Hacker News Reader

spogbiperon US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

interesting video I recently watched about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJcyDOjFLwQ

tl;dw - They say Vegas visitor numbers are down, but profits are actually up. This is because the tourism industry there has refocused on higher end clientele

spogbiperon Google ends its 30 percent app store fee and welcomes third-party app stores

Now instead of using the excuse that "Apple does it too" they can use the excuse "Apple does it even worse"

spogbiperon Emails to Outlook.com rejected due to a fault or overzealous blocking rules

outlook.com and Office 365 are very different beasts. with the latter problems are more often something (mis)configured by the customer/administrator of the 365 account rather than microsoft themselves, and there are steps the customer can take to work around the issue. With outlook.com there is nothing the recipient can do.

spogbiperon MacBook Neo

https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...

this, basically

spogbiperon MacBook Neo

true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still ~2x the price and lacks the management tools that Google Classroom provides

spogbiperon MacBook Neo

its quite common for schools to issue windows laptops to staff (who use MS 365) and chromebooks to students (who use Google Classroom). The windows laptops also have no problem with google classroom of course.

spogbiperon PL/0

I think it started with IBM: System/360 and /370, PS/2, OS/2, PL/I

And then Gary Kildall also seemed to like it with CP/M and PL/M, but those were after IBM had used it and I'd guess Gary was just copying IBM.

Between just those two influences you cover a huge portion of the mainframe and micro computer worlds during the 60s-80s

spogbiperon Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

Its not the basic mail and calendar functionality that drives large business to Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google). It's really not anything that a normal user would see in an average role.

Email in a large organization requires things like central management, compliance with retention policies and other regulations, data loss prevention, encryption standards, auditing and ediscovery capabilities, etc.

spogbiperon I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

what is the difference between "ponder" and "generate"? the number of iterations?

spogbiperon I’m joining OpenAI

this is such a weird take to me. every piece of evidence I've seen shows that AI is quickly becoming better at writing code, debugging, finding security issues. my own experience, benchmarks, studies, new articles.. everything points to progress

spogbiperon LinkedIn Is Down

MoltedIn appears to be up

spogbiperon Playing Board Games with Deep Convolutional Neural Network on 8bit Motorola 6809

I learned assembly on the 6809 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Much nicer than x86, which pretty much convinced me never to do assembly again

spogbiperon Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app

I think it depends on the laws controlling Apple where you live

spogbiperon Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse

The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.

spogbiperon The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

maybe that's why its popular in the US? for most of this country the 0-100 range works quite well to describe the normal range of outdoor temperature. we seem to like 0-100 ranges, for instance speed in MPH works out nicely.. "over 100 MPH!" is a common expression for extreme speed drivers. school grades are often a value out of 100, etc. which makes you wonder why we don't prefer metric lol

spogbiperon The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

below zero days are really really crazy cold and above 100 days are really really crazy hot. I don't think the fact that things occasionally exceed the 100 point "normal" range makes it less useful, if anything the out of bounds numbers emphasize the severity of the temperature. it's common where I grew up in the midwest US to hear "wow its going to be BELOW ZERO" as a way to express extreme cold

spogbiperon RCS for Business

A bit different in that RCS is available on both iOS and Android (and I guess theoretically other platforms?) while iMessage is strictly Apple devices

spogbiperon Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

the change is more subtle than I expected but this does seem like a step in the wrong direction

a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.

spogbiperon How I learned everything I know about programming

I'd like to think that we all learned everything we know about programming

spogbiperon Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers

i always heard "no high, no lows, must be bose"

spogbiperon Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died

(audio only) interview with Stewart that I enjoyed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQSWeJUjy-k

skip to 2:30ish to bypass the podcast's nonsense

i had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times, truly a nice guy with a passion for sharing computing with everyone

spogbiperon Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

It goes beyond the file formats. There is an entire ecosystem of industry specific extensions and plugins that are heavily used in law and accounting firms. These only work with MS office and they are critical to how many businesses operate.

spogbiperon Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

> How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!?

There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint

spogbiperon IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

[flagged]

spogbiperon Why is there no Uber for plumbing/HVAC? (and why there ought to be)

task rabbit is sort of uber for a lot of non driving things, many house repair/handyman people available. not sure if they go all the way to major things like hvac

spogbiperon iPhone Pocket

if women actually bought clothes with pockets, vendors would sell them. there is no secret conspiracy against pockets for women

spogbiperon iPhone Pocket

this voids the warranty

spogbiperon Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law

i'm one of the Americans. went to South america for a dental procedure that was 12k in the US, 2.5k there. very modern facilities, they had some better tech than my american dentist. if you can speak a bit of spanish, i highly recommend looking into it for expensive dental stuff.

spogbiperon It's the “hardware”, stupid

There is some value to the idea as Apple was a single manufacture with a somewhat high end image vs Android being on every random company, some who were decidedly budget/low end. So we seem some real tacky advertising for Android devices vs more polished ads for iPhone. But there is more to the story than just this factor

spogbiperon It's the “hardware”, stupid

there were also previous mobile devices with "regular" http/s browsers that also really sucked