Hacker News Reader

Yes, it sounds that way, but the event you (and they) describe has never happened.

> They go quiet or form a tiny invite only groups to hide after an attempt to do something good that backfired because their skin is the wrong colour or they aren’t trans.

It really sounds like they accidentally offended someone, the person who was offended was so much so that they couldn't communicate why they were offended, and then your friends misinterpreted the issue.

_lffvon 4chan founder Chris Poole has left Google

> Poole's 4chan is an anonymous, ephemeral imageboard that is often given the title "cesspool of the Internet." The site is broken up into boards of various topics, and some of the more lawless boards are home to all of the worst characters on the Internet, like school shooters, child pornographers, and racists. It's also the birthplace of a lot of Internet culture, like Rickrolling, lolcats, and, more recently, Pepe the frog memes and the alt-right. The site gave rise to the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous and is often used as a dumping ground for various hacks like the Nintendo Gigaleak. Poole sold 4chan back in 2015, a year before joining Google.

I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).

_lffvon The Dawn of a new Command Line Interface (2017)

This is a dangerous joke to make / idea to perpetuate given the audience of HN.

_lffvon Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace

Twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/plan9foundation/status/13743504723168174...

Plan 9 Foundation: https://p9f.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

There's still a pretty active community around Plan 9, too.

9Front, a popular fork of Plan 9: http://9front.org/

Interviews with some Plan 9 community members: https://0intro.dev/

Some videos: [A Tour of Acme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M), [Peertube channel of sigrid's](https://diode.zone/video-channels/necrocheesecake/videos)

_lffvon Ask HN: Best locked-down C++ subset?

Have you tried C90? It's a very small subset of C++ but it hasn't really changed in 30 years or so.

_lffvon GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

I like Thunar's method, giving a big yellow warning on the top of the window but not inhibiting the user outside of that.

_lffvon Xfce 4.16

My grandmother's computer is an old Debian box with nothing more than `ly` (as a DM), xfce, Chicago95, and Firefox. She loves it, though I made a ton of tweaks here and there to make it easier for her to use (specifically a ton of website launchers on her desktop). She got lost in regards to how to use her computer back in the XP>8 transition so it was great to be able to bring her back to that style of desktop and have the system be easier to fix than Windows 8 or 10.

_lffvon macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS

> Linux has systemd, not my favorite thing out there, Windows is privacy nightmare. That left me with 2 major options: Linuxes without systemd (Gentoo, in my case) or BSDs.

Even if you don't like systemd (I don't but I live with it because I never have to interact with it anyway), this is such a weird way to phrase it. Imagine saying "Linux has `apt`, not my favorite thing out there. That left me with two major options: Linuxes without apt (Arch, in my case) or BSDs." Just... change the program. Apparently Arch can switch over to sysvinit just by installing two packages from the AUR (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SysVinit), Devuan exists, et cetera.

Of course, the author was sold on BSD before making this argument - and fair enough, at least it's a free system. But in my opinion it's ridiculous to discount a family of systems because of one common program.

_lffvon My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

I had parents sort of like you when I was younger, which is why I attempted suicide at 14.

Strict parenting puts weights on your kids' backs. Eventually they'll snap in half.

_lffvon Dell Adding Hardware Privacy Driver for Linux

"These new Dell privacy buttons are basically hardware kill switches for the microphone and web camera video stream. The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware."

Why not just wire the LEDs up to the same power line that goes to the camera?

_lffvon Windows 7 won't die, still second most popular operating system

If I was a multimillion dollar corporation trying to follow the best operating system I had made thus far (ignoring the splatter that was Windows 8 and 8.1) there are some things I wouldn't do:

- introduce telemetry

- introduce unnecessary updates and remove the ability to choose not to install them. security updates are fine, feature updates that break things but are only temporarily avoided are unacceptable.

- remove theming. I would not remove the ability to use the themes my designers had created over the years.

- introduce a "Settings" app that fragments the OS configuration (especially if my operating system already had a weird second settings menu that you could only get to by running a command like, for example, `msconfig`).

If I did do these things, I would probably introduce them in a beta operating system and continue to support my flagship product because it would, in this hypothetical scenario, be much friendlier to the average user (whom in this scenario I target).

_lffvon Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

Don't know why you were downvoted, it's common knowledge that state actors can break Apple's encryption. Apple makes a huge show of refusing to break their own encryption but with a subpoena they legally have to provide the encrypted data and then state actors just go elsewhere for cracking.

_lffvon Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

> I rely on Mac and FileVault for professional use

... then phase out your use, because proprietary systems will always get cracked given enough time.

_lffvon Is anybody still using Windows 95?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

It's why computers from the 80s can last until now without needing any recapping but computers from 2002 or so are ticking time bombs.

_lffvon Show HN: SponsorBlock – Skip YouTube Sponsorships, Intros, Outros and More

I'm surprised SponsorBlock didn't blow up on here again. In all seriousness, it's a terrific add-on.

_lffvon Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

Hell, I still write the HTML and push it to Github where Github Pages and Cloudflare put it up on the Web for me. I've never seen any reason to use Markup when I can just Mark my text Up in HTML pretty simply. If you write a site correctly (a site, not a webapp) it'll render in anything from the original Netscape to the Wii Browser (tested working with my site), Internet Explorer 8 (working), Links2 (working), and the latest Chrome.

A site like YouTube doesn't need to work with old stuff like Netscape or IE but if your site primarily focuses on text there's next to no reason there should be Javascript on your site. Sites like danluu's[0] and Michael Norman Williams'[1] may not look the best but they just work.

My website: https://www.instantfloppy.net/ (though admittedly I don't spend as much time on it as I should)

[0]: https://danluu.com/

[1]: http://michaelnormanwilliams.com/

_lffvon Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Just rewatched that scene (happens at around 1:16:00). The first time I watched that scene in particular I had to pause it because I was flabbergasted that they were so clearly breaking the fourth wall.

After the... unfortunate opening scene of the movie I hadn't rewatched it but every time I see even a small clip of anything from Eva (the movie or the show) I'm just enamored. Hideaki Anno is one of the greatest artists of our time just from NGE and Shin Godzilla. It felt like every frame of the original anime was perfect.

_lffvon YouTube faces creator backlash

Here's why YouTube can go fuck itself:

I have a YouTube channel. My first video will be five years old on September 14. I kept putting out content for a number of years, content which I thought was funny and would surely be well-received.

But people never watched my videos! I get 20ish views per video. They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller channel, and then I never become big for that reason. (Or maybe my videos just suck. Some of them definitely do, but I've made some that I'm proud of.)

I joined TikTok, YouTube's 60-second-max competitor. Out of boredom I made a video synced to one of those songs. Fifty views on my first one. Eventually I started making more content. I've clocked around 150K views on my videos combined, 40K likes, and 1200 followers. I made my first video around February and my second around June.

While YouTube discourages small creators, non-celebrities, and those that don't have massive amounts of cash to throw around on sets, TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular.

TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).

YouTube's algorithm is: [redacted]. It's amusing to me that a Chinese company would be more transparent about this. YouTube doesn't understand its community and it's probably too late to save it, it got a monopoly and stagnated. My story is one of many others.

_lffvon Ask HN: Why doesn’t HN have notifications?

Yes, but HN is a zero-distraction distraction: It's a workplace procrastination tool that doesn't let the user veer too far from their work. You can see this in the anti-procrast settings and the lack of any advertising here (both of which are very nice features I use regularly). If HN had notifications it'd lead on a slippery slope to HN being a social network instead of a news aggregator, and I don't think anybody wants that.

_lffvon Introducing Cloudflare Registrar

Yeah, it's naive, but it's the best solution there's been for quite a while. I just really hope this is good.