Hacker News Reader

kraussvonespyon DraftKings Uses A.I. To Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

The gaming apps for many people are roughly equivalent to giving an opiate addict an app that dispenses heroin whenever they press a button.

kraussvonespyon Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

Approximiately 60-70% of desktop / laptop users worldwide use Windows according to wikipedia.

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

The big problem with shifting users from Windows is training. Corporations aren't going to pay to train their employees in something new if they don't absolutely have to. With that said, now that Windows workstation prices going crazy because of RAM/storage/GPU inflation, I hope that we see a shift to more memory efficient operating systems (anything based on UNIX like Linux and MacOS) but need 2x-8x memory (along with fast storage) to have a similar experience running Windows 11.

kraussvonespyon Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

That would look good as a title on a nice business card. Letterpress, maybe.

kraussvonespyon Apple proposes to take a 15% cut of purchases made outside the App Store

C'mon Apple. Ease off on the app store fees, let innovation blossom again, maybe use some of that momentum to encourage game developers to use the Mac platform for gaming. Consider throwing some extra GPU cores in future M<whatever> chips and manufacture cheap Mac Minis / Macbook Neos that come preoptimized for Steam (and other) games.

My ultimate goal: I'd really like to be able to play modern games on a laptop that doesn't also act as a makeshift space heater / 110db white noise generator.

kraussvonespyon Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.

kraussvonespyon Reaping the Whirlwind: Inside the Potomac River Midair Collision

It is. It's a good study of what happens when you combine complex systems in planes and helicopters with the complex systems of navigation and communication, and air traffic control.

If you're looking for more Cloudberg, some of my favorites are:

the United 232 crash in Sioux City

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...

the Gimli glider

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-mathematical-miracle-t...

and UPS flight 6

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/alone-in-the-inferno-the...

That last one is truly a nightmare scenario if you're a pilot.

kraussvonespyon Reaping the Whirlwind: Inside the Potomac River Midair Collision

Note that this is a long article (~3 hour read). If you just want the executive summary of what happened, I might suggest skipping forward to chapter 7 first and then if you want more, go back and read the in-depth analysis of earlier chapters.

kraussvonespyon Windows 11 25H2 – I'm so happy to not be using this

Windows isn't getting any slimmer. Storage / RAM isn't getting any cheaper for the first time in the the last ~50 years.

There's a storm brewing.

kraussvonespyon Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

This started long ago. In the 1980s, pros used 60 minute Umatic cassettes because it was the standard and it was the highest quality format. Home users had VHS and Beta (and laserdisc and CED discs and...) The pro market was mostly short videos / news segments / local insertion commercials so a 60 minute Umatic tape limitation was fine with the pros. In the home market, VHS won over Beta in part because the recording time was longer and it meant that most rental movies didn't need a second cassette and a swap in the middle of the movie. To your point, most video production companies had VHS and Beta decks if they needed home formats (I was playing with my VHS-C camcorder and caught that plane crash on tape), but even in the dark ages of NTSC, pros didn't want to use home formats unless they absolutely had to.

kraussvonespyon You Can Run

Sometimes the journey is the reward.

kraussvonespyon MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

lol

We consult with a medium sized medical group that interfaces with all of the larger hospital groups and tons of smaller clinics around the area. They had me do an audit on their fax server because they were getting complaints that a lot of faxes weren't getting to their destination. Well.

Almost 90% of outbound faxes didn't get delivered. What?

So I started researching the destination numbers of those faxes. About 2/3 of those numbers continuously rang, were continuously busy, had been disconnected at some point, or were voice answered by someone who had no idea that they were supposed to be making fax noises at me.

Sadly, the story ends there. I didn't have the stomach to investigate how these records were getting places if most of the faxes were destined to fax machines that no longer existed.

kraussvonespyon MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

You used the magic word "fax". I think you just told me you work in the medical industry without telling me you work in the medical industry.

kraussvonespyon Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation

Today in the US in 2026, if you're blindly trusting fully enshitified corporations to keep you alive, I assure you that you're not going to have to worry about broken insulin pumps for very long.

kraussvonespyon Extremely Low Frequencies

computer.rip has dozens of rabbit hole articles that seem to be tied together in an "old tech / weird tech" bundle. I'd love to find a book on similar subjects too.

kraussvonespyon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

Trump is basically a glorified realtor with the intellect of a single celled organism.

kraussvonespyon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

Laser pointers are to cats as sparkly objects are to Trump.

kraussvonespyon The Pentagon threatens Anthropic

Yep, they're playing the always popular "bomber gap" card.

kraussvonespyon Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac. I have Dirac receivers in two rooms that are absolutely terrible listening areas, and running the full Dirac calibration on the room creates a soundstage where you don’t hear individual speakers anymore.

But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.

https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm

kraussvonespyon Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

I don’t question that audiophiles hear different things on expensive equipment, but I think it’s all placebo. “If I spend a stupid amount of money on this, my brain will gin up the sound to satisfy my expectations.”

kraussvonespyon Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

There's probably also some "I don't want to get my pretty truck wet or dirty" involved there too.

kraussvonespyon The New Kindle Scribes Are Great, but Not Great Enough

I still bemoan selling the first couple of years of issues to someone on ebay. I needed to get the stuff out of the basement, but feels like I should have kept them just for the technology history lessons.

I'm still looking for the very early Wired issue that has an ad that goes something like "they laughed at you when you were growing up because you were different. now they wear a uniform with their name on it. and you don't."

kraussvonespyon 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea

Yep. The low hanging fruit principle in action. You can’t make anything completely secure so you put up more obstacles than your neighbor so the attackers go visit the neighbor instead.

Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.

kraussvonespyon Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models

I'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure:

Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."

Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"

And here's a truly excellent long form article on the crash by the always excellent Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...

kraussvonespyon If you are harassed by lasers

Although there are a number of charging stations designed for IOS devices that have bright blue LEDs that you can't turn off. Some good number of these devices are going on someone's nightstand where a bright blue LED is exactly what most buyers don't want.

kraussvonespyon Ask HN: Radar and radio failures at Dallas area airports

It would be interesting to know the who and how of the fiber cut. We're a tiny company in the heartland and have seen two separate fiber cuts in different parts of the state. Both tickets indicated that they were believed to be malicious, intentional cuts. In one case, fiber was cut in two places many hundreds of meters apart.

What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.

kraussvonespyon Airbus B612 Cockpit Font

I put B612 on my kindles a few months ago and it's my favorite reading font. Very legible from tiny to huge, no serifs to slow things down.

I'm not sure I'd use it for written documents, although the monospace version is a very welcome replacement for courier.

kraussvonespyon 1981 Sony Trinitron KV-3000R: The Most Luxurious Trinitron [video]

Mid 1980s, I worked at an record store that was also heavy into stereos and other audio / visual equipment. We were fortunate enough to have not only a huge 40" Sony set (which weighed about 300lbs) but also a 36" Fisher console set that I think weighed close to 400lbs. So, so much heavy glass.

There were lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to buy one of these behemoths at the time (cost, weight, heat) but maybe the most significant was how bad NTSC video looked when you spread it across a 40" screen. I recently pulled out an old laserdisc player and connected it to a 65" OLED set and it looks absolutely terrible.

kraussvonespyon Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

Oof. Things got awfully dusty in here thinking about The Great Silence. It's a very short piece with huge emotional impact.

kraussvonespyon Sales Compensation Simulator

“Sorry, the commission budget is out of money for this budget year. You sold way too much which made the company a ton of extra money. Sadly that means it’s your fault we can’t pay you the commissions you were promised.”

kraussvonespyon 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

Feels like this well written piece by Atol Gawande is relevant if you haven't seen it. I showed it a couple of years ago to my very competent and conscientious doc and she got PISSED. She talked about how she spent literally half of her doctoring time working through poorly designed menus in {epic, cerner} to carefully document everything she could about the patient, only to discover that most doctors don't pay attention to any of that info.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...