Hacker News Reader

vitovitoon Ask HN: What's the hardest part of validating a new idea?

I used to tell founders that if they can't figure out how to find the right people to get feedback from early, they're also not going to be able to find the right people to sell to later.

The logistics are the same at either end of the process.

If they expect to hire a salesperson once they have a product, why not hire a research panel vendor or a firm like GLG to get validation?

If they want to own their sales and customer acquisition channels once they have a product, they have to figure out how to build an audience to get validation.

Is it a dark art of hustle and luck, or is it just marketing, and most founders don't want to do that?

The only difference is what you're selling, but the process is equivalent.

vitovitoon Ask HN: How do I unlock the Activation Lock on my M1 MacBook?

If you still have your proof of purchase (if you bought it from Apple directly, they should also have it), you can take your receipt and the laptop to an Apple Store and they'll remove the activation lock. They may wipe the machine in the process, I don't recall.

(We had some company iPhones in our device lab, not on MDM, and people would attach them to their personal accounts, so this was an occasional hassle.)

vitovitoon Ask HN: Where can you find old NetBSD packages?

Look for copies of physical distributions? The Internet Archive has ISOs from 1.5.2: https://archive.org/details/netbsd-1.5.2

vitovitoon Board: New game console recognizes physical pieces, with an open SDK

Not the OP, but in the TechCrunch Disrupt launch, founder Brynn Putnam says, "capacitive material manufactured into the pieces."

If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.

There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)

I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...

vitovitoon Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

All of vintage computer emulators on the Internet Archive owe a tip of the hat to the Canon Cat emulation, because that was the computer that started me on automating the original cross-compilation infrastructure.

Archived Twitter thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1150798839294627842.html

Gist with links to the actual scripts behind the scenes: https://gist.github.com/vitorio/4e5d8de0db5c56b6816b95817c20...

vitovitoon Any info on dock connector of the original Apple iBook G3 "Clamsheel"?

I don't see that anyone's ever done the work. Disassemble it, trace the contacts, apply increasing amounts of current?

In the underside photo here, it's CP1 and CP2: https://davidigreen.com/blog/ibook-g3-clamshell-logic-board-...

vitovitoon Any info on dock connector of the original Apple iBook G3 "Clamsheel"?

Not a docking connector: charging contacts.

See page 29 of the service manual here: http://www.applerepairmanuals.com/the_manuals_are_in_here/iB...

(No third-party charger that used them was ever released AFAICT.)

vitovitoon Ask HN: Isn't there a simpler way to run LLMs / models locally?

https://jan.ai/

https://anythingllm.com/

https://cherry-ai.com/

vitovitoon Query Apple's FindMy network with Python

I ended up using Shortcuts to publish a set of screenshots from an always-on Mac every 10 minutes or so for a set of shared, family AirTags: http://vitor.io/android-airtags

I couldn't reliably get iOS to do the same, and my tests of an Android-compatible tag found it was detected much less often than an AirTag riding along with it.

vitovitoon Palmtop 2024

I don't use it as a daily driver any more (I did for a bit while traveling, for obvious reasons), but it's been very useful as bench computer. Doesn't take up as much room as a laptop on a desk, has both a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0 port for serial consoles and data transfers, is proper x86 so I don't have issues with running proprietary flashers on it. I think it's running 18.04 right now because I needed to flash an old Jetson board.

vitovitoon Palmtop 2024

My notes on a previous generation version of the machine: http://vitor.io/notes-7-inch-mini-laptop

I haven't tried a new OS version since 22.10, I'll have to see if audio and touchscreen support have finally resolved on this one, too.

vitovitoon Diatom Arrangements

I salvaged a museum kiosk about diatoms and emulated it at the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/diatom_exhibit

34 diatoms can be browsed using the left and right arrows in the UI. The diatoms of Yellowstone Lake can also be viewed in a separate section by clicking the link in the lower right.

vitovitoon Ask HN: Can you make virtual phone numbers at scale?

There's only a fixed amount of phone numbers, but you can gate the person behind a single number by an extension, just like businesses do.

Give out your regular number, and generate a unique extension for each business or individual.

Have an IVR, bot, or service answer the number. "Hi, you've reached blakeburch, if you have an extension number, please dial it now." Valid extensions get routed to you, invalid or expired ones go to voicemail.

vitovitoon Anyone Keep MinocaOS Toolchains?

You may have luck running the macOS binaries on Linux using Darling: https://github.com/darlinghq/darling or in a Darwin or macOS VM?

vitovitoon Anyone Keep MinocaOS Toolchains?

The pre-built toolchains were there, but the readme in their GitHub states you can still build the toolchains yourself using this repo: https://gitlab.com/minoca/third-party and possibly some things especially for Windows using this repo: https://gitlab.com/minoca/tools

(Neither of those are mirrored on their GitHub.)

That said, the Wayback Machine has one of the prebuilt toolchains, for macOS, mirrored here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170412065030if_/http://www.min...

Other downloads in the Wayback Machine can be seen here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.minocacorp.com/down...*

vitovitoon To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees (2009)

Irrespective of the actual post content, I've dug up a proper source for the title quote and added it to Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Val%C3%A9ry#Degas_Danse_D...

It is Paul Valery, but per Adrian Kohn's A Way to Look at Things by Not Forgetting Their Names, Valery may be (intentionally?) misreading Blaise Pascal just to get a jibe in. See footnote 3, bottom of page 11: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674801

vitovitoon Ask HN: What's your favorite Underrated Anime that no one talks about?

Redline

vitovitoon Ask HN: How to Optimize a Delivery Route?

This is a geospatial analysis or geographic information systems (GIS) problem. Applications like ESRI ArcGIS on the commercial side, QGIS or GRASS on the open source side, PostGIS with something like pgRouting on the DB side.

vitovitoon Ask HN: 4chan Archives Pre-2008?

https://archive.org/details/4chan_threads_archive_10_billion

"This is a text-only compilation of 4chan threads, primarily from the years 2006-2008. The total unique threads in this collection is roughly 10 million."

vitovitoon Ask HN: How to MITM SD-Card?

If the relative reliability of the SD card is an underlying cause (e.g. tons of writes wearing them out early causing corruption) you might also consider eMMC chips on SD card adapters. A discussion here: https://jamesachambers.com/emmc-to-sd-card-adapters-explaine...

vitovitoon I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

You can look into accessibility APIs, or see how Arbtt does its rule-based metadata tracking: https://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/effective-use.html#...

vitovitoon I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

Savant Recall demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_RtbBaWIG8

Original Savant source? https://bitbucket.org/theluxury/savant/src/master/

Videos of how the later Atlas Recall worked: https://www.youtube.com/@atlasinformatics3316/videos

vitovitoon Tell HN: We should snapshot a mostly AI output free version of the web

2024 might already be too late, since this sentiment has been shared since at least 2021:

2021: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1376304266667651078

2022: https://twitter.com/william_g_ray/status/1583574265513017344

2022: https://twitter.com/mtrc/status/1599725875280257024

Common Crawl and the Internet Archive crawls are probably the two most ready sources for this, you just have to define where you want to draw the line.

Common Crawl's first crawl of 2020 contains 3.1B pages, and is around 100TB: https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/inde... with their previous and subsequent crawls listed in the dropdown here: https://commoncrawl.org/overview

Internet Archive's crawls are here: https://archive.org/details/web organized by source. Wide Crawl 18 is from mid-2021 and is 68.5TB: https://archive.org/details/wide00018. Wide Crawl 17 was from late 2018 and is 644.4TB: https://archive.org/details/wide00017

vitovitoon I wrote a macOS app to save the movements of your own AirTags and iPhones

An open-source equivalent: https://github.com/fjxmlzn/FindMyHistory

vitovitoon Show HN: Rem: Remember Everything (open source)

AMF is AMD's equivalent to NVENC. I think if you aren't running an AMD card, you won't have the necessary libraries?

vitovitoon "Plotto": Generating Offensive Stories Since 1928 (2018)

It has!

vitovitoon "Plotto": Generating Offensive Stories Since 1928 (2018)

What a great analysis and considered outcome, and love the copious references to related work.

It's also nice to see the IA copy built upon; I donated that 1928 edition of Plotto to the Internet Archive in 2012: http://vitor.io/its-a-gift-never-lend-books (also visible in the "sponsor" record in IA metadata).

vitovitoon .BOT, a new extension launched by Amazon Registry

What's new is the removal of restrictions on registering domains. Previously, you had to go through a custom automated process to verify that the domain was being registered for and used by a bot.

vitovitoon Dolphin: A Cellular Voice Based Internet Shutdown Resistance System

PoC source code: https://github.com/pi-yush/Dolphin-code

vitovitoon A quick look back at when Microsoft made an interactive Barney toy

This looks like the relevant patent for it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6281939B1/en "Method and apparatus for decoding data encoded in the horizontal overscan portion of a video signal"