Hacker News Reader

Causality1on I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

Yes, and the viewing and sorting controls are deliberately manipulated. Sort by price low to high and suddenly the cheapest things don't show up. Enter a price range and the list is scattered with results much higher than your upper bound.

Causality1on I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

There's nothing about old web organization that takes away new web dynamism when added. Just give me a little "collections" link somewhere in a corner or at the bottom. Something I can click on and get everything you wrote on a particular topic. For example, if you're a game review site, let me see a list of every PC game you've reviewed sorted by date. Some sites have that but many don't anymore.

Causality1on I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

I just miss organization. Everything feels like a mess now. Content is either in an endless scroll or it's only accessible through a search box and you have absolutely no idea whether the site doesn't have the content you wanted or if you just failed to use the correct terms. Increased reliance on CDNs and cross-site content has simultaneously made web pages expire faster than ever and made them harder to archive.

Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.

Causality1on This resume got me an interview

Yeah, "not an asshole" flags go further than you think.

Causality1on The Internet Archive transforms access to books in a digital world

(and continuing to crawl a website that specifically forbids it through the standard robots.txt is a bit icky).

I find the idea you, in control of a server, can send someone data and then demand they erase it a bit ridiculous. If you want to control distribution then control it. Require a login to access any data you don't intend to be public.

Causality1on The Internet Archive transforms access to books in a digital world

Ok, it's comparable to CD Projekt deciding that because DRM is bad, they're going to crack a bunch of games and host them on GoG.

Causality1on Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

I'd enjoy a good writeup on how and why simple processors make better real time controllers than vastly more powerful ones.

Causality1on The Internet Archive transforms access to books in a digital world

I'm rabidly pro-piracy but what the Archive did was the very definition of shitting where you eat. What fool thought they could get away with that? This is like if Cloudflare believed revenge porn shouldn't be illegal and decided in light of that to create and host a revenge porn site. You can't do that shit as an organization. You flaunt the law when you're a ten-person underground operation, not the founder of a thirty year old nonprofit with 168 employees.

Causality1on The Internet Archive transforms access to books in a digital world

Within that context, the Archive has made careful efforts to ensure its uses are lawful.

Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic. I still want to know who it was that made a decision so mind-bendingly idiotic it put the very existence of the Internet Archive itself at risk. Of course our current copyright laws are stupid! That doesn't mean you as an organization with twenty million dollars in yearly revenue get to just ignore them and trust that having the moral high ground will protect you from the lawyers of an entire industry.

Causality1on Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

Seriously? I've hit "real" programming and bounced off but I spent a few months as a PLC tech and ladder logic was very easy.

Causality1on Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

It would suggest a lot of software developers are unmarried.

Causality1on Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

Can a Pi match the sort of real-time performance of something like a Controllogix PLC?

Causality1on 20 years of the iPod

The ipod didn't shuffle music and tech into a new era. The iTunes store did. The iTunes store could've turned any PMP into a titan. One could even argue it was Rio's successful legal defense of the concept of a PMP that laid the foundation for the entire industry.

Causality1on Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

Exactly. It's very much a war about what programs users can run, and the users don't always win.

Causality1on Research finds consumer-grade IoT devices showing up on corporate networks

Well, duh. I've never seen an office that didn't have crap people brought from home and hooked up. "Hey we don't get good wifi in here, I'll bring an old router tomorrow."

Causality1on Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

Are you aware of the enormous amounts of blood, sweat, and tears expended by people on XDA Developers just to unlock bootloader to use functions as simple as custom gesture controls?

Causality1on Fake shutters make me angry (2018)

So what if it did? Shutters and disc drives are both things that aren't especially useful with modern technology. What if I liked the look of it anyway? Do magnetic fake handles on garage doors make the author angry too? Let people enjoy things.

Causality1on Fake shutters make me angry (2018)

Fake shutters aren't any more or less stupid than a painting hanging on a wall. It's an aesthetic accoutrement that makes people happy. If you have a problem with that you need to fold up your lawn chair, go back inside, and find something better to do with your time.

Causality1on The tight-knit time zone data maintenance community

It wouldn't be a Medium article if you didn't have to wade through five pages of utter dreck to get the significant information.

Causality1on Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana

regenerative in the sense of regenerating local commerce and economies.

That is wildly outside the definition of "regenerative farming" given by the article.

Causality1on The next generation of AirPods

Sony MDR-J10 earphones were the most comfortable listening experience ever created, and I regularly forgot I was even wearing them. Shame they're no longer being made and no TWS earbuds have tried to imitate their design.

Causality1on Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana

So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.

Causality1on OpenMW: Open-source reimplementation of TES3 Morrowind

Which is great because both those games are hobbled on modern platforms. For example, if you want to play Oblivion with analog sticks you'd have an easier time emulating the 360 version than adding them to the PC version.

Causality1on Physicists take a key step in correcting quantum computer errors

"Not working as well as alternatives we already have" is a lot better than things which do nothing at all. There is no promising progress for cold fusion or alchemy.

Causality1on Physicists take a key step in correcting quantum computer errors

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031...

Causality1on It's been 42 years since 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' answered the ultimate question

I don't get it. Is this a joke? It reads like Time Cube.

Causality1on Physicists take a key step in correcting quantum computer errors

Because it functions? It may never be the behemoth researchers expect it to someday be but it actually does function and produce results.

Causality1on No more painkillers A side-effect free, and drug-free method to relieve pain

I'm curious to know how they came to the conclusion there were no side effects, even in rats. Everything has side effects.

Causality1on Netflix's new player breaks the ability to modify the seeking of a playing video

Netflix's user-side software has always been garbage. The android app forces you to keep a separate brightness slider from your phone, so if you watch Netflix a lot you're constantly having to adjust your screen brightness twice. It's also nearly 2022 and you still can't reorder the profiles on the login screen. How fucking hard can that possibly be?

Causality1on Analogue OS – Explore video game history

Now and then I use emulation and revisit some old favorites. And I’ve also bought a couple of old consoles second hand to play on those in the past

You are assisting his point by indicating you are not part of the retro gaming audience and you like the page. Personally I will reserve judgment until there are hardware reviews but everything about that page is a "marketing department is in charge of our company" red flag.