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userbinatoron Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections

The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”

What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!

Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.

userbinatoron Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections

That was the most "WTF?" in the article. No one working there thought about the nonsensicalness of calling for medical aid for someone who was supposed to be killed?

userbinatoron Fuck Android Developer Verification Program

A decade ago, I made a joke comment to a friend that you were soon going to need a carry permit to operate a compiler.

Richard Stallman's Right to Read (1997) made a similar observation.

userbinatoron Show HN: Yantra – an LALR(1) parser generator for C++

It's a little surprising to see new parser generators being written, long after the vast majority of compilers have already settled on recursive descent / precedence climbing (including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913192 , which is currently nearby on the front page.)

userbinatoron Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

It's what happens when activists take over science.

userbinatoron When did Google get so weird?

Bing was never great, but Google has gotten so much worse in the past year or so (ironically, the biggest fall was shortly after they started requiring JS around a year ago) that it's now the better choice. Yahoo is another one I've started using instead.

userbinatoron When did Google get so weird?

It's weird to read this comment not long after having experienced Google giving zero results for a search, and then finding what I wanted on Bing.

userbinatoron Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

I've experienced the same problem with newer car headlights, which despite being regulated are now far too bright and concentrated, creating a very bright and very dark region with a sharp line between them instead of the dimmer but more diffuse gradual cutoff they used to have. Eyes have dark adaptation so you can see farther with the latter, and it's also better for oncoming traffic.

userbinatoron Video CDs Break Windows Explorer

Seeing all the AI-assisted RE projects that have appeared recently, that was my thought too.

...and despite MS having their own AI, one which many here have said their employees are required to use, and yet bugs like this remain unfixed, is a good example of why AI isn't replacing any developers. Ultimately a human has to care enough to even point the AI at the problem.

userbinatoron Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

other than to feel connection to another human

With AI, instead you feel a connection to the sum of all humanity.

userbinatoron Video CDs Break Windows Explorer

That odd behaviour and "can't even do a safe restart" state sounds very familiar to those who have used Win9x; and there, it's usually the result of some memory corruption in the kernel.

The bug first appeared with the monthly updates 2023-03 (KB5023706) for Windows 11 and 2023-04 (KB5025221) for Windows 10. The initial releases of Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2 with no updates do not have this bug

...and everything older likely doesn't either, especially from the time when VCDs were far more commonly used.

Pulling the files off (and ignoring errors, the way Windows does) loses that.

I suspect this might be the clue; perhaps some overzealous "security scan" tool (or these days, AI) flagged a "bug" in the error handling path, and something was done to appease it, but created this other subtle bug.

userbinatoron Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

A human did --- just indirectly, in the same way as using a compiler or assembler instead of writing each byte by hand.

userbinatoron C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

On x86-64, you need an extra prefix to do 64-bit operations (while 64-bit addressing is the default), so it's a question of "are you sure you need the 64 bits and 32 isn't enough?"

userbinatoron Flip Fluid on Flip Dots

Care to post a rebuttal? This is a standard practice. I've scavenged many parts this way.

userbinatoron Flip Fluid on Flip Dots

The dots are so delicate, with tiny magnet wires and soft plastic that can melt, that it has to be done very carefully. Even with the very best desoldering equipment it would take forever.

Put a hot air gun on the back of the board, and they'll either just drop out or do so with a small poke of the pins.

userbinatoron OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields

"stealing"

Everything is a derivative work.

It's great to see the delusion of Imaginary Property vanishing.

userbinatoron How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC

Look at how many browser exploits need JS, and how many don't. The latter tend to be far more memorable too, specifically for that reason.

JS is a huge attack surface. It's better if it isn't used where it isn't actually needed.

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

and start typing the last sentence you read while it's still fresh in your memory

Double hell no. The majority of the time it's a log file with lots of repetitive lines, and I'm definitely NOT going to remember exactly the line, especially after the disruption of accidentally jumping somewhere unexpected.

userbinatoron Two-tier encryption in the UK

This predates the current one.

userbinatoron Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

True revolution in UX will come from making customisation accessible

...like it was back in the days when Windows actually had a very customisable UI[1], and then the "skinnable" UIs of the early 2000s (most of which were extremely gaudy, but then again, maybe that was what the majority of the population wanted.) Now it has devolved into little more than this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experience/perso...

[1] and one of the included color schemes was indeed crazy, but a good demonstration of what was available: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247605

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

Upon closer inspection, you're right about the playing field; but the preference and high score dialogs are made of entirely standard Win32 controls.

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

unless the app is a game

...and even if the app is a game, it can still make great use of Win32 controls creatively. Minesweeper is one example that comes with Windows, and I remember plenty of other casual (non-3d) games in the 90s/early 2000s making use of buttons, both ownerdrawn and stock, likely to avoid having to write their own hit-testing code.

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadays

Pure Win32 still works, and is the most efficient and consistent.

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.

The frameworks that actually wrap a Win32 scrollbar are the ones doing it right; the ones that (badly) reinvent a scrollbar are the ones to avoid. The real problem in this case isn't frameworks, but how they make use of the platform capabilities.

userbinatoron A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

Oh hell no. If you think "scroll here" is a sane default, you haven't experienced the pain of jumping possibly thousands of lines in a long document with an accidental click, and no easy way to go back to where you were.

userbinatoron ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system

GPUs have been using a 256MB window since they started coming with 256MB of VRAM, as it would otherwise be a pointless waste of address space to have a window larger than the actual amount of VRAM. Previously, they would have a window exactly equal to the size of VRAM (likely rounded up to the next power of 2.)

userbinatoron ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system

The last time I looked at Coreboot it didn't have any configuration UI at all ("you have to set the options and recompile/reflash" was the answer I got), which basically makes it next to useless for a regular PC... and apparently it still doesn't. They've already done the hard work of RE'ing and all the hardware-specific stuff; how hard can it be to at least have a simple setup menu? Hopefully someone vibecodes (vibeports?) one in the next little while.

(Incidentally this is also one of my gripes with the Intel Macs, wanting to put Linux on one but having zero configurability pre-OS is a huge pain. Meanwhile a standard PC BIOS with the equivalent hardware has plenty of options. Maybe I'll get around to (vibe)porting a regular BIOS to mine...)

userbinatoron Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone

Probably more like "some jobs are just very robotic". CSRs aren't paid to think for themselves, but rather to follow a script. I suspect that human would behave a lot more like a human outside of work.

userbinatoron ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system

These days you might be able to just point an AI at the original BIOS and tell it what you need done, instead of attempting to install a complete rewrite like Coreboot (which comes with its own limitations, the biggest one being that only a rather small subset of mobos are actually supported.)

userbinatoron People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes

It would be fascinating if someone could live a long life despite smoking so much

Genetic variation probably has a bigger role than we'd like to admit. There are definitely outliers. I know smokers who lived into their 90s, and non-smokers who died much younger. The sibling comment says they lived into their 70s, which is probably average.

...and then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_life...

Calment continued smoking in her elderly years until she was 117