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lvillani

816 karma · joined May 23, 2010

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lvillani··on AirPods 5
The Pros don't fit my ears even with the smallest ear tips. I definitely welcome bringing that feature to the regular model.
lvillani··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
Interesting. OpenRouter classifies the Moonshot provider as ZDR. I wonder whether they have a ZDR agreement or it's a misclassification on their part.
lvillani··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Not the OP, but I just downloaded the latest stub from an M2 MacBook Air using Safari and it appears to be an x86_64-only binary:

  % file /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx 
  /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
  /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
lvillani··on X plans to collect biometric data, job and school history
It is only kept on the device.

Sources:

- https://www.apple.com/business-docs/FaceID_Security_Guide.pd...

- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204587

- https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

lvillani··on The Decline of Usability
On macOS you can search menu items via Shift–Command–QuestionMark (or by opening the Help menu). Most toolbar actions are also exposed as menu items, so this lets you essentially search for almost every function of every application that plugs into standard macOS frameworks.

Some applications have features that extend beyond what can be surfaced through the standard menu bar but the infrastructure is there for "normal" apps.

Ubuntu used to have something similar in earlier versions of Unity. It would surface Gtk and Qt menu trees in a searchable interface.

lvillani··on Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom
Some apps offer to move themselves to /Applications on first launch.

Still, there's the possibility of users clicking "Cancel". Even then, it's a bit more code to write, test and pay for (from the POV of a client).

Wrapping the bundle inside a .pkg instead of a .dmg solves the problem "for free".

lvillani··on Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom
Another reason could be to ensure that you have at most one copy of the application ever, since you can force it to install stuff always at the same location.

On an unrelated product we learned that users ended up with many different copies of the app scattered throughout the system, if they were allowed to use the traditional bundle + DMG distribution method. Spotlight would then helpfully pick one random copy, with obvious consequences wrt. project file versioning. That is despite the DMG having the usual symlink to /Applications for a drag-and-drop installation.

lvillani··on Using Visual Studio Code for Qt Applications
You have to take into account the helper and renderer processes. A freshly launched instance takes around 250 MB on my system. It consumes more as you open files that trigger lazy loading of additional extensions. Still less than other IDEs, though.
lvillani··on App Engine’s New Go 1.11 Runtime
Yes! Thanks for releasing this and making my life easier :)

I have an old app deployed to App Engine. The app itself is rock solid and chugging along fine (I touch it once a year or so), but I dreaded having to deploy it due to the lack of vendoring support and other... peculiarities of the Go runtime. Glad to see this is no longer an issue!

lvillani··on Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
AFAIK Google doesn't do that anymore.

Source: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

lvillani··on Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1].

They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server.

[1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-... [2]: https://jmap.io

lvillani··on G Suite Horror Story
It depends.

I used to have my own email server.

Having to manage yet another public server is a stress on its own. Having to worry about server backups, security, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, avoid being blacklisted, etc made it even worse. Despite all of this I couldn't shake off the feeling that my mails went directly to the recipient's spam folder.

I'm not interested in maintaining mail servers. I can certainly do it, but my spare time is scarce.

Nowadays, I periodically sync all mailboxes to my laptop, so that they enter the backup chain I already have. If GSuite goes down or Google disables my account, I'll upload my backups to Fastmail, point the MX records there and go on with my life.

I find this setup way easier to understand and maintain than a mail server.

lvillani··on Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
I read this as HipChat’s own export function having problems handling large amounts of data.

I’m not sure how this is Mattermost’s fault.

lvillani··on MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber
> since modern thermal pastes are non-conductive, there is no real downside to an enthusiastic application of paste except for making a mess

I recently re-applied thermal paste (an old Arctic MX-2 I had lying around) on a late 2013 MacBook Pro which has bare-die CPU and GPU. The first time I did it, I applied too much paste and it had an observable negative effect on thermal dissipation. Once I applied the correct amount, I got slightly better results than stock paste.

lvillani··on Mailinator.com: Anatomy of a Spammy Campaign
I tried to create a secondary email address on Gmail and Outlook.com and they both required me enter a phone number.

Ended up using Protonmail instead, which allowed me to register with username and password and nothing else.

lvillani··on I Got Catfished by a Candidate
His knowledge is solid, sure, but would you really want to work with someone who has such a strong inclination to cheat and deceive? I certainly wouldn't.
lvillani··on HomePod
I strongly doubt that they were able to shrink Darwin/iOS down to the Cortex M0+ that the AirPods have. I would love to be proven wrong, though.
lvillani··on Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language
> written by Zuse (after whom SuseLinux is named)

I was under the impression that SuSE (now SUSE) stood for "Software und System Entwicklung" (Software and System Development, translated from German), are we referring to the same Linux distribution?

lvillani··on Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
> I wish there was an equally useful feature to get back to the bottom.

WhatsApp shows a small button in the lower-right corner once you scroll up a few messages for this purpose. iMessage scrolls back to the bottom as soon as you focus the input field. I don't know about the others.

But yeah, it highly depends on how the developers decide to implement it, which is suboptimal :(

lvillani··on Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
If you think this is weird, what about the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

Seriously, try to e.g. delete an email from the system's mail app, then vigorously shake your phone in anger. A popup asking you to "Undo delete" should appear on the screen (Many applications hook into this seemingly standard undo mechanism on iOS).

Some things in iOS are objectively weird and unintuitive but I miss them so much whenever I use an Android phone.

lvillani··on Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
> on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!

That's by design and standard iOS behaviour (it has been there for years). Tapping anywhere on the system toolbar (i.e. where the clock, wifi, signal strength indicators are) brings the main scrollable view to its "topmost" position.

lvillani··on Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash
shellcheck (https://www.shellcheck.net) is an absolute godsend when writing Bash/POSIX sh scripts.

It catches so many errors that I think it's a must have in every programmer's toolbox. It even catches bash-isms when you are targeting POSIX sh. It saved me many many hours of grief trying to debug shell scripts I wrote and changed the way I write them for the better.

lvillani··on Redoing all my home networking
I was under the impression that they were going to decommission the EdgeRouter line as more and more features get added to their UniFi line.

(I have both and my EdgeRouter X feels definitely in “maintenance mode”).

lvillani··on Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout
I have a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro and I've been using High Sierra since the GM release and I haven't seen any of those problems. No visual artefacts in Xcode, either.
lvillani··on Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
I keep reading this but my experience is different: I have built and installed two applications on my iPhone more than a month ago and they still run just fine. I didn't have to re-install them every week.

My paid developer subscription expired two years ago. I suffer from all restrictions of the free tier (can't publish to App Store, can't use StoreKit, SiriKit, etc) except for the need to re-install the app every week.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

lvillani··on Privacy
That only applies for location access. Even then, you'll see an arrow in the status bar and there's a page in the settings that lets you see which applications are actually accessing your location in the background, and how often.

Mic recording, on the other hand, is always user-initiated and very explicit.

lvillani··on Privacy
I don't think privacy can be measured by counting the number of lines of code that are open source.

A device can be perfectly respectful of your privacy despite being closed and proprietary.

The only difference (IMO) between open and closed platform is that with the former you can have 3rd parties inspect it.

However, unless you have the resources to fully audit an open platform (either yourself, or by paying someone else) I believe you should assume the worst from both open and proprietary platforms.

lvillani··on Privacy
iOS is different in a subtle way: once you grant an application permission to use location/microphone, it will show a banner if a background app is using it.

Once you grant e.g. permission to access the microphone to an Android app, it can do so at any time without you noticing. Until you manually go to the settings and revoke the permission, that is.

lvillani··on MacOS High Sierra
If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install.

Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.

lvillani··on GeoGebra Augmented Reality
Are you sure that's true? I have an app on my phone that I last built and installed more than a month ago and it's working just fine.
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