Hacker News Reader

aasasdon CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

> It's not the polish that was bad.

Indeed, it would be weird if CDPR had trouble with Polish.

aasasdon Apple says iPhones will switch to USB-C chargers to comply with new EU law

It seems that the patents aren't the only obstacle to ubiquitous Lightning:

> Yes, it's hard to make floating paddle and sheet metal spring indents more robust than a solid metal puck, but it also comes with extra baggage that Apple is willing to eat and most USB committee companies are not willing to. USB has always made the connectors out of stamped sheet metal for mass production, but it is not possible to make the lightning puck like that. Having potentially live exposed contacts also complicates things.

(https://reddit.com/comments/6xfo53/comment/dmfqbnc)

aasasdon We became experts on Google Play Store policy violations

Yes—the developer can simply move into a different line of business, that doesn't require having a mobile app.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

> "JC Denton" is said to be a codename, and the player can create JC's true name and pick from a variety of preset appearances.

Hmmm, I don't remember that either—and JC is also sort of a meme with his default appearance (presumably), used as userpics on Youtube and elsewhere. So I guess many just picked the first look offered. Seeing as JC is considered very much a ‘blank character’, there probably wasn't much of a meaningful difference in the choice.

aasasdon We became experts on Google Play Store policy violations

People are perpetually wondering why Goog keeps doing this, and the answer is because they can.

> I really really need to make Google happy.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Fun fact: afaik many games, starting with Duke Nukem 3D, implement mirrors by just having the entire room built out behind the glass, with duplicates of the objects moving on that side. In DN, with some noclip trickery or something, one can move into the ‘mirror room’, or observe the whole level with the double rooms.

aasasdon UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

I wish someone calculated with some certainty how much the lifestyles in different countries would have to change if the world just had to drop production that emits excess gases. I bet that would show that there's no way people modify their habits for this, especially in the ‘first world’.

(As for myself, I'm living on less that 400 bucks a month, including rent, use transport once a month; and most energy I use is probably for central heating in the winter and for pumping water—otherwise it's the fridge and boiling water for tea. But idk about the ‘footprint’, probably still not good.)

aasasdon Games Worth Continuing to Develop (Part 6)

There were official GTA 1-2 for Gameboy Color, so I'm not sure there was even much need for that effort.

(There was also ‘Driver’ for GBC.)

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

No, but I'm planning to replay DE one of these days, and even if I use a mod for graphic enhancements, I'm gonna disable any and all gameplay modifications. IIRC Revision allows that.

Perhaps changing the gameplay is more interesting for those who already played through the original a bunch of times and are looking for same-but-different. In the spirit of game randomizers.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The cutscene experience was funny if one happened to have both legs shot—so JC crawls around for hours, then stands up during a cutscene, and afterwards plops down again and proceeds to crawl to completion of the level.

aasasdon Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

I think the article means using Bash for scripting, while the reader could use anything they want interactively. That's what I do—I use zsh, but I don't script in zsh.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

“It alters almost every aspect of Deus Ex, from the AI to the RPG systems.”

Yeah, you know, sounds alright if you actually want to play a different game than Deus Ex.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I don't really understand how one has the nerve to ‘fix’ levels in a classic game. But at least, I vaguely remember reading that it might be possible to disable gameplay changes in ‘Revision’—haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm planning on only enabling graphics enhancements.

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The parent commenter means to say that for most of the game in Deus Ex, the player doesn't see the protagonist. (Can't remember if the cutscenes shown him from a third-person view.)

aasasdon Decompilation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Sounds similar to the story of how Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon received patches, particularly thanks to them being made in Assembler from the start and thus easy-ish to modify.

Though plenty of old favorite games in fact get fan patches, especially for graphics—e.g. System Shock (iirc) and original Deus Ex.

aasasdon Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

Personally I'm longing for a slight variation on the default page, where I could freely arrange the shortcuts how I see fit—instead of having them in a 6×2 table (or 8×2, can't remember at the phone). It's like Windows vs Mac again: MS loves coercing everything into tables, because that's easy for programmers—while Apple understands that people want to navigate with some visual guides and reference points.

aasasdon Show HN: I solved my New Tab page

I like me some widgets, but pretty much the only time I see the bare desktop is when the machine restarts. So instead I put some in the menu bar (Mac's ‘tray’), in the dock and in the bottom corners around the dock. I'm using open-source ‘Stats’ for the menu; there's also BitBar iirc. The stock Activity Manager for the dock, and custom scripts in Hammerspoon for drawing anywhere on the screen, namely in the corners.

aasasdon My dad's resume and skills from 1980

I didn't even think about this at first, but—perhaps the parents' occupation is there because of the caste system? I heard that it's still around not just in India, but also in diasporas like the Silicon Valley.

aasasdon Ask HN

> How does an attorney know whether you are incapacitated?

You realize that the system to deal with this already exists? It's called the legal system, and it hooks into various specialized professions, including medical ones. As in, the partner brings the lawyer some papers from doctors that say you're out of commission, and the lawyer executes whatever procedure you prescribed for such a case. The same way as when you're dead, just without the death part (hopefully).

(Cue HNers saying that the papers can be forged, etc.—if that's the worry, one has more immediate problems in their relationship than the arrangement of a ‘dead man switch’.)

Sometimes I have to wonder if a bunch of hackers from ~2000s decided to live entirely in computer systems, and forgot that the ‘hacker ethos’ pertains also to researching and using existing systems.

aasasdon My dad's resume and skills from 1980

Eh, I was pumping out PHP+MySQL and a bit of Python until the early 2010s, when a) I went to work on a larger site where disparate specialized tech was used to optimize every part of it, and b) hipster explosion of devops happened.

aasasdon My dad's resume and skills from 1980

My bet is on India or thereabouts.

aasasdon I help seniors with technology issues

Perhaps Blokada doesn't properly run the background service, with a persistent notification. The notification is necessary since around Android 9 or so—and while NetGuard's ‘vpn’ is indicated in the status bar, it also still has a notification.

Some apps have a setting to disable the notification, but all that achieves is that the app doesn't stay running in the background.

aasasdon How the clipboard works

> I want to copy an image from a webpage into an email... And then the paste fails because the email client tries to download the image.

Personally I haven't had this problem: just like the article says, the browser ‘copies’ image data with a correct mime-type, and the other app pastes the image if it knows about that mime-type. This is on MacOS, with Firefox.

(Though, again personally, I now usually scale the image and convert to webp before sending in a chat—I don't do much email. This way I'm avoiding 4K 4MB pics. I'm probably gonna make me a browser extension to do this automatically.)

You're right however that drag-n-drop doesn't work so smoothly yet.

aasasdon Ask HN

I was lowkey thinking about approaches to a similar arrangement, and my conclusion is that the key to this is a lawyer/attorney, unless you want to make the trusted person a part of a convoluted cryptography scheme. Give the person an encrypted file with instructions, or a password database, and have the attorney deliver a piece of paper with the password to that file if you're incapacitated. Perhaps make the paper look innocuous to the lawyer if you want. IDK though if lawyers actually do things like this in various jurisdictions—outside of the rather final scenario of a will.

aasasdon Security through obscurity is underrated (2020)

I think in fact that the sequence can be changing, based on some secret and e.g. current time. Haven't had a chance to implement anything like that, though, and not sure if there's software that supports such an arrangement. It's true however that above some effort it's more of a meaningless flex, and the proper aim of hiding the ports from most attackers would be achieved long before fancy combinations.

aasasdon Security through obscurity is underrated (2020)

A kind of a tipping point for me was when one commenter called port-knocking ‘security through obscurity’. Sure, let's see attackers pick one of 65535^x combinations of ports, and meanwhile let's hear this smartass wax about how that's categorically different from a password.

aasasdon I help seniors with technology issues

Meanwhile FF allows one to just disable those requests altogether for all sites until further notice.

aasasdon I help seniors with technology issues

> I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep.

Shouldn't happen since NetGuard works as a ‘vpn client’ to pass connections through the app—so afaik reasonably it should stay working as long as the pseudo-vpn-connection is up.

(Not to be confused with actually connecting to a vpn server, which it doesn't do.)

aasasdon 3M Glass Cloth Tape 361

That's the not-young one. This year's Mick Schumacher is Michael's son. In fact, he's thirty years younger.

aasasdon 3M Glass Cloth Tape 361

Eh, five drivers retired from that race, including both Ferraris—so Tsunoda was in fact third last, ahead only of young Schumacher and Latifi. I mean, it was an okay try, but regrettably it went nowhere.