Hacker News Reader

marbletileson Could I use the iPad as my only computer?

I don’t mind that iPadOS is limited, my gripe is that Apple limits Mac hardware to protect the iPad. Where’s my 11” OLED MacBook with eSIM? Where’s my Mac with hinged screen and Apple Pencil support? My mac with tolerable cameras?

I bet we’d have seen at least some of these if not for a decade of trying to make the iPad answer the “what’s a computer?” question.

marbletileson Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other aspects.

marbletileson Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s

There were a number of factors here - outsourcing engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then failing to move to OS X for years after the market was ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.

It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.

marbletileson U.S. Rules Apple Illegally Interrogated Staff and Confiscated Union Flyers

The distinction can matter because the core purposes of the two are different. A "Labor" union is one that represents one side of the relationship between capital and the workforce: that is, the side that has a portion of the value it creates in its work extracted by the other.

It exists fundamentally in order to be able to collectively negotiate around the amount of that value extracted and attempt to retain more for those who create it. That in doing so it also establishes workers' rights, policies around treatment etc is a nice to have.

The police, as an extension of state power much like the army, are generally understood to be broadly on the "side" of capital (in capitalist states). They are not value-creating, and their "unions" have nothing to negotiate for a share of. This is why you'll more often see them represented as "associations" or "federations", much like civil service, nursing or fire service staff bodies. Their goal is simply to argue for better terms and conditions for their members.

Does the distinction practically matter? In many cases, no. When the interests of capital or the state are at stake, yes: police officers will break up labor union strikes, even when those officers are members of a federation. They are fundamentally not part of the same movement.

marbletileson Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

Because often you can’t easily get back “in less than a second” as a tab is the culmination of a large stack of combined thought+browsing.

I keep it open because I can more conveniently context-switch back to it when I need to, rather than attempt to retract my steps from a search query all over again.

An open tab is state in suspension - it’s sleep mode. A bookmark is hibernation.

marbletileson Paul Alexander, ‘the man in the iron lung’, has died

Curious that the story doesn't mention he died of Covid – an infection that, you'd expect someone with his condition to be extremely keen to avoid, and who should have been able to, given reasonable precautions from his visitors.

marbletileson Sora: Creating video from text

It’s heartening and gives me hope that the reaction here is so full of scepticism and concern. Sometimes proceeding with caution is warranted.

marbletileson Ancient City Found in the Amazon

The "vapid moralising" is a quote from the person who lead the research. It's in the article because it is the opinion of the person whose work the article is about. Did you want the author to try and create false balance by finding someone to say "we don't have a eurocentric view of civilisation and this finding is nothing new"?

marbletileson BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

There's no contact in your profile so I'll say it here: Thank you! That work had a big impact on me when I was getting started and I still think of the B incredibly fondly.

marbletileson How Apple's developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the '90s

> It's not quite the full system.

You're right about the ROM, but parent is talking about something else: the built-in bootable system that came in ROM on the Classics. Cmd-opt-x-o at startup would boot you straight into 6.0.3, at the cost of RAM (it made a RAM disk to run from).

https://lowendmac.com/1990/mac-classic/

marbletileson Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division

News that affects the news industry always has a priority for news outlets, obviously. The fact that it's a tiny percentage of the staff is neither here nor there: if Apple laid off a few dozens from its core hardware design team, that'd be newsworthy too.

There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.

marbletileson Developing on and for Chromebooks is a terrible experience

Member-only story, fyi

marbletileson Terry Pratchett’s hard drive steamrolled in 2017 had '10 unfinished novels'

There is a long history in literature of ignoring author’s wishes: for example, we wouldn’t know of Kafka if Max Brod hadn’t ignored his instructions to destroy the manuscripts of The Castle, the Trial and others.

(I’m not saying this makes it right, but there’s a long precedent for it happening)

marbletileson How Tycho Brahe really died (2001)

That’s my thought: if you’re not doing it to be compliant, why do it at all? Seems pointless.

marbletileson How Tycho Brahe really died (2001)

Site has a cookie permission box where “Deny” takes you to Wikipedia, which is both non compliant and pointless

marbletileson Thoughts on Mark “diveintomark” Pilgrim's and _why's infosuicides (2011)

I see this point often - and similar ones about entitlement - but my reaction at the time to both Mark and _why was one of concern: they were people whose work I absolutely appreciated, and who I therefore appreciated as people. When they vanished abruptly I was concerned for them on a personal level, and naturally I wanted to find out if they were OK.

The unfortunate consequence is that concerned checking in doesn't scale well, and is indistinguishable from mob action to the person being checked in on. (Which is how it played out, if I remember right). So even though the person certainly doesn't owe anyone an explanation, it can be in their own best interests to provide enough of one to curtail concern.

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

My main challenge with navigating large threads is seeing what's new when I return to them. If there was a view that helped with that, I'd be sold

marbletileson The iPhone Setting Thieves Use to Lock You Out of Your Apple Account

Defence in depth helps make the situation less catastrophic. Right now, with just an iPhone passcode, you can take complete control of the Apple ID [including wiping the user’s other devices], any apps protected by Face ID (even those with 2FA if it’s SMS-based), private photos, notes, passwords, the works.

Those consequences are design choices - convenience over security. There could be features (tighter Face ID, multiple passcodes, etc) that reduce the blast radius of a leaked iPhone passcode. But Apple hasn’t implemented them. It hasn’t given users the tools to protect themselves, if they value that more than convenience.

marbletileson The iPhone Setting Thieves Use to Lock You Out of Your Apple Account

Muggers in the UK are now demanding the phone passcode on threat of violence. Having to give up the phone passcode (which also unlocks FaceID-gated apps like banking!) shouldn’t make your entire life vulnerable.

There are currently insufficient tools to deal with that situation

marbletileson The British computer magazine cover tape

Same but YC, and the game was Microdot. I used to scrutinise every line of those magazines, now I can barely scroll to the bottom of a single link without switching apps twice.

marbletileson Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

It's somehow managing to get worse in this area. You were once able to say "not this version" and it would try a different version of the same song. Now it just replies "I found some results on the web, but I can't show them here".

(This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)

marbletileson BBC Subtitle Guidelines

This is a deeply strange line of thought to follow. Do you think broadcasters would go to the trouble and expense if there was no value for people in it?

If subtitles were equal value or even “good enough”, they’d be used exclusively. That they aren’t should tell you something, and you repeatedly protesting that you are unable to comprehend the value doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

marbletileson BBC Subtitle Guidelines

And you’re seeing this nuance while simultaneously reading subtitles? From a speaker at a distance? GP is correct, sign is a fully expressive language, far richer than subtitles.

marbletileson I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

Nothing you say is necessarily the case, and is dependent on implementation. Take "value is just always equal to true", well, no, not if your key is a predicate. "Color:red" is more powerful than "#red" or "red:true", and "color:[lookup-ID-for-red-concept]" is substantially more powerful than both.

marbletileson Color fonts on Google Fonts

I think you're thinking of the Amiga, which had support for ColorFonts – the Kara collection was made famous by Deluxe Paint

marbletileson The Val Object Model: Template for a possible future Swift object model

One of Apple's cultural touchstones has been that it can focus; that it knows when to say "no", even to could-be-great ideas that genuinely excite them ([1] example of Jony Ive retelling how Steve Jobs taught him this).

There's little evidence of this discipline when it comes to Swift: got a great idea? got people excited? Breaking change? In it goes!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oksetv3i90

marbletileson Quirky computing books

I see a few mentions of beginner-level books that have struck a chord with people here and I empathise, as by far the computer book with the most formative impact on me was the Macintosh Bible 4th ed.

Certainly quirky, it was also one of the best attempts to capture why the Mac was different, why UX mattered, and codified for a young me a certain way of thinking about apps just as much as the Hacker Dictionary did for an earlier era.

The personality of its editor, Arthur Naiman, also shone through. I was sad to see when looking him up that he died in 2019. Short obituary here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sfgate/name/arthur-naim...

marbletileson A Brief History of ClarisWorks (2003)

Not the OP, but I think there's something in what they're saying. Technically, you can get close to the embedding that the Claris apps used to support with Word/Excel (although there's no separate vector/bitmap tools with the same integration). You even get something akin to System 7's Publish+Subscribe with Office.

At the same time, it feels a lot more fragile now, because the support is coming from Microsoft, it's not as baked into the platform as it was. The OG Mac did a lot of work to support a document paradigm – with features like aliases, stationary pads, publish+subscribe, solid drag+drop and clipboard, spatial Finder, etc. Even where these persist in OS X they're shadows of their past selves.

By the time you get to iOS the document paradigm is entirely gone, and you're dealing with app siloes which are ridiculously hard to bridge across. The web, even Google Docs, is similarly focused on the tool, not the output.

I'm not sure which paradigm is "better", to be honest. If you take the original document paradigm to its conclusion you end up with OpenDoc, which even if you make allowances for attempting it on underpowered 90s platforms, was probably the wrong direction. But the app paradigm makes composable workflows like OP describes in a sibling comment very difficult or impossible to achieve.

marbletileson FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes

It's not "you have money we didn't know about", it's "you have an amount of money that requires explanation".

It's more like "we see a lot of smoke coming out of your house, satisfy us there isn't a fire or we're coming in with the hoses". Viewing that through the "innocent until proven guilty" lens is like trying to argue the fire crew have to stay outside until they see actual flames

marbletileson BMW’s Heated Seats as a Service Model Has Drivers Seeking Hacks

Cars are increasingly moving to a more-or-less rental model, with lots of finance and little eventual ownership.

But this doesn't solve the "less garbage parked" problem; for that you need short-term rentals and although ZipCar and others are making inroads there are real challenges here: the demand is bursty (everyone wants a car on a sunny weekend) and the model is inconvenient (can't leave stuff in your car).