Hacker News Reader

odysseuson TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

Yikes. Makes me think of certain scenes in Slumdog Millionaire.

odysseuson Show HN: I built a site that lets users find playlists by songs they contain

Thanks for this! I tried 3 songs and they came back not found. But on the 4th, I got a good hit! (Mix of Progressive, Deep House & Trance, designed for High Intensity Focus & Created for my Medical School Studying by Austin Nguyen)

https://playlists.dags.dev/tracks/7xdkou0YaNLW9hWXU9MRcR/pla...

Tried a bunch more without success. Granted, I like a lot of obscure electronica.

odysseuson I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

> When a [customer] champion leaves [to a new job] this puts ARR at risk. Unless you’re being proactive and inserting yourself into the conversation with the replacement, it’s likely that come renewal time that your product will be at a high risk of churn.

I've seen this happen a lot.

By the way - this is also (sometimes) true with managers. You might have a manager that's championing you now, but leaves. When you get a new manager, unless you're proactive and finding out what projects/goals are really important to your new manager (and your manager's manager), it's likely that come layoff time that you will be the first to go.

odysseuson Lufthansa has not banned AirTags

Air Europa out of Spain isn't that bad and fairly inexpensive. I flew on it 4 times this past year and the booking process works OK.

odysseuson Top USB Drives on Amazon are a Scam

She could have just gotten those Kindle books from the library.

I recently dug into my property taxes and found I’m paying over $200/year (!) for the library. A lot more than the cost of Amazon Prime. Since I found this out, I’ve been using the library a lot more ..

As for our Amazon “customer score”, wish we could see it. I bet they have merchant scores too - would be interesting to see the number of returns per product displayed on each product page/merchant page.

odysseuson A Cheap 2.5GbE PoE Unmanaged Switch

Yep, I got the TP-Link TL-SG1008D recommended by a network guy who works at Eero. $20 for 8 ports, unmanaged, works fine. Not 2.5GbE though, just gigabit.

odysseuson Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage

https://www.onebag.com/checklist.html

There used to be a horizontally formatted PDF one page printable version of the guide but I can’t find it at the moment.

There's also a how-to-pack portion of the guide as well re: bundle wrapping.

odysseuson Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage

There are two kinds of bags: carry-on and lost.

I first read the above quote on a site dedicated to techniques on packing only one bag per person on a trip of any length - and it’s been a mantra ever since.

So much easier to skip baggage claim and walk out of the airport.

I still put an AirTag in the carry-on - helps in case it gets stolen at the hotel/etc.

odysseuson What Makes the Zig Programming Language Unique?

Take off every zig

odysseuson How criminals are using jammers, deauthers to disrupt WiFi security cameras

Hi it's Vince with Slap Chop

odysseuson How criminals are using jammers, deauthers to disrupt WiFi security cameras

HomeKit cameras and doorbells do this.

odysseuson “Creative” ways to use a $30 Wyze camera

My Wyze camera has already paid for itself when it caught a delivery driver backing into (and partially wrecking) my mailbox. Their insurance paid up.

Really my only complaints with the camera are:

* It randomly decides to turn off my “lite” camera subscription in the app so I have to reset it up

* Too much pestering to upgrade to a monthly plan in the app

* Camera doesn’t come in black

* Can’t read license plates (but higher end cameras have trouble with this too)

odysseuson From Burned Out Tech CEO to Amazon Warehouse Associate

Wonder if this guy was influenced by the ending of the movie Office Space.

odysseuson You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now

When I ordered a Pi 4 from CanaKit back in January, it took 54 days to get to my house. It felt like a long wait at the time, but looking back, it wasn't that bad, given the chip shortage. Took me another month to get around to setting it up anyway.

odysseuson Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam

For sure. I have a couple of Winix air quality sensors / purifiers and they power up (with red LEDs and rushing fans) almost immediately if anyone has a little gas anywhere in the room.

odysseuson I spent $3k on a Samsung Smart TV and all I got were ads and unwanted content

If you use electrical tape, the remote can no longer change the volume on the TV. Or maybe I need to trim my electrical tape a bit ..

odysseuson Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

It might mean "reinforce this argument/provide evidence for this", per https://constantrenewal.com/steel-man

From the context, it might also mean "rebut this as strongly as possible", "criticize this" or "defuse this argument".

It's unfamiliar wording to me as well. Does anyone have a rough etymology of "steelman" as a verb?

odysseuson macOS keeps a huge wallpapers cache

There's a useful Apple-created tool built right into the OS:

1. Cmd-space for Spotlight

2. Type Storage Management

3. Hit Review Files

Now you can sort by largest files and quickly make an impact on space used.

The only problem I had with Apple's storage management utility is that it kept reporting a Steam game using 27G when that game was long deleted (and Steam itself was deleted). To resolve this, I had to go to the ~/Library/Application Support directory and completely remove the Steam folder (which didn't actually have that 27G game anywhere in it.)

odysseuson Analysis of Apple Watch running data

As a counterpoint, I saw something similar happen after upgrading to watchOS 8 for 7 months, but then I somehow got my vo2max to go back up by losing 5 pounds in 1 month and eating healthier.

odysseuson Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

I had a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and still had many of the problems you mention and more:

- Barely ever waking from sleep, especially with external monitor connected

- Screen brightness keyboard controls didn't work (needed to use a CLI tool to control gamma as a hacky workaround)

- Had to power cycle repeatedly to get to a desktop when booting

- Not working reliably in clamshell mode

- Randomly forgetting external monitor scaling

- Accessibility features like screen zooming are very poorly done compared to Mac's Ctrl-MouseWheel (which zooms entire screen without crashing)

Things actually got worse as I upgraded to newer kernels. The wake from sleep problem is the #1 productivity killer I had. I had to leave the machine running all the time just to do my job.

A good post on why Linux has so much trouble waking is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25386605

odysseuson Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

By contrast, Slack is 6MB of minified JavaScript across 6 requests.

odysseuson Show HN: TaskTXT, plain text task-timing notepad

Does Horo even work on Monterey on an M1? I tried launching it and nothing happened. No menu bar / menu extra icon, no dock icon, nothing.

odysseuson Show HN: TaskTXT, plain text task-timing notepad

Nice concise video showing off the features. I love that it's plain text. Very cool UI. I'd like to use it, but as long as:

- there's no local-only version (although I'm now seeing from another of your comments that you plan to do a full offline mode - hooray!)

- there's a requirement to sign in (even before using any paid features)

I'd rather not use it.

Also, a better name might be TaskTimer, but I imagine that's taken.

odysseuson LibRedirect: Redirect YouTube, Twitter, Instagram to privacy friendly services

Too bad it's not available for Safari yet, even though Safari supports porting in of Chrome extensions.

There's a workaround though: Use Jeff Johnson's Stop the Madness Safari extension, and hit the redirects tab - screenshot: https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/support-safari.html#...

(not affiliated with Jeff, just a happy customer of many of his apps)

odysseuson Regarding the eSIM-only iPhone 14 models in the U.S.

Some carriers (for example, all the major carriers in the U.S., Telekom in Germany, and Vodafone in Australia) have eSIM "Quick Transfer", which requires no contact with the carrier at all:

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/tutorials/device/apple/ipho...

It's just a series of steps that you do on both phones, not that different than transferring a physical SIM.

odysseuson Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says

There's also Brave Search which has "Goggles" that perform the same function. https://search.brave.com/goggles

odysseuson I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018)

I don't think I've received a "we promise this is anonymous" survey from a hotel, but if I did, I wouldn't treat it as such.

Really the best advice if you do plan to submit such a survey is to take a couple days to cool down about the situation, then sandwich the complaints between a couple of slices of positive things to say about your stay.

Basically treat it the same way you would if you were complaining in person, which is hopefully polite but serious.

odysseuson I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018)

I just stopped leaving reviews. Airbnb pesters you so much to leave a review, and for what do they give you for it? Nothing. In fact, writing an honest review can be dangerous.

Contrast with a hotel, which -might- send you a short survey a few days later and then never bother you again. And if you do fill out the survey with a legit complaint, execs take notice and are motivated to give you discounts/free nights. Or at least an apology.

odysseuson I tracked everything I read on the internet for a year

What I like are the buttons at the bottom of the page. Takes me back ..

odysseuson Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

I’ve been an ISTJ (but have moved closer to an ISFJ over the years) and am not resistant to quantifying personality aspects - as long as results are disclosed and I’m informed it’s being done. Still, I’m not going to do a 128 question personality test to get hired - interviews are already long enough.