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sossles

800 karma · joined November 12, 2010

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sossles··on Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP
I have an email forwarder on my personal domain that forwards to my gmail address, and gmail lets me send email as if it were coming from that address. Seems like it's the same result, and they're not blocking that.
sossles··on Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections
Wow, that's terrible. That would be nearly impossible for me to produce, because GPs around me are sometimes booked out a week in advance.
sossles··on Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections
Who goes to a GP for a cold? Your symptoms would have to be pretty severe to do that wouldn't they? And if so, maybe it's not just a cold.
sossles··on Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections
Just counter this with a little more anecdata, I'm a regular GP visitor in Australia and have found them to be great. The only antibiotics I've been prescribed in the past decade were for a particularly persistent parasite infection.
sossles··on Woodworking through the mind of an engineer
Woodworking can be a good hobby for an engineer as there's a lot of problem solving - both design problems or construction problems (like how to set up a particular cut to make it more accurate or efficient).

Combining those worlds is even more fun. I had a simple project involving an Arduino board and built a nice housing for it out of wood that managed to combine my interest in software, electronics and woodworking all in one!

sossles··on NightWare helps disrupt nightmares for those with PTSD
4. is underrated and mysterious. I've dealt with periods of anxiety by playing an online competitive card game, something that "should" be stressful, but having played it hundreds of times before, the steady stream of familiar choices that ultimately don't matter, is soothing.
sossles··on Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?
I'm a long term employee of a large software company. When I had kids I asked to go down to 4 days so they wouldn't be in childcare for the whole week. Now the kids are all in school but I've kept the 4 day week as I'm much happier this way. A few years ago a colleague asked to go to 4 days (with no kids) and was rejected, so I doubt I'll ever give it up, otherwise I'll never get it back, and I don't know how I'd ever find another job that would support this style of work, so I guess it has worked in my employer's favour.
sossles··on Give up GitHub: The time has come
At one point does AI recreating patterns it has seen from reading source code count as a derived work? What if a human learns to code by reading only GPLed code, does all the code they write fall under GPL as a derived work now?
sossles··on Are you the asshole? – AI powered answer bot
Got roasted for "I deleted my coworker's unit test because I thought it was a bad test." The blue AI ranted at me about never ever deleting tests, and the green AI failed to absolve me because of an error. I'm sure it's a legitimate error but it looked like the green AI managed to find a passive aggressive way to express disapproval!
sossles··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell
The game Twenty that I posted on here many years ago as a ShowHN[0] post took off from that very post and is still earning in that ballpark. I keep trying to find more time to work on it and other projects too, but somehow as my kids have gotten older and my spare time in the evenings gets shorter, I haven't managed it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543005

sossles··on 8880 Super Car (2010)
As a kid I always wanted the 8860 set: http://www.technicopedia.com/8860.html. It was well beyond the means of my family at time, and I had almost forgotten it existed until I discovered my wife's family had it in their Lego stash and thus I had a chance to live out my childhood again.

Building the 8860 made me realise how much Lego instructions have improved, as every step is basically a game of spot-the-difference trying to work out what pieces have been added. Not so bad for a small build, but in these complex builds it's a long process, especially when all the parts have been mixed into a larger collection of bits.

sossles··on Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)
Dick Smith Electronics was a huge part of my childhood. The "Fun Way" electronics books (written by Dick himself) was fascinating to me and the VZ-300 computer they sold was how I got into computers as a kid. It was great to discover as an adult that Dick himself was also such an amazing character.
sossles··on Stop spending so much time being trolled by billionaire corps
This is an inevitable side effect of people's tendencies to over-subscribe to information sources. Once it's normal to try and follow 200+ people on Twitter, you're in need of an algorithm to prioritise content, and from there it's an easy side-step to inserting other content you haven't asked for.

Unfortunately even when you don't follow 200 people on Twitter, you're still subject to the same design principles.

sossles··on MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows
Same here. The website is bizarrely uninformative. A Windows logo, but it's called MacType with a Mac-style download button, with zero explanation as to what the product actually does. The tagline "the way texts should be" is terrible English and it looks blurry on my screen, so the idea that this is some kind of improved font rendering is undermined.
sossles··on New in Git: switch and restore
If a glove comes into contact with a spinning blade, there is a good chance it will pull the rest of the glove, and the hand within it, right into the path of the blade.
sossles··on Fastly Outage
I assume "Guru Mediation" is supposed to be "Guru Meditation", a reference to the way AmigaOS used to describe system failures.
sossles··on Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
I've read a few older books with my kids that contained mildly questionable things, like a boy saying that girls can't do certain things, but I much prefer having that awkward conversation about how things used to be, over tossing it all out and pretending things were never any different.
sossles··on YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
It's easy to disbelieve what you read on the internet when it's one voice in a thousand. But increasingly, all thousand voices are telling you what you want to hear.
sossles··on 7GUIs
True for most, but it wouldn't be so great on the spreadsheet one due to the data structures involved. c# would be my pick.
sossles··on Google: Open Letter to Australians
I imagine Google would rather continue to serve up those search results if possible. And if they did omit the search results their argument that they treat content fairly falls apart.
sossles··on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
I'm no social butterfly but I feel the same way. Working in an office gives me regular light social contact that would be very tiring to get otherwise.
sossles··on The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
I've always wondered: Does encouraging women to pursue STEM subjects send the subconscious message that it isn't something they are naturally suited to? Ironically having the opposite effect?
sossles··on Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone
It also checks you're looking at the screen which is pretty neat (though it's got a pretty wide margin for error).
sossles··on Show HN: 2048.cpp – Play 2048 in directly your terminal
Ok, now I'm tempted to rewrite Twenty to work in the terminal. It's already c++!
sossles··on Taking Children Seriously
The article makes many good points but (as many others have noted) it really misses the mark on rules and obedience. Rules and obedience are an essential abstraction to allow larger organisations of people to function and interoperate. The rules aren't always the best for each individual at every time, but overall they help things run smoothly. There is always some kind of consequence for not following them.

To understand (and eventually change) a system you always starts with a high level acceptance of the 'rules' and drill down from there. Why shouldn't children also be taught to operate on that basis?

Say they want to question the 'rule' about having 3 meals a day. That's fine, drill down into why and maybe change it. Maybe bed-time is unfair, perhaps the 8yo doesn't want to go to bed at the same time as the 5yo. It should be ok to challenge these things to an extent, but at the end of the day someone needs to make things run smoothly for everyone, and that's the parents' job. Rules (with an expectation of obedience) are how they do that.

sossles··on Savitech USB audio drivers install a new root CA certificate
That works on phones because app developers desperately want their (typically) free app to be installed and permissions is one thing that turns people away, so they try to minimise permission requests. Additionally, apps (at least on iOS) are expected to work even when some permissions are refused (eg. camera access for a shopping list app) so the permission request is often one you can genuinely say "no" to.

But device drivers for a desktop machine? The user has paid good money for that device and are going to grant every permission they need to get it working. Asking for each permission individually is just noise.

sossles··on Essential Phone, available now
> To say that a person's phone choice defines them in any sort of meaningful way is extremely silly to me.

For someone buying a mainstream product like a Samsung or Apple phone, I'd agree that it doesn't mean very much. To someone buying a niche product like this though, it definitely says something about the person's values.

sossles··on Ask HN: $1k+ side projecters, what was the best thing you did to market it?
That's on Android, and maybe half that again on iOS. It varies a little, but it's $500-$1000 a month at the moment (even split between iOS and Android). I'm pretty sure I could do better but I could never bring myself to do heavy monetisation. I hate aggressive IAPs, for example.
sossles··on Ask HN: $1k+ side projecters, what was the best thing you did to market it?
My web/mobile game called Twenty (http://twenty.frenchguys.net/play) blew up when I put it on hackernews.

But before and even after that, emails to game review sites were universally ignored (with Rock Paper Shotgun as the one exception). Even the Ars Technica guy who proclaimed it as his "latest obsession" wouldn't reply to an email.

I understand these people are inundated with emails, but I was still a little surprised.

sossles··on Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store
They are dependent on developers as a whole, but not on any individual developers (with perhaps a few exceptions).
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