Hacker News Reader

Recently I received several emails from Amazon offering me $15 if I would start using their Photos service. Never read the fine print, but that sounds skeezy - like they're trawling for more raw material to train ML systems on.

paulharton An overview of concrete forming technology

paulharton Why Men Are Hard to Help

And yet, for the men who go to (the right) universities, and choose to join a fraternity:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/10/sex-ratio-college-c...

paulharton Luxury Media

Apparently Tim hasn't seen publications like Wallpaper[0] and Monocle[1] (both created by Tyler Brûlé). Ironically, those kinds of aspirational/luxury magazines are printed on heavy stock, and therefore lack a few of the traits that he enjoyed about The Atlantic.

[0]: http://wallpaper.com/ [1]: https://monocle.com/

paulharton Boxes.py – Create boxes and more with a laser cutter

Internet Archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220809073511/https://festi.inf...

Github.io: https://florianfesti.github.io/boxes/html/generators.html

Also see the Hackaday Project: https://hackaday.io/project/10649-boxespy

paulharton Inco Superstack

Canada’s tallest free-standing structure, the CN Tower, is 1,815.3 ft tall. 1250 ft is impressive.

Two World Trade Center was only 110ft taller than this chimney.

paulharton Is Java Dying?

Java is the new(?) COBOL.

In my niche, a COTS application that was written in COBOL has been migrating to Java for the last few years (happens to be an Oracle product through acquisition, but that's probably not relevant). As of now, the product is wholly written in Java, though large parts were passed through a COBOL-to-Java converter.

Java isn't going away any time soon - there are massive amounts of enterprise software now written in the language that will need to be maintained for years to come - but it's probably not the language of choice for a startup writing something custom.

Keep in mind that the HN community may not be indicative of the broader industry.

paulharton Futel – Free Payphone Service (art/social justice)

The recent posting of the SparkFun "970-HA-JOKES" project reminded me of this service, which is part art project, part social justice service.

The founder of Futel also spoke at a conference a few years ago about the project and its backend tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P0-TcU7NlY

paulharton Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

Apparently it does - with another Rogers connection.

paulharton Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

I'd suggest giving the CRTC a call with your thoughts... but their phone system is down :)

https://twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041

paulharton The great junk transfer is coming

Yeah, my dad is into stamps... These days he only collects items that are no longer produced (i.e. from Newfoundland), and keeps them highly organized.

No idea if they're actually worth anything, but it gives him pleasure.

paulharton GSuite legacy users can now get a free personal account, includes Gmail

You also don't get aliases with O365 Personal - you need to subscribe to a business plan for that.

paulharton Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

Fellow Hamiltonian here...

Council wasn't for intensification until they got the results of the poll back (and even then, the likes of Ferguson continue to be aghast at the idea of not being in the pockets of suburban developers).

We can see that with the kneejerk response to Bill 109, and the fact that only one Secondary Housing Unit has been approved by the city so far, the rest denied for what seem like vague reasons that won't hold up at OLT.

paulharton Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard?

Maciej is a member here - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords - maybe he can help you out?

paulharton Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links

Much easier to read: https://blog.zulip.com/2022/02/25/zulip-cloud-invitation-vul...

paulharton Slack System Status

(For me at least...) The client.boot file is returning a 429 (too many requests).

paulharton Divorce in the rich world is getting less nasty

A lawyer friend who has colleagues working in Family Law says they (the family lawyers) describe their practice as "Feelings Court". The law itself is a guideline, adherence to the rules for e.g. contents of filings is on a meh-effort basis (beyond things that are completely objective such as tax returns).

paulharton Reporter may be prosecuted for using “view source”

There have been many instances where PDFs have been "redacted" by painting black rectangles over the text, but keeping the text intact. I can't think of anyone who has been prosecuted for unredacting those documents - the people who did their jobs poorly are considered liable.

paulharton PineNote E Ink tablet and PinePhone Pro developer versions now shipping

there's a working Android version for the device - the work is in building a FLOSS set of drivers for the display etc.

paulharton I returned my Remarkable2

I registered for the pre-order and was accepted into the developer batch. AFAIK we're all waiting on the devices. Kernel development is actively occurring on the Quartz64 board (same CPU), and some people with pre-release devices are working on the display driver.

paulharton Saintcon: Lock Picking Lawyer Keynote

He also talks about things he can't pick - here's a video on the Bowley where he almost immediately admits he can't pick it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV8QKZNFxLw

There are a couple of (old) videos on Medeco locks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmyC7KM5Qxk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fh6IHCr7uo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avwt39uHDOQ

Related to the Disc Detainer (come for the tooling discussion, stay for the picking):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRO5wzAaT00