Hacker News Reader

offskyon Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton

Business plan: Use AI to write fake old books. Make a used bookstore to sell these books back to AI for training.

Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ. https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php

offskyon Dark Pattern Games

It’s meant to look like an old NES game controller.

offskyon Dark Pattern Games

It’s always shocking to see one of my sites pop up on HN.

For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life. I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore. The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.

The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.

I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.

offskyon Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.

offskyon Vacheron Constantin breaks the world record for most complicated wristwatch

I became interested in complicated watches several years ago and knew I could never afford one, so I made a website with simulated watch dials. Just for fun and education. It was also a great way for me to learn svg animations. https://www.complication.watch/

offskyon Mandelbrot Set Explorer

I tried adding deep zoom to mine, https://www.zazow.com but it became way too slow. Arbitrary precision math is just orders of magnitude slower, at least in the way that I understand it. I am not a mathematician.

offskyon Cross Views

Is there a way to turn Apple special photos into cross view images?

offskyon Apple Invites

It would be cool if Apple made something like this for public events with a way to browse local events. I acknowledge that moderation of spam would be an issue.

offskyon WebGL Fluid Simulation

I would love to see a lava lamp simulator with this type of quality. I’ve tried before to make one but alas I don’t have the math.

offskyon Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

If I lose access to my Apple account (via hacking, being banned or otherwise), do I also lose access to all my saved password? Thats what I want to know.

offskyon Empty S.F. office tower formerly valued at $62M sold for $6.5M

I wonder what the annual maintenance, utilities, taxes and other upkeep would be on that.

offskyon Tesla recalls all cybertrucks for faulty accelerator pedals

This is surprising to me too because I saw 3 different Cybertrucks on the road yesterday. I guess I live in a hot zone.

offskyon Device stopped working because your medical prescription has expired

Here is a migraine headache therapy that works on the same principle.

https://www.gammacore.com/

It’s really difficult to get prescription and insurance to line up and then they mail you a RFID card that you scan to “refill” the device.

offskyon Introducing Kagi Search's New Design

Why is sales tax being applied now? Is there some new tax law or is Kagi offering a new benefit that requires taxation?

offskyon Framework: We don't want to have to make a printer, but wow

My brother laser worked great for years. Then I decided to save money and get generic toner. A week later my brother printer bricked itself. It won’t even turn on. Probably a coincidence, but still makes me angry.

offskyon Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies?

If HN suddenly dies there will be 1000 former HN users who will create a clone in a weekend.

offskyon Ask HN: How to figure out a good direction/goals for the year ahead?

I did this exercise last year called “8760 Hours” which is a series of prompts to help refine your values and goals for the year. I then reviewed my answers at the beginning of each month to make sure I hadn’t strayed off target. It was very helpful for me and I’ll do it again for 2024.

https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/

offskyon Why doctors pay millions in fees that could be spent on care

I was recently at a museum and I had two choices to buy a ticket. Buy a paper ticket from a real person or use a self-service kiosk which emails me a ticket for a $5 electronic delivery fee. Why??

I am always baffled by fees for electronic delivery of anything.

offskyon Farmworkers thought a new overtime law would help them. Now, they want it gone

This is exactly what I thought. Or maybe 1 farm will split itself into two separate corporate entities and employees will work 35h for each one and nothing changes.

offskyon Ask HN: How do you find high quality mobile games?

https://www.darkpattern.games/

My site to track games with dark patterns and those without.

offskyon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2023)

I recently joined forces with some web dev/designer friends to start a team for hire. Collectively we have a ton of experience building and shipping websites of all kinds. We are looking for clients who need help building early stage SaaS products, or similar.

Location: USA

Remote: Yes, we are a remote team spread around the US

Technologies: SQL, PHP, Python, Node, JS (all flavors), HTML, CSS, UI/UX, etc

Résumé/CV: https://www.omegacollectiv.com

Email: omegacollectiv@gmail.com

offskyon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2023)

Location: USA

Remote: Yes, only

Willing to relocate: No, we are a remote team spread around the US

Technologies: SQL, PHP, Python, Node, JS (all flavors), HTML, CSS, UI/UX, etc

Résumé/CV: https://www.omegacollectiv.com

Email: omegacollectiv@gmail.com

offskyon Ask HN: How do I keep my elderly father safe on the internet?

That gives a new meaning to "parental control". I like it!

offskyon Thinking hard makes the brain tired

Can someone please explain the picture at the top of the article?

offskyon Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

I would easily pay $50/m for a version of google without ads. Take my money please and return the search results to a sane place.

offskyon MIT’s Barry Duncan demonstrates the power of writing in reverse

It’s a travesty that the word palindrome is not itself a palindrome.

offskyon Not by AI

Ironically, the badge sounds robotic "written by human". How about "written by a human" to make it grammatically correct? And while we are at it, why are the letters AI the biggest thing on the badge? Seems backwards. I suggest flipping the emphasis so "written by a human" is bold and the "not by AI" part is smaller to indicate its inferiority.

offskyon Ask HN: Science fiction movies that are appropriate for 12 year olds?

Here is a quick deep link to 80s and 90s sci-fi movies for 12 and unders. Sorted by popularity.

https://www.movienight.tips/movies.php?m=1&start=1980&end=19...

offskyon Ask HN: Science fiction movies that are appropriate for 12 year olds?

Over the pandemic I created a website to solve a very similar problem for finding appropriate movies for my kids.

https://www.movienight.tips/

Click through to the list of movies and then add a genre filter for sci-fi. You can further filter by rating, popularity or maturity level as desired. Enjoy!