Hacker News Reader

Causality1on Fans pour funding into ‘The Chosen’

Give it another read. He gets pissed off all the time and for the most bizarre reasons, like the time some people he was teaching don't understand his parable and he's asked why he teaches in parables if people have trouble understanding them and he throws a shit-fit.

Causality1on Apple broke up with me

Companies should be required to divulge the exact reasons for account termination as well as all internal communications related to that termination.

Causality1on Fans pour funding into ‘The Chosen’

Does the grit extend to Jesus himself? That is to say, do we get the Zen monk-style Jesus from modern Western media or do we get the anger-issues Jesus from the Bible?

Causality1on Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

Not broken perhaps, but I regularly click a link to a product and get a page about a totally different product.

Causality1on Is the big tech era ending?

We're just now noticing the edge of the cliff rapidly passing eye level as we fall. Every time tech gets easier, its users get more ignorant. Microsoft can take a shit in our mouths with Windows 11 because the average Windows 11 user doesn't even know what an operating system is, let alone that they can change to a different one. Facebook and YouTube can do whatever they want because their only competitors are even more toxic than they are.

Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?

Causality1on Is the big tech era ending?

Not local, but small and competitive was nice. Electronics were so much more fun twenty years ago. Nowadays a company is a bold risk-taker if their glass sandwich has an extra button on top.

Causality1on YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

Imagine the number of dead PCs if that Verge video hadn't been riddled with dislikes.

Causality1on [dead]

What I find frustrating is that fifty years from now, no matter how bad it does or does not get, people will look back with disbelief at how we failed to implement what will seem to them the obvious solutions.

Causality1on Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

Brilliant? As I recall it has light bleed issues and doesn't even let you adjust the color balance.

Causality1on Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

I tried that, but it makes fullscreen applications like games behave very oddly and inconsistently and required constant fiddling.

Causality1on Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

Amen. I'm pretty sure 7 is the last Windows ill ever feel happy about installing.

Causality1on Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

I think anti-profiteering laws could be helpful. If you bought land and built a house and want to live in a quiet neighborhood until you die, fine. But maybe if you vote against expanded housing you don't get to sell your house for more than you paid for it, or maybe don't get to sell it at all while you're alive.

Separating the homesteaders from the investors would do a lot of good.

Causality1on Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

There are some 30 and 32 inch 2560x1600 monitors, such as from Dell, but they're mostly geared toward offices and artists and have terrible input latency and response times.

Causality1on Movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand

I would use subtitles all the time if it didn't ruin dramatic and comedic timing. I often find myself wishing movies and video games had "proper nouns only" subtitles.

Causality1on Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

I don't understand why 3:2 and 16:10 have taken over the mobile space but if I want one for my desktop my choices are 1920x1200 or a thirty inch, thousand dollar monstrosity with bad response times.

Causality1on Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

Vista was fine except for all the OEMs installing it on $300 Office Depot shitboxes. I still miss being able to have My Computer as a menu across the top of my desktop.

Causality1on Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

I'm convinced there's an alternate universe where Windows 9 brought all the improvements of Windows 10 without treating the user like a contemptible moron.

Causality1on 50 years of eBooks: 1971-2021

I have to say, learning I could download books off the internet and read them on my Palm was a transformative experience as a child.

Causality1on Pixel sent to Google for replacement. They used it to post wife's nudes online

This should be a reminder to the rest of us that IT and technicians are humans with human vices, and a large fraction of them will look at anything they can find. For every nude that gets posted online a thousand are added to personal collections. Unless they have someone looking over their shoulder or are in a hurry, they will scroll your photos for anything juicy.

Causality1on Overdue library book returned more than 110 years later

Many of the books in my library came from used library book sales, especially those I read as a child. When I read them again I always look at the checkout dates and wonder about those people, whether the book had the same impact on their lives it had on mine decades later.

Causality1on Toyota Children's Web Site (1995)

Untrue. It's just regulated: https://adstandards.ca/about/childrens-advertising-initiativ...

Causality1on T-Mobile CDMA network shutting down soon

That argument sounds good until you remember T-Mobile, a company with less than half the annual revenue of AT&T, has absolutely no problem servicing any device with the proper frequency bands.

Causality1on Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

I can attribute this decline to various factors:

In my opinion the author missed a large one: Mozilla chose to chase after Chrome's market share instead of focusing on the reasons people liked Firefox. For years there were a ton of things that made Firefox objectively more powerful for a skilled user than Chrome. Mozilla has burned all of them to the ground.

They could have kept us, the ten percent. Instead they chased the 50% and they will end up with nothing at all. When they write the obituary for Firefox, it will begin with the day they decided if Chrome does something then they have to do it as well. Personally I'd peg the terminal diagnosis for June 21st 2011.

Mozilla should be comparing their user share to their user demographics. When Firefox had thirty percent of the market its users were talking about all the amazing things they could make Firefox do that other browsers couldn't. In 2021 Firefox users pretty much just talk about getting off on Google not knowing what they're up to. What's that get Mozilla? 3.29%. So why is Mozilla hell-bent on the same attitude and pattern of behavior that's been ruining them for a decade?

Causality1on T-Mobile CDMA network shutting down soon

A cell tower can't interrogate a handset for a list of supported bands?

Causality1on T-Mobile CDMA network shutting down soon

Generally, but with a lot of exceptions and weirdness. For example, my OnePlus 6 is not supported, but if I modify my IMEI and APN those "impossible" features like VoLTE suddenly start working. Before they stopped automatic activation, I could put my SIM out of a supported phone, put it in an unsupported one, and those features would work for between fifteen minutes and a couple of hours.

On the other hand, some handsets that are blatantly missing LTE bands are on the whitelist, such as the Chinese Oneplus 8T.

Causality1on T-Mobile CDMA network shutting down soon

Not really. There have always been smartphones that supported both GSM and CDMA. The three major carriers not only use different LTE bands, but also Verizon and shortly AT&T (in February) have adopted a whitelist model where only select handsets can be activated on their networks. It's a much less open marketplace than it was five years ago.

Causality1on I returned my Remarkable2

Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere.

Legally. If you're willing to break the law you can essentially get every book ever written in a few minutes via torrent. Truly vast archives are available at surprisingly small file sizes.

Causality1on GitHub Broken Download URLs

Hey now, that's libel. There are problems that can be solved by rebooting, and a Microsoft MVP would never post a genuine potential solution. I'm pretty sure you meant to say "an MVP popped up in the newsgroup to copy/paste a paragraph of random intro text and then ask if he's solved your problem".

Causality1on Pop psychology has killed the villain

I think really good villains tend to have a traumatic/motivational background that guides their desires but also fundamental personality flaws that lead to them acting well outside the bounds of normal human behavior. Some modern stories fall down when they decide to just take forever really grinding that explanation into the audience. For example, Ramsay Bolton was a great modern villain. I don't need to spend an hour watching him be sad that his dad was mean to him.

Causality1on A new way to make quadratic equations easy (2019)

As very much a non-mathematician, his method does not seem remotely intuitive to me. Whether that opinion is invalid because of my lack of skill or more valid because I'm his intended demographic I'll leave up to you.

For this very specific use case, I would call it sub-optimal, for the simple reason it takes all of five minutes to teach a class the formula by singing it to the tune of Frère Jacques. I haven't used the formula in over a decade but can still sing it.