qingcharles

Basically, yes. Everyone is just scraping them with residential proxies.

I don't know how my elderly mom would have dealt with having to get a code from a TOTP app where there is a tiny countdown timer and just as you think you have the number memorized to type in it suddenly flashes to a new number and the timer starts again.

I recently spent 10 days trying to move my WhatsApp chats from Android to iOS. Tried probably 40 different times, dozens of different ways. Even down to having Claude pull the encrypted chat backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row-by-row looking for issues.

Gave up. Just left the old phone plugged in and added the iPhone as a companion device.

40 years of software development, this is the worst piece of dogshit software I've ever encountered.

Meta had a huge step up in advertising this since they've pushed it front-and-center to every one of the billions who uses Facebook, Instagram, Threads etc.

All of that stuff is still in the latest Visual Studio 2026. VS2026 looks basically identical to VB6. It's still great if you're making little desktop apps by hand and you can back them with any .NET language, e.g. C# etc.

$35 for that page turner is insane. I assume you can buy the same thing on Aliexpress for a dollar.

This is an absolute par-for-the-course FOIA case anywhere in the world.

There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?

In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.

Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.

Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaps

[1] "Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas" https://mchap.io/

I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.

Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.

There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.

I was writing BASIC code for everything until a few years ago -- VB.NET -- until it was really clear that it had become a totally second-class citizen and I switched to C#.

I still think VB.NET is vastly more readable than C/C#/Java etc.

It can already connect to ads. And it can look through all your competitors ads at warp speed, en masse, and figure out how well they are doing and steal their ideas and copy all their creatives.

Also, just inside Google Ads itself they stuck Gemini which tries to get you to spend your life savings on ramping up your campaigns. If you use Gemini externally it tells you Google is trying to scam you :p

I remember when Leonardo wrote in his notebooks about having to use the undo feature a few times during the painting of The Last Supper.

As soon as a new model drops I point it at one codebase I have and ask it to do a security audit, look for bugs, check for optimizations, things that are over-engineered, etc.

Every single time I've done this it has found at least one serious bug or security hole.

Makes me wonder how many are left I've not found.

Can it serve 5TB?

Or b3ta.

Those wouldn't likely fall under NASA's remit and budget, though?

Does the Speccy have enough outputs on the edge connector to make a simple DAC like the parallel port ones we used to make with a bunch of resistors for the PC?

e.g. the homemade versions of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Is it possible they still have a patent moat?

Prosecutors call these "sample charges". Probably charged based on the five counts with the strongest evidence with dates far enough apart that they constitute separate crimes and the sentences can be run consecutively, rather than concurrently.

The primary aim is to put the defendant in as large a hole as possible, with the minimum of work at the start, such that the case can be disposed of via a plea deal.

That's actually intriguing.

I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day.

How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?

I think the bottom one is called "Plus", right? I get that confused too.

This is peak HN. Bravo!

There's a ton of streaming content that is stuck in streaming, so you can only "buy" it, not buy it. Oscar-winning movies that you can't get on physical media.

Have to take things into your own hands these days and grab the 2160p Dolby Vision streams and stuff them onto a BD-R, if you know what I mean.

Luckily, it seems like they are all being undone for the 50th next year. Most of them, anyway. We'll have to wait to see the release to be sure, but it's a definite improvement. Maybe the definitive version, finally.

I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.

[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]

"Which subroutine did he come up with?"

"Yes"

Surely the 4th amendment is technically "directory" to public officials, not mandatory?

Under Illinois law at least, that's how it would be interpreted, since the US Constitution lacks any punishment for violation of its terms. [0]

The exclusion of evidence is a judge-made remedy for something that doesn't exist in writing, and for most of the history of the 4th amendment it didn't exist.

[0] https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...

Some of those rich guy brain farts turned out to be iPod and iPhone.

And we know how the rest of the story went. That monthly recurring revenue changed everything for Apple. Did they have any recurring revenue of significance before that? I don't think they were doing music streaming. I think Nokia was probably doing streaming subscriptions from ~2005, but I know the numbers were miniscule.

I don't know. At least when I was hired Nokia was 110% into making music their main priority. They bought LoudEye/OD2 because they want to get really deep into the music biz. They saw iPod as their main competitor, but didn't see iPhone coming at all. I don't remember Rokr came out, but Nokia were sure that a good music experience where you could download or stream music direct to your phone was the winning strategy. And they were partially right, but that was only a piece of the puzzle. Their handsets were just janky compared to the slick iPhone, and they had no universal design language. I worked on their software and not once did anyone at Nokia HQ say "You should make your buttons like this, or use these colors, or these widgets." It was anything goes. Every app on the phone developed by different teams who only talked to each other when something was broken.

Hah. Yeah, they really didn't see it coming. I worked on music player stuff for Nokia's janky 2007 handsets [0] in 2004-2006 and it wasn't on the radar. The security around the iPhone project must have been really good. When Apple was working on the iPod I was getting intel for at least a year in advance because they were talking to so many people in the music biz about it.

[0] https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_764fa227-8853-45dd-91...

Did they want to get into smartphones? I worked for Nokia somewhere in 2004-2006, designing music software for their latest prototypes. I don't remember anyone I spoke to at Nokia seeing the iPhone coming. There were other things that did bits of the iPhone, but nothing as slick and finished. Nokia were bad at software, honestly. They were outsourcing all their "1st party" apps to random dev shops who didn't get enough support and technical docs from the mothership to really make their apps work well. And every dev outfit had their own design ideas and design language. Apple vertically-integrated everything and shipped a really polished-looking product and made Nokia look pretty dumb, IMO.