Hacker News Reader

bangonkeyboardon Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video

"They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off." (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)

bangonkeyboardon Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video

Sure, just like the Apple Watch doesn't "record" audio, it "flows."

"You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word." (https://leancrew.com/all-this/2026/09/new-apple-watches-have...)

bangonkeyboardon Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.

bangonkeyboardon Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

Not true. Here is a mirror of an image posted earlier in this thread: https://i.postimg.cc/MK86WX6s/TEmek6j.png

bangonkeyboardon Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

I've tried several times before to install syncserver using those pip instructions, on multiple platforms, without success.

bangonkeyboardon iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release

> Apple now continues to support older operating systems with security updates, allowing users to remain on iOS 18 without immediate pressure to update or forfeit critical patches. This makes it much easier for users to remain on older software.

This is an incredible untruth to end this article on. MacRumors' own reporting (https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-up...) showed Apple denying the existing iOS 18.7.3 security update to iPhones, and then shutting down the beta channel workaround the same day that MR drew attention to it, leaving iOS 26.2 as the only option.

bangonkeyboardon Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

What was the root question of law?

bangonkeyboardon Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup

I want to be optimistic, but Dye was just a symptom. The rot in modern Apple design must run much deeper.

bangonkeyboardon John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

"Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

bangonkeyboardon Apple Reportedly Moving Ahead with Ads in Maps App

There are already ads in Apple Maps: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255060954

This would just be more ads.

bangonkeyboardon Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

Thanks.

bangonkeyboardon Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries? Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?

bangonkeyboardon A compact bitset implementation used in Ocarina of Time save files

> Tai disagreed that Tai's model is simply the trapezoidal rule, on the basis that her model uses the summed areas of rectangles and triangles rather than trapezoids.

Oh my god.

bangonkeyboardon A compact bitset implementation used in Ocarina of Time save files

Apparently "compact" here refers to the five lines of actual code.

Just use <bitstring.h>.

bangonkeyboardon Scott Forstall on the Future of Siri and AI (2017) [video]

The exchange at 47:48 has been coming to mind more and more of late.

"Where do you see the future of Siri and other AI going?"

There's a lot of, I mean..."Siri and other AI," there's Siri, there's the..."Can you ask something a question?" Like, when we were doing Siri, I was blown away by it—having had my Master's in artificial intelligence—so when I saw Siri I thought, "Wait, this is supposed to be 20 years from now, I can't believe it's now." And I kind of thought, you know, Google is...if you go to a library and you look up in the card catalog, "What reference materials do you have related to this," and then you go and look at every one and figure out who's right. Siri is, you ask a reference librarian: "Go find the answer to this question." I think that sort of thing is very very interesting, and the more we can do to have that...now, if you look at AI, I think there's a lot we can do with AI that we're not doing right now that I hope we get to. I can talk about it if you want...?

"Let's go on."

bangonkeyboardon VR Design Unpacked: The secret to Beat Saber's fun

Beat Saber's reveal trailer is still one of the best I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIzRbI1JUe4

A tight 30 seconds of wordless, uncut gameplay that intuitively unveils the game mechanics while the simple track, just when it seems overly easy, crescendoes into the beat drop and trickier motions. The finishing touch is the missed note right before the hard cut to title.

bangonkeyboardon OpenBSD 7.7 Released

A note to myself for future upgrades, from the upgrade guide:

• Check available disk space in /usr. Verify that the /usr partition has a size of at least 1.1G. With less space the upgrade may fail and you should consider reinstalling the system instead.

When this says "available disk space," it means "total" disk space of the /usr partition, not "free" space. I had less than 1.1GB of unused free space on /usr and had to verify that that was fine before proceeding.

bangonkeyboardon Levels of configuration languages

A top-level /AppleInternal/ directory on macOS, even if empty, will enable certain features in Apple developer tools.

bangonkeyboardon Mac(OS)talgia

> The lack of a fan or any decent cooling, the "lack of a floppy disk" (for those of us who didn't use Zip drives), it was pretty to look at but hard to work with.

The G4 Cube had an (empty) standard mount and power connector for an optional fan.

bangonkeyboardon Mac(OS)talgia

Not from me. A black box filesystem that can't even accurately say how much space is free and destroys mechanical hard drives with longer term use. There were other options to deal with HFS+'s 2038 problem.

bangonkeyboardon Apple seeks to defend Google's billion-dollar payments in search case

Why are people who go out of their way to select Google search "Apple's users" but never "Google's users"?

bangonkeyboardon In 1870, Lord Rayleigh used oil and water to calculate the size of molecules

I would have loved to have had a course in school about "The Design of Scientific Experiments." One that described the processes of landmark historical experiments from antiquity onward, and challenged students throughout: "Given this set of constraints, how would you design and execute an experiment to estimate the size of the Earth? Disprove phlogiston and luminiferous aether? Measure the speed of light?"

bangonkeyboardon Ted Chiang has won the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's short story prize

I was hoping this had meant he'd written a new story.

bangonkeyboardon The Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac (2019)

"We're trying to get away from programming. We've got to get away from programming because people don't want to program computers. People want to use computers."

— Steve Jobs, 1983

bangonkeyboardon Bitmagnet Allows People to Run Their Own Decentralized Torrent Indexer Locally

Who remembers Skytorrents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423629)? Posted as a "Show HN" here, it was a DHT-sourced index and stack written in C with no JavaScript, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. Skytorrents was unbelievably fast, friendly, and complete, and this translated into rapid adoption and traffic growth that caused the site to shut down due to server costs after just a year (https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents-dumps-massive-torrent-d...).

It was a shame that the technology behind Skytorrents was never open-sourced; it was the best torrent crawler and site I've ever seen, and I would have liked to see how it worked so well.

bangonkeyboardon Aho – a Git implementation in Awk

Both, I assume. "Git" was already slang for "stupid person," so this is a clever name.

bangonkeyboardon Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

What's surprising to me is that this deal is apparently about content and IP, not the Unreal Engine technology per se.

bangonkeyboardon Apple Sees Surgery, Training as Future Vision Pro Growth Areas

I find this interesting in that Apple is already speedrunning the pivot to industrial/health uses that Magic Leap (https://www.magicleap.com/en-us/magic-leap-2-video) and HoloLens (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/industry-healthcare) both eventually turned to.

bangonkeyboardon Parsing 8-bit integers quickly

These gotchas make keeping a big-endian machine around totally worth it.

bangonkeyboardon Apple Patent Shows GPU Dynamic Caching Has Been in Development for Years

All Apple Silicon is unified memory.