ucs-detect.readthedocs.io/results.html#terminal-capa...

jquaston Edbrowse, a Command Line Editor Browser

I stand by my metaphor. It’s a command-line interface, a picture of text is only reducing its accessibility.

To complain about the visually impaired not doing enough to make the content more accessible for the visually gifted. I’m just too upset to respond to this kind of discussion. This is my last HN discussion, you’re right, blind people should take screenshots of their programs, enjoy your contrarian community

jquaston Edbrowse, a Command Line Editor Browser

The author of edbrowse is visually impaired, and so is the target audience.

This is like saying braille books could use more illustrations.

Please read the very first hyperlink to learn more, http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html

jquaston Donkey code

Hard disagree.

Please everyone name it what it is, and don’t try to be coy or clever. Call it the metrics database, the example.com web service, the marketing tool, the data acquisition service, etc.

I really hate that most private code bases are named “Steve” or similar, in a sea of micro services with Stacey and Stans and then there’s Steve 2.0 projects, and the only thing they bothered to document in the readme is the origin story and maybe a cute meme picture to go with it. And all of those people are gone and I’m a new employee and it’s not funny anymore.

Everybody please just be serious, name it what it is, and document private business code like a professional. You’re getting paid so please take your job seriously.

jquaston Apple pulls plug on Goldman credit-card partnership

https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/a...

I’m very certain that even in the crazy case you have outlined, SIPC insurance would cover up to a half million. Some brokers provide additional insurance beyond the regulatory requirements.

I think everyone recently learned about FDIC because of SVB etc., but I think it’s important that people are also aware of SIPC, and especially to consider that there is no crypto currency exchange that offers any such insurance of any kind, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/cryp...

jquaston Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

All of the content is provided by the community, if not directly submitted, ripped from message boards, Usenet, and other websites.

Please don’t think that UG is paying anybody to transcribe (or repair/moderate, desperately needed) the guitar tabs.

jquaston IKEA sensors for doors and windows, motion, water leaks

I don't chose to be spied on by any government! But if I could chose only one, it would be an opposing country like China or Russia.

American businesses are forced to share our private data witn three letter agencies. Conversely, I can't imagine any leverage, money or lawful, that would cause a Chinese citizen living in China, with families in China, to be so stupid as to collaborate with the US government in any way, unless they wish for their families to be sent to labor camps.

My data is safer with the Chinese. I don't like it, but that's where we stand with our privacy.

jquaston IKEA sensors for doors and windows, motion, water leaks

Agreed, I would rather a foreign agency with no power or authority over me to have my personal data than a government that has the authority to wrongfully tax, investigate, jail, prosecute, and imprison me for that same data.

jquaston We stole 3.6M traffic from a competitor

This will certainly be used by corporations to whitewash their bad histories.

IBM’s relationship with the Nazi Holocaust was difficult to find last week. the Wikipedia article, the book, and articles were all pushed further down to the bottom of google search because of the “News” that IBM pulled out of X advertising for anti-Semitic remarks.

Although the “news” is now older and not pushing down the results as far as it was last week. There will be perpetually generated “news”, books, and blogs that whitewashes away bad histories.

AI-generated PR campaigns that never, ever, stop.

jquaston Cannabis that people are using for anxiety is probably making it worse

Which of you are doctors? Why do you talk like this if you are not?

jquaston Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

You are correct about the mortgage payments, I had a 1-2 cent error every few months, after a days struggle, I simply added a “Penny” column to add or subtract as necessary so that they would match!

jquaston Windows Key

It is easier to locate keys when given hints like an empty space on the board, it’s much easier to find “f4” next to a gap rather than counting four keys from the left

jquaston Apple Joins IBM in Pause on Advertising at Twitter/X

I’d also like to add that IBM had no issues doing business with the Nazi party.

They did it for the money, and stopped doing it for the money. They advertised on X for the money, and they stopped advertising X for the money.

Is a white nationalist of faith worse, or better, than a white nationalist of profits? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

jquaston Apple Joins IBM in Pause on Advertising at Twitter/X

This is IBM letting us know that they are still breathing, they got more brand awareness from this article than a years worth of spend with X, big brain move from big brain execs

jquaston Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk'

I would have disagreed about supporting 80286 PC-DOS and Apple ][ computers all the way to the year 2000

but supporting 2+Ghz 64-bit x86’s in 2023 isn’t really asking a lot.. and android phones in particular need to be prosecuted criminally for their ocean garbage

jquaston How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

Some kinds of mushrooms take up lead And other toxic materials.

I only found this out because edible mushrooms grew in my yard, but they are warned in literature that they may contain heavy metals, as my well water contains 3ppb lead I wasn’t confident to eat them.

I also found this article for you, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/03/05/mushrooms...

I grow my own turmeric and ginger with reverse osmosis filtered water indoors, perfectly lead free, and it tastes amazing when it’s fresh

jquaston Two hackers one keyboard two ways

One of the first things I saw Linux do was utilize two mouses with two separate mouse pointers (serial and ps2 at the time), I was a young teenager and it blew my mind and I was installing Linux at home by the end of the month.

jquaston The History of Microsoft Encarta

You should especially consider the role of a historian or the person who wishes to set out to correct facts and figures that are in error in Wikipedia, this is precisely what they need to correct it, to be able to trace the lineage of the error and correct the associated facts and figures like an excel sheet would, it’s very important especially with LLM’s that can’t cite their sources and google having gone to shit to find them, errors are quickly propagated across the web like some kind of crypto mixer, it becomes difficult to verify

A non-historian mathematician does a good job explaining the issue of census data errors, https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=ySApTldsYVf3jv0W&t=1630&v=GVh...

jquaston Scammers posing as customer service agents on X as companies leave platform

> We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.

Working exactly as designed, requiring you to be rich and powerful enough to have the influence necessary to get the help you need.

Google employs just the right amount of support to ensure that they do not have to interface with the poor.

jquaston FCC robocall enforcement does little to stop illegal calls, Senate hears

it would be like saying, “I’ll show those email scammers, by reading and replying to every spam email, surely they will be overburdened”, when you’re fighting automatic programs with human time, you’ve already lost

jquaston What Caroline Ellison's Testimony in SBF Trial Says on Loneliness and Workplace

I don’t drink, I guess I score pretty poorly on your relationship scale. If you need to have a drink to get through the workday and get along with I’d rather work with anyone else.

jquaston Goldman Sachs regrets Apple Card, and is trying to escape the deal

I received an email that my credit limit would be reduced on an Apple Card unless I called customer support. I haven’t seen that since 2008, I called, and said to the support person that GS must be in a lot of trouble to resort to this, she replied plainly, “No comment”

jquaston Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date

Why is nobody mentioning using a tenths decimal, like 1.1 days ago, 1.9 years ago, 2.5 weeks ago. That’s how I like to implement it!

jquaston Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date

Also that git timestamps are localized to each individual developer and are not validated, it can make global development more difficult. https://alesnosek.com/blog/2017/01/02/git-getting-the-timing...

jquaston One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

20 year old browsers don’t work at all, though. You can’t browse any of the top 100 sites, and you won’t be able to download an old release of firefox with your old version of internet explorer, because SSL.

jquaston Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debt

I do like to call the large amount of TODO items i find in business codebases as “TO DIDNT”, always some comments about what we know should have be done, but some alternative or smaller solution was done instead.

Sometimes TODO comments describe a strict deadline, they read almost like apology letters!

jquaston Satya Nadella Says Copilot Will Be as Significant as the PC

It seems to be specific integration with a few specific Microsoft applications so far..

LLM might be the end of complex GUIs.

CLI and symbolic languages are so much easier for an LLM to work with so far, stdout and stdin, main and argv, these are things and LLM can compliment.

Microsoft may learn just how cantankerous their UI/UX and ever-changing GUI stacks have been to users and developers when they find out their best AI can’t even use it properly!

jquaston Burkey Belser, designer of the nutrition facts label, has died

They did have nutrition labels, but they were voluntary, so you maybe did see "nutrition facts" of some kind, but they could have had any appearance or title and could make any claim deemed "truthful".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/

> Every manufacturer should be encouraged to provide truthful nutritional information about his products to enable consumers to follow recommended dietary regimens. (WHC, 1970)

> Food manufacturers were eager to respond to the consumer interest and did so in a variety of ways, often through the use of an assortment of new, undefined claims on product labels that attempted to state or imply something about the special value of the food, such as “extremely low in saturated fat,”

This article contains an image of a 1987 bran flakes label, which shows calories, proteins, fat, cholesterol, vitamin content, ingredients etc., mostly the same content but without the styling of Mr. Belser's nutritional facts label https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/25/282628088/nu...

jquaston iCloud Drive silently deletes your content

I think it’s because git provides atomicy, requires it, requires you to make decisions on merge conflicts, etc while cloud sync makes invisible arbitrary decision of which file is newer, if there is a “conflict” like the same filename but different hashes and sizes, it will happily “clobber” your git database records by arbitrarily choosing which file is “better”

jquaston Ditch That Else

I was frustrated with a memory leak in someone else’s code of a dozen or more if-if-if-if-else-else-else statements like the second example, it was probably 400 or more columns wide. It was my first real job and I began to doubt my abilities, I couldn’t follow the logic.

I refactored it all as the author suggests, out of desperation to better understand it in a debugger if more code could fit on a page. To my astonishment the memory leak disappeared, so it has always since been a habit, sometimes I still rewrite code this way just to better understand it, I think it looks better.