Hacker News Reader

toast42on I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple

"I’m here to save you some time and energy by telling you that the distro you pick doesn’t matter that much. "

That's the point I stopped reading.

toast42on ‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect

> my productivity is easily 5-10x what it was before

How are you measuring this? Those numbers seem incredulous.

toast42on John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

https://www.coindesk.com/tesla-sold-bitcoin-in-q1-for-procee...

This was very easy to find, and makes me question your position that you weren't aware of it.

toast42on Stripe Tax

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar

toast42on No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

Looks like they lost all their possessions in an apartment fire: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

toast42on Ask HN: Best Recipe Search Engine?

How can I browse the recipes?

toast42on Iconoclast: a Gothic/Cyberpunk MUD RPG, Online Since 1996

Plug for my favorite MUD, even if I haven't played in years: https://www.aardwolf.com/

toast42on Hard Lessons in Living Off the Grid

> He and Sokchea scaled back their lives to live within their solar-powered means — ditching their toaster and microwave, giving up laundry on cloudy days when their batteries wouldn’t be able to recharge.

I read this as they completely got rid of their toaster and microwave. Otherwise I think it would read "giving up their toaster, microwave and laundry on cloudy days".

toast42on IPv6 Adoption

The Google Fiber router doesn't support IPv6 port forwarding. That was a frustrating afternoon and a bit of a surprise to learn.

toast42on Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

As a follow-up to this question, imagine a job where a significant portion of time is spent waiting on a computer (rendering animations, code compiling, etc).

Two contractors are hired, one with a modern laptop and the other with a 10 year old machine. The older machine takes at least twice as long to process the work.

Is it A) ethical to bill for time spent waiting for the machine to process and B) ethical to use the older machine? Assume the contractor using the older machine is using the best equipment currently available to them.

toast42on Ask HN: Why are credit card chip readers so slow?

Planet Money did a story on this last year.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/13/474135422/episo...

toast42on Removing Home Internet Is the Most Productive Thing I've Done

I'm having a similar experience travelling through Melbourne as almost all of my internet access is metered. My mobile plan has 3GB/month and is almost my sole source of internet.

I just discovered the public library which is great for getting work done, but I have to leave my room to get there. Most cafes either don't have wifi or impose a time limit w/ a user/pass login (so changing mac address won't defeat it).

I'm mostly finding it makes me more productive, though it's sometimes frustrating if I need to search for a quick Stack Overflow answer.

toast42on How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

It will be interesting to see if self-driving cars lead to parents being more comfortable with their children exploring.

toast42on Ruining the Magic of Magento's Encryption Library

If it were true open source I think the project would get a lot more contributions. The enterprise edition, with the "best" features, is very much not free.

toast42on How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games

> When you say "there's nothing innovative about it" regarding hearthstone, you could say that about several of the games Blizzard has made.

This makes them good at making money, not necessarily good at making games. I personally see WoW as the beginning of Blizzard's decent. I can't argue that it made a boatload of money though, or that millions of people love it.

As for how it's a bad thing, Blizzard used to develop some seminal games in the RTS genre. These games showed significant innovation and shaped the genre (though they didn't invent it). Compare that to their current lineup of rehashed and cloned games. I don't see the same level of innovation anywhere.

I think Blizzard is so focused on profits at this point that monetization is the primary concern of any new game. It's just my personal, anecdotal opinion but it's also the reason I don't buy Blizzard games at release anymore.

toast42on How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games

That is certainly a good sign. I played in the beta and decided it wasn't for me, so maybe I owe it another chance!

toast42on How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games

I'm fairly certain that D3 was originally built around the auction house. They started with a solid stream of monetization and then built a game around that.

toast42on How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games

> HOTS is good. Just hasn't taken off.

It's good but it's not great. League of Legends and Dota2 are both superior games in just about every way. Honestly Blizzard is just really late to the table with this one, which is surprising seeing as how MOBAs started in War3.

> Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun.

Hearthstone is Magic: The Gathering with most of the pain points removed. I'm not saying it isn't fun or commercially successful, but there's nothing innovative about it. MtG never produced a viable online game, so Blizzard did.

> Starcraft 2 is okay. > Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark

I agree with both statements. SC2 will never be as popular as Brood Wars, and they seem to be struggling with game balance a lot more. D3 completely missed the mark with the auction house.

What I see happening to Blizzard is a focus on micro transactions, with gameplay coming second. I think this article accurately summarizes their history, but ignores recent changes to their company that paint a different picture going forward. I'm not expecting SC3 (should it ever happen) to be as amazing as SC1, and I certainly won't be happy to pay $1 each time I run out of pylons.

toast42on Replace a running Debian installation by Arch remotely over ssh

Last command:

reboot # And pray it'll boot.

toast42on Slackcat – Pipe command output to Slack from your terminal

Ya! I mean, when would it ever be useful to share a log file from your server with your team?

toast42on PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lower power than Nvidia GTX

Assuming the claims are correct (5x performance, 10x less power), what's stopping this from going mainstream?

toast42on So, I tried Dwolla

I use Dwolla to transfer less than $500 every month for splitting rent, utilities, etc. I've never once had a problem, they're just kind of slow sometimes.