HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ShadowBanThis01

1,049 karma · joined March 14, 2023

submissionscomments
ShadowBanThis01··on Why are Americans frustrated with the economy? The answer lies in grocery bills
The answer lies in monopoly.
ShadowBanThis01··on Smart binoculars can identify 9k birds
I support this joke.
ShadowBanThis01··on Smart binoculars can identify 9k birds
But can they find our little R2 unit?
ShadowBanThis01··on Live record of being fired from Cloudflare during a redundancy plan [video]
Yes, they are assholes. But what are we to do with it? This video, unfortunately, does not represent anything particularly out of the ordinary, and shouldn't be taken as "how to handle it" either.

She repeatedly volunteers that she hasn't made any sales, and merely disgorges a wholly subjective review of what she has accomplished... which appears to be nothing. The things she should have hammered them on are

1. No written warnings about performance. Is there a single documented incidence of performance falling short? Likewise, does she have any written accolades from her supervisor? Not that this really matters anyway, especially since she's in the standard 90-day probationary period (which she calls a "ramp-up").

2. The point about her supervisor wussing out and not giving the news himself or herself is valid, but even worse is that these two other people showed up to the meeting UNPREPARED. If they were simply laying her off, fine. No details needed. But since they claimed it was for performance, they invited scrutiny and the demand for specifics... which they didn't bring to the meeting. THEY should be fired for poor performance and embarrassing their firm. If I show up to a meeting in which I'm supposed to give a presentation about something and I shrug and say, "Oh, yeah I don't have any details on that so maybe you should ask later but don't expect an answer," I expect to be fired.

But she strayed from those points and mostly just protested at length that she did "really great."

I guess if the point was to reveal that Cloudflare is run by unprofessional assholes, then I withdraw my question. Otherwise I don't see what the call to action is here, and the promotion of it with breathless headlines like, "RARE footage of a firing!" is dumb.

ShadowBanThis01··on Live record of being fired from Cloudflare during a redundancy plan [video]
So what?
ShadowBanThis01··on Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos (2021)
Cool, thanks! I wonder how many of those can run well on a Raspberry Pi.
ShadowBanThis01··on Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos (2021)
This is really informative, and the simple FM-synthesis demo confirmed my guess as to what the term meant (since I could never be bothered to look it up). Fun!

Is there a highly-regarded software (or hardware + software) emulator for the DX7?

ShadowBanThis01··on Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos (2021)
I see what you did there, and raise you an octave.
ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
It's woefully impractical for a laptop, specifically because it CAN'T be flexibly positioned where many people would want it. Plus, you'd have to lug an additional and cumbersome device around with you, occupy a USB port with it, and deal with a wire.

All of that makes the trackpad a much better option.

ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
Jony Ive presided over the worst usefulness/usability regressions and design blunders in the history of Apple. That guy is a pompous hack who, in the end, had no ideas for the advancement of products. His only M.O. was to take functionality away, with the excuse of making whatever the product was "thinner."
ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
For sure, the "Magic" mouse is another Apple entry in the Hall of Peripheral Shame.

"Does anyone who stops to think about this for more than 2 seconds actually want this?"

Really? Have you ever heard of Wacom? They built an entire company on people who want this, and it has been in business for decades. And of course you can see what you're writing, right there on the screen! The surface area of current Apple laptop trackpads is 33% larger than that of a Wacom Intuos tablet: https://i.imgur.com/D8pmsTC.jpeg

It has nothing to do with handwriting recognition, either. That's another area where Apple failed spectacularly to make the Pencil useful. All they had to do is add a single-character writing area to the standard keyboard on the iPad, as was nailed in the '90s by Palm. That way, ALL applications would have immediately have gotten handwriting-entry capability. Instead, Apple left it up to every application developer to implement it separately. Baffling.

ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
That's sarcasm, right? Surely you're not lauding this asinine peripheral that is supposed to be jammed into a fragile port to recharge while sticking out like a chopstick waiting to be snapped off.

Surely you're not lauding a near-useless gimmick that inexplicably doesn't work on the (defectively) giant trackpads of Apple's own computers... or most of their iPads.

ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
The fact that you can't say WHAT Apple should do with AI is exactly the reason they shouldn't do shit.

When you can state something concrete about Apple's products or services that can be improved with so-called "AI," let us know.

ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
That's an absurdly vague declaration. What do you want them to do "in the cloud space?"
ShadowBanThis01··on Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
Sad. Microsoft, after advancing the state of consumer-oriented computing more than anyone else through the '90s, is now a despicable anti-customer troll.

Nothing epitomizes that more than the reduction of all users to a goddamned "Microsoft account" that nobody wants. You can't use or even install Windows now unless you do so as a "Microsoft account," lest you be hounded day and night to log in, log IN, LOG IN WITH YOUR "MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!!!!"

Office365 is subscription trash with hopelessly inept UI. Windows itself is a depressing shitshow of UI defects and... I was going to say half-baked... but in reality NO ideas.

I was a professional developer on Windows from the days of separate 16- and 32-bit versions of Visual C++, eventually leading what was (according to Microsoft, as far as they knew) the largest Visual C++ project of the early/mid-'90s. You could have called me an evangelist for most of their products. I continued using Visual Studio until the mid-2000s, even while working at Apple.

Today I don't have a single installation of Windows running in my home (which is also my business). I'm a pilot, and I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but not even that is enough to get me to buy an Intel box and tolerate the disgusting abuse that is being a Microsoft Windows user. There's simply no excuse for the execrable state of Windows, Microsoft's other product offerings, and the way they treat users. Fuck Microsoft.

ShadowBanThis01··on Why Instagram failed to become TikTok
This thesis is absurd. Who gives a shit where the poster's identifier sits? No one. It's all about the feed.

Instagram's feed is full of bullshit that has nothing to do with anyone I follow. It's a conduit for spam at this point, and everyone knows it.

TikTok on the other hand is just a sewer line. I don't know what dictates the effluent they're funneling through anyone's feed, but it represents a new low even to cynics. Just... mind-boggling stupidity.

Vine came and went. So why the ascendance of TikTok? Human stupidity. My condolences to Vine's creators.

ShadowBanThis01··on The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
Thanks! Intuitively this sounds like it enables what at one time would have been called bad programming (widespread reliance on RTTI), but on the other hand a lot of rules have turned out to be arbitrary.
ShadowBanThis01··on The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
Indeed, but I only wanted to include so much pedantry!
ShadowBanThis01··on Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine
This is a pretty cool prototype for something I'd considered Godot for: a GUI for a device running embedded Linux. In that environment, you want the least bloat but some decent development tools so you can iterate reasonably fast. That's not a widely-available combo.
ShadowBanThis01··on The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
Does the "pattern matching" referred to here work like JavaScript's "destructuring?" It's the thing where you can call a function with an object, but the function's parameters extract one or more of the object's members directly without mentioning the object's class, so it'll take anything that has appropriately named members.
ShadowBanThis01··on The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
"FAANG has first-class support and commitments to Java"

Nobody told Apple that.

ShadowBanThis01··on The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future
Not to mention that Node isn't a language, and Deno is cleaner.
ShadowBanThis01··on Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)
Thanks. I'm going to watch that MS video and see if I'm still as pissy about the ribbon afterward.

Ribbon aside, there are still lots of regressions in Word. The handling of styles, for example, which used to be excellent. Now Microsoft has stuffed the style list with dozens of asinine canned styles (most of which consist of different-colored underlines) that you can't get rid of. So instead of being able to format your document efficiently by selecting styles, you must now wade through a giant list of shit, looking for your own styles every goddamned time you want to apply one.

ShadowBanThis01··on United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
Exactly. Unless the "upward-pitching tendency" under high power is extreme, any competent pilot should be able to keep the plane's attitude as desired.
ShadowBanThis01··on United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
Yes, two would be very ill-advised. I think there was some incident where a plane had only two pitot tubes and of course this caused problems. Or... I may have simply misremembered pitot tubes instead of AOA sensors in the Boeing case.
ShadowBanThis01··on Why Prince Changed His Name to an Symbol 30 Years Ago, and What Happened Next
Thanks for the tip. I use Reader view in Safari on the Mac, but Apple has obscured it on mobile by making the icon look like only a font-size option. Heaven forbid they use consistent icons in their own products.
ShadowBanThis01··on Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
Fair enough; I didn't go hunting around for my discs to check the order of "video" and "CD" in the moniker.

"Video-CD" was widely used in China long after DVDs came out, lasting almost until the HD era (when the Chinese attempted to introduce their own HD disc format that still used a red (insert "communist" wisecrack here) laser.

I always thought that those Chinese discs were CD-I, which failed miserably in... well, everywhere else. But in fact CD-I was a bastardization of Video CD that was incompatible, although it offered slightly higher (but still crappy) resolution. In the end, the format that prevailed all those years in the east was presumably Video-CD.

Oh yeah, I have a few examples of yet another obscure disc variation: the 8-inch LaserDisc. If I remember correctly, I have "I Want to Break Free" and "Radio Ga-Ga" by Queen, and "Salt in My Tears" by Martin Briley. The back sides of those are opaque white plastic.

ShadowBanThis01··on OpenAI says it's "impossible" to create AI models without copyrighted material
Every time I see "Open"AI's fraudulent name, it pisses me off. I'm sure it augurs a new era of non-open "Open[bullshit]" branding.
ShadowBanThis01··on Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
Ha haaa! NO, I have a decent-sized 45 collection and there's no confusion about their awesomeness! Most of them sound better than the dynamically-compressed-to-shit streaming "remasters" of the same songs today.

I also have a few 3-inch CDs, which were supposed to be the successor to 45s but record companies just weren't down for seriously selling singles at that point.

Another historical curiosity: I have a couple of "video CDs," which were regular-sized (5-inch) CDs with a digital section containing the song (playable on any CD player) and then an analog video section with the video for the song (playable on later LaserDisc players).

ShadowBanThis01··on Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
I think they say they bought an album on CD, not a record on CD.
Page 1 of 34Next →