Hacker News Reader

trympeton Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

While I appreciate the build quality and ruggedness of the thinkpads, I’d take the bigger trackpad and better screen of the XPS/precision any day. Or, maybe my employer screwed me by giving a shitty thinkpad SKU (it has a 1080p TN panel ffs)..

trympeton Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

> you can run a useful model on flagship phones today

How?

trympeton Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

Yikes, thanks. Enjoy this feature while it lasts, I guess. EWS is getting nuked.

trympeton Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

Still is

trympeton Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

How do you know Thunderbird is using EWS, not MAPI? MAPI is not going away any time soon.

trympeton ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones

lol spot the fed

trympeton How do you quote a passage that has used '[sic]' mistakenly?

Incidentally, I discovered this article while learning what '[sic]' even means.

"The typical editorial usage of sic is to inform the reader that any errors in a quotation did not arise from editorial errors in the transcription, but are intentionally reproduced as they appear in the original source being quoted", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

trympeton Getting AI to write good SQL

Parent is implying that we're still playing the same game.

trympeton After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth

I’m not much of a YouTuber shill, however, I feel this crowd would enjoy Scott Manley’s video [1] on the subject

[1] - https://youtu.be/vGQgmnQ1FtA?si=sylxAkAKj-kT5fUq

trympeton Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

This is also known as capability-based access control. It was implemented in Project Midori [1] — Microsoft’s flopped managed microkernel OS

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

trympeton Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

I recently had the pleasure of using XSLT after never having seen it before. I used it to transform a huge 130K line XML manifest with MAPI property metadata into C# source code. It was so simple, readable, and intuitive to use.

trympeton Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

> Had they made it open source

That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows

trympeton Microsoft offered FFmpeg small one-time payment instead of support contract

Microsoft eats its own dog food and refers to internal “alpha testers” as customers.

trympeton Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

Ah yes, you're right. We should be thanking Apple for restricting user choice...

trympeton Tour of new custom M1 macOS runners racks with Christina Warren [video]

> I got the impression that the guide didn't know anything about what they were talking about w.r.t internals or how it's used

I got the same impression, and I think it's a fair critique of the video and the presenter. OP simply acknolwedged that unconcious bias may be affecting their judgement, for better or for worse.

trympeton Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/regulatory/offe...

https://servicetrust.microsoft.com/ViewPage/AllDocuments

trympeton Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service

You don't have to take their word for it. See the SOC audit reports for yourself:

https://servicetrust.microsoft.com/DocumentPage/6ee23fc7-20d...

trympeton Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

At big tech companies, "writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does" is not really a good, representative performance measure. Often times, you will be solving problems across multiple domains, outside of your area of expertise. You have to take on the role of PM, data scientist, SWE, researcher, etc.

Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. It is expected that you re-acclimatize and learn quickly. Giving you a take-home test to write some CRUD app isn't necessarily sampling those same attributes.

p.s.: also not a fan of classical algorithm style interviews. Clearly, they also have a bias.

trympeton Bitwarden Heist – How to break into password vaults without using passwords

> Windows registry is in itself insecure. Applications can't own perms to their own entries.

I think registry entries support DACLs, and permissions can be restricted to SIDs or user accounts. I have no first-hand experience with this though; YMMV.

> The easy and expected fix being that applications get perms for their own folder, rejecting 3rd party by default.

Back in Windows 8, they launched an app model called UWP or something which does exactly this. Met with luke warm reception from the industry because (you guessed it!) back compat.

trympeton Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

My penis enlargement pill newsletter isn't showing up in my customers' inboxes. I could have been a penis-enlargement millionare if it wasn't for your stupid spam filter. What to do?

trympeton Ubuntu squeezes more performance than Windows 11 on new AMD Zen 4 Threadripper

You may want to give dev drive a try https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

trympeton Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

You should try the Teams preview. Much better in terms of resource usage. https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/new-microsoft-teams/

trympeton Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

I've used Power Automate in the past to create bots. Worked fairly well.

trympeton How to pass a first-round interview

The half-day loop is probably referring to FAANG-style interviews where you have an initial screener (30 mins) and 4-5 subsequent interviews (around 30 mins each).

trympeton YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

Exactly this. Why do so many people feel entitled to free stuff at the operator's expense? It boggles the mind.

trympeton Kill Siri (2022)

You are correct. Maybe I'm missing the point, but everything you mentioned is still applicable even when the data is encrypted.

trympeton Kill Siri (2022)

> not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks.

They can already protect themselves by using pseudonymous IDs, and by not storing SSN and full names on the same system/network as your browsing history.

I'm struggling to come up with a general example where an adversary would be prevented from accessing the data if they had already compromized the network, so to me, it's just obfuscation with extra steps. Maybe if an adversary, by some miracle, had a non-root shell in database server, but somehow did not have read-permission on the crypto store ???

Physical theft of drives is a valid argument, but even that is a weak one. The data center facilities are very secure.

trympeton Kill Siri (2022)

I am willing to bet my left nut that they don't encrypt common metadata and telemetry at rest.

trympeton Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

Good analysis.

> 5. Hardware accelerated GUI initiation vs 'dump everything to frame buffer in kernel GUI32 library'

Even on my fast workstation, this seems to account for most of the percieved startup latency in modern, well-written GUI applications. The Nvidia drivers seem to do this stupid signature check every time a d3d11 device is created..

trympeton Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

What's so bad about Scala? I've only used it for hobby projects myself.