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I’ve been maintaining a machine deployed to my mother-in-law’s house for ~4 years with Mint.

She went from needing tech support every time I was at her house to never overnight.

I highly recommend Mint for this scenario.

According to MKBHD’s video, you just look at the key you want on the on-screen keyboard and then click it by touching your thumb and index finger. They also mentioned in the keynote you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard and type on that.

leesalminenon High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

This is why we’re on “Hacker” news :)

leesalminenon Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

I could see that for sure. At the time I couldn’t find any easy contact info for my local club and thought it would be inappropriate to just show up to the monthly lunch meeting. Maybe I’ll try that though!

leesalminenon Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

I tried applying to my local rotary club online in 2019. Basically just a web form expressing interest. I got an automated email saying someone would reach out in the next 30 days. I was met with complete radio silence. Never heard anything back at all.

I was a Rotary exchange student 20 years ago which completely changed the trajectory of my life (for the better), and was excited to help the next generation with becoming an exchange student. I was also involved with RYLA as a teen.

For a group facing an existential crisis, they didn’t seem too worried about it

leesalminenon I have gained admin access to numerous GCloud Organizations by accident

I’ve had access to both Google’s and Amazon’s paid support options (up to and including enterprise support).

Amazon’s support has gone above and beyond for me over the years in ways I didn’t even expect or ask them to.

In comparison, I agree with you that Google’s support is useless.

My experiences with AWS support have actually left me with a positive impression of the platform, while my experiences with Google reinforced that they don’t know how to do support. At all.

Want to guess where our 8-digit cloud spend goes?

leesalminenon I have gained admin access to numerous GCloud Organizations by accident

A few months ago I stumbled upon a bug in a state machine that allowed me to obtain stuff without having to pay for it. It was a weird combination of steps and was kind of hard to explain.

I submitted a ticket to the support team advising them in painstaking detail the steps needed to reproduce this vulnerability. They could also look at my account and see that I got stuff without paying.

A couple days later I got a reply from a support manager that my concern wasn’t valid and there was no bug.

The next week I happened to be at a conference where the company in question was a sponsor. So, I visited their booth and spoke with the VP of Eng. He asked me to forward the ticket to security@. Within 8 hours I got a reply from them saying that they had fixed the bug.

I guess I’m saying that even if Google let you submit a support ticket it might get ignored because they aren’t trained to deal with security reports.

leesalminenon When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?

How often do these economic sanctions actually work? From my limited perspective they seem to only hurt the poor, whilst the rich find loophole after loophole and are largely unaffected.

leesalminenon When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?

> The Netherlands is a net exporter, apparently, so we could stand to loose some food production.

The countries importing that food will now have to import from somewhere else. It doesn’t seem to be solving any climate problem, just shifting it elsewhere.

leesalminenon When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?

> China is also investing heavily in reducing their dependency on fossil imports.

Sure they want to import less LNG because of increased cost and unstable geopolitics. But they are continuing to build huge amounts of new coal plants (which is largely domestically sourced).

leesalminenon Show HN: I made an iOS HN app to navigate large threads without getting lost

FWIW, I think the pricing scheme you’ve come up with is fine. People will complain about anything, even free stuff.

It’s clear you put some thought into pricing and have avoided the subscription route which is what most people will complain about.

I wouldn’t put much stock into the complaints here.

leesalminenon San Francisco office values fall

The little town in Costa Rica where I live got thousands of new Canadian residents over the past 3 years. The vast majority are from Toronto. The next town over has a huge Quebec expat community.

leesalminenon Potentially millions of Android TVs and phones come with malware preinstalled

I bought my wife’s uncle a cheap Android phone after his old flip phone broke. At the time he needed to use Uber for his work commute, so a smartphone was in order. I helped him set up a google account, downloaded some important apps and showed him how to use them.

Fast forward 2 weeks and he’s complaining the battery only lasts a couple hours.

The Lock Screen was littered with gambling ads, there were all kinds of apps installed, and the phone was basically unusable.

He claimed to have no idea how it happened. I assumed he was just clicking on any/every pop up. Maybe he really downloaded 1 bad app which then self installed the rest of this crap?

Anyway, I went back to the store and bought him an iPhone SE. That was years ago now and haven’t heard a single complaint since.

I think android phones aren’t for the tech illiterate. It’s way too easy to screw them up.

leesalminenon Show HN: A simple echo server for testing HTTP clients

I had the exact same thought after the first 2 sentences.

leesalminenon Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

Tbh that’s a pretty lame appeal to emotion argument. An event can be “manufactured” while also having real negative externalities.

I’m not making any statement on the veracity of the claim that the pandemic was manufactured, just pointing out a flaw in the logic here.

leesalminenon Getting ready to ship 13th Gen and announcing power saving Expansion Cards

> or that it's mostly common sense to tell what you do with other people's personal information

We had a very restrictive privacy policy. We never shared or sold any information with third parties. We contractually stated this.

But that’s not enough for GDPR.

leesalminenon Getting ready to ship 13th Gen and announcing power saving Expansion Cards

When GDPR went into effect, our company had ~5 clients in the EU (out of thousands). It was cheaper to drop those 5 clients than attempt to even read and comply with the regulation. We weren’t even doing anything nefarious, it just wasn’t worth our time to spend any brainpower thinking about it.

leesalminenon Geography of Kansas (2022)

Really? Denver 15 years ago was pretty rad. Maybe I should go check it out.

leesalminenon America Forgot About IBM Watson. Is ChatGPT Next?

Back during the Watson hype our company had a partnership with another company who was betting big on Watson. So, I was loosely around to watch it unfold.

It started off rosy, the CEO of the company we were partnered with had fully bought onto the hype train. Every meeting we had he couldn't help but mention Watson (by name). I tried to gently warn him that maybe, just maybe, he had fallen for the marketing hype and the idea wasn't going to be a blockbuster like he thought. It fell on deaf ears.

Over the course of the next year or so, they pumped big $$$ into the project. Eventually, the project was quite delayed and over budget and the CEO stopped bringing it up. I asked about the status of that Watson thing and the look on his face said everything. Not long after the entire leadership team was shaken up.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

It's weird how "decentralized" means something different to every individual. Having the ability to choose where to host my images is what I'd call decentralized.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

Check out the gossip client [0]. They take a unique stab at dealing with relay discovery. NIP-65 [1] also attempts to deal with this. Hopefully clients will start implementing this shortly.

[0] https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

wss://no.str.cr

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

A big topic of conversation at nostrica (nostr's first conference) last month was how to maintain decentralization. One of the biggest concerns was having a client or relay provider build features outside of the protocol to gain market share and enable them to lock-in users.

You are correct that there is no easy solution to these problems. There are draft NIPs that attempt to solve many of the problems you've described. You're welcome to join us in the conversation and work with us to try and solve these hard problems!

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls

PS- I don't think the web is effectively controlled by large companies. Email is a different story though. Hopefully we can build nostr to be more like the web than email.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

https://www.nostr.net maintains a list of all known clients. I am a bit partial to astral, though it is resource intensive. You could try coracle, snort, or iris to see if they're more your fancy.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

The recipient of that donation (@fiatjaf) immediately split it 50/50 with the developer of Damus (@jb55). All distributions have been done in public. At last check, fiatjaf has already dispersed 70% of the donation to other people/groups.

fiatjaf has been a prominent developer in the Bitcoin community for many years. Think what you may about crypto bros, fiatjaf is not that. I've had the pleasure of working with him a bit & have been on the receiving end of debates with him. I've always found him to be an upstanding person with deeply rooted ethics, even if I regularly disagree with him. If $240k were enough to sway him to do something he thought was wrong, Bitcoin would've been destroyed already.

I understand where you're coming from, though. If I didn't know the players and hadn't followed along (on nostr) intently throughout, I would likely have the same concerns as you. I still do, to some extent. Though my personal experiences and interactions with these people has helped assuage most of it.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

nostr isn't a platform though, it's a protocol. Something closer to SMTP than to Facebook. Go build a little something on it (there are decent libraries for popular languages at this point which makes it easy) and see for yourself. It doesn't feel like a platform, it feels like a tool.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

I feel the same way. I don’t feel the need or desire to be connected to every single person on earth through some app. I left almost all social platforms a couple years ago (except HN).

I got into nostr and feel like it’s almost exactly what I want from social media. Just a reverse chronological feed of the people I follow.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

Yes, nostr is just a protocol. There is no inherent algorithm. A client could choose to implement one and users could then choose to just migrate to a different client without one. All I want is a reverse chronological feed of posts from people I follow. That’s it. And right now the nostr clients deliver that.

leesalminenon Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

That’s pretty subjective. I happen to like astral, though many say it’s too slow for them. I think a lot of people are using coracle, snort.social, and iris. There are a lot of other ones under active development.