Hacker News Reader

rajboton Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing

Oh cool! Send me the list of questions and you can decide if my answers are podcast-worthy.

The early days of the Apple Store were so fun. The company was smaller then, and as an employee (or really anybody) you could just show up and start answering customer questions.

I remember when the Palo Alto store opened in 2001 they handed out T-shirts on the first day. I still have mine in a big box of old apple T-shirts from back in that era.

rajboton Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing

Very nice podcast! Such a breath of fresh air given how many podcasts these days seem mostly interested in selling ads. Will definitely check it out.

It might be a bit before I have time to do a podcast (and also there are many things I can’t talk about because of both the nature of Apple and also the legal mess that is the video field). Anything specific you want to hear more about?

rajboton Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing

And Intel! We shipped QuickTime for windows, and then later launched intel-based macs. That was a lot of work to optimize for too! Lots of nights and weekends porting and optimizing for little-endian byte order and a completely different simd instruction set. Porting QT from OS9 to OS X was another major transition. It was fun though :)

rajboton Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing

> Then at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June of 2003, along with the G5 processor and OS X 10.3 panther, Apple announced "iChat AV".

This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!

I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..

rajboton Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.

There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.

rajboton Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?

From the article:

> Cycling now spends far more money on anti-doping programs than any other sport

rajboton DJ With Apple Music launches to enable subscribers to mix their own sets

Yes:

“”“ The popular DJing app djay by Algoriddim already offered Apple Music integration since last year, and additional platforms that are now supported include AlphaTheta, Serato, and inMusic's Engine DJ, Denon DJ, Numark, and RANE DJ. For example, you can now access the entire Apple Music catalog in AlphaTheta's rekordbox app for iPhone and iPad.

"Apple Music support has finally arrived," says the release notes for today's rekordbox update.”””

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/25/dj-with-apple-music/

rajboton Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

This GitHub Action is still compromised, leaving thousands of repositories vulnerable.

Is there anyone here from GitHub that can help get this fixed?

rajboton FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine

After spending all week reviewing and commenting on gdocs, I have to say that the Papyrus interface looks really beautiful. I love how they implemented sticky notes!

rajboton I Don't Have Spotify

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Identifier

> One of MusicBrainz' aims is to be the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification; this music identification is performed through the use of MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs).

rajboton Gandi's .com renewal price is up 60%

Route53 domains uses gandi as a registrar, so their prices go up when gandi’s go up

rajboton Xiaomi releases electric car $4K cheaper than Tesla's Model 3

Every company sells their first electric car at a loss.

The first Roadsters sold for $110K and the BOM alone was $145K per car. No one accused Tesla of price dumping.

rajboton 15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps

""" Here’s how it could look: - Keep the search box - Keep the bottom bar - Remove everything else from the map """

If you followed these suggestions you would end up with something that looks very much like Apple Maps

rajboton Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes

It is a dupe, but it seems none of the comments there address the actual trigger for silencing her, which admittedly is at the bottom of that difficult to parse post.

She believes she was silenced for disclosing an IME vulnerability that allows Chinese authorities to read Signal messages via third-party android keyboards that are extremely prevalent in China.

rajboton How do we save water: Stop growing alfalfa in Imperial County

The alfalfa growers and the industries they support, such as the beef industry, have successfully convinced Californians that their water issues are entirely due to growing almonds. There have been so many news stories about growing almonds in the California desert, but almost none about alfalfa.

rajboton Is Mastodon mainly for far left?

There are plenty of right-wing mastodon instances full of climate deniers. Trump’s TruthSocial is one, gab.com is another.

rajboton Backup driver in first death by fully autonomous car pleads guilty

If the backup driver is guilty of failing to stop the primary driver of killing someone, then that means the primary driver is also guilty of killing someone.

rajboton Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right

Their data goes back to 1992, the start of the Clinton presidency.

rajboton The Bay Area German bar that brought down Apple’s famed iPhone security

Click on the special coverage section -> three dot menu -> block channel.

Or better yet, just don’t use their feed.

rajboton The Bay Area German bar that brought down Apple’s famed iPhone security

You can. First you can just use it like Reader Mode. Safari -> share menu -> open in News for any HN link you click on that has too many popups.

Or, in the News following tab, click Edit, remove all “suggested by Siri” topics, and block low-quality channels. I blocked the National Review, WSJ, USA Today, and People Magazine and my feed got a lot better.

rajboton The Bay Area German bar that brought down Apple’s famed iPhone security

If you have an Apple News/One subscription you can read it as this link. Much more readable, and the publisher still gets ad revenue:

https://apple.news/AlNrxUYEHQPGfrBna1YfVqQ

rajboton Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right

The NYT doesn’t mention that white people of all generations lean republican, and non-white people of all generations are strongly for democrats. White millennials identify as or lean republican 45% to 43%, while non-white millennials identify as democrats, 61% to 23%.

This is important because as the population is getting more diverse, gerrymandering districts and suppressing non-white votes are more important than ever for republicans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-...

rajboton Apple brings Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad

It’s not. I bought FCP X in 2011 for $299. If you are just counting my own usage, that is $25/yr over the last 12 years, but I get to keep using for many more years, and both my kids use it through family sharing as well, so we are down to $5/year per person or less, without having to mess with yet another subscription.

I used to work on a competing product, and subscription pricing will work better for most people who are in this market, so my personal use case is an outlier I know.

Edit: all that said, I’m excited to be the first person to subscribe to Logic on the iPad. I hope that subscription is Family Sharing enabled as well!

rajboton Apple brings Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad

Although I understand the reasoning, I’m sad to see the move to subscription pricing.

I bought Final Cut and Logic a long time ago in the Mac App Store, and now my kids get to use them through Family Sharing. One of them has written hundreds of songs in Logic and published an album.

The one-time purchase of Final Cut and Logic with Family Sharing and a lifetime of upgrades has been such an unbelievable value for such powerful software.

rajboton Cruise is now running 24/7 across all of San Francisco

If you open the Cruise app, it still says hours in San Francisco are from 10pm to 5:30am PDT

rajboton Hyundai promises to keep buttons in cars

There are a few people in this thread saying their engines seized within the warranty period but weren’t covered by Kia, so this warranty might not be as useful as it sounds.

rajboton Tesla’s dropping share price takes valuation below ExxonMobil’s

After this week’s share price drop, Tesla’s P/E ratio fell to 42 (was 50 last week)

Contrast that to other car makers like Ford with a P/E ratio of 5 or GM with P/E of 6

Or contrast that with tech stocks like Google with a P/E of 18 or Apple with a P/E of 21.

Exxon’s P/E ratio is 8.71

Why is Tesla stock valued so highly, with a P/E ratio an order of magnitude higher than other car companies and twice that of Apple?

rajboton [dead]

What part of this story do you think is fake?

rajboton 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

No, your iPhone does not magically work differently than everyone else’s.

rajboton 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

All incoming texts, whether sms or iMessage, show up in a gray bubble.

Only your own outgoing texts are in a colored bubble