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bsammonon Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

(Assuming you've already bought one and have been using it for a while)

Have you tried using the built-in speakers or have you been using external speakers the entire time you owned it?

I'm curious if the (specs say 10watt) built-in speakers are in any way usable -- my criteria would be, can you easily hear dialog at the normal viewing distance; I wouldn't hope for hi-fi sound suitable for music.

bsammonon Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots

Sooo... the current status of this appears to be "referred to committee"

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9915...

It's hard to tell (especially with my ignorance of current USHouse dynamics) if this is a real threat to pass, or if this is just a "Hey look, campaign contributor, I submitted this bill--look, I care about your issues" with no real intent/hope for it to pass.

As near as I can tell, the congress.gov website says it was introduced in late July, referred to committee the same day, and nothing has happened since.

I wonder, is there reason to think there's a recent push to move it out of committee that means we should actually start to pay attention to it?

bsammonon Pell Puzzles Review

I submitted this gripe (before I saw your comment) to the "report an issue" widget on the puzzle site. I wonder if this puzzle will get ongoing development.

I have a few ideas for feature requests, but I'm not going to bother submitting them if it appears there's no interest.

bsammonon After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home

Yeah... not actually objecting to you bringing him up, but I was briefly confused (longer than it should have been as I had some trouble getting the NYT artictle to load), and I thought the point was worth clarifying.

bsammonon Pell Puzzles Review

So... how long before this gets added to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection? (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/)

bsammonon After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home

To clarify, Arthur Blessitt is not the subject of the NYT article.

Karl Bushby is.

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

bsammonon Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts

> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.

A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):

1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.

2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.

3) Do the "set up a new device" process.

4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.

In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.

One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.

bsammonon IRCv3

There was x11amp, which got renamed to XMMS, which was later forked into Beep Media Player, which was later forked into Audacious.

IIRC, the last time I used Audacious, the default interface was a loosely-inspired-by-itunes kinda UI, but tweaking the right knobs in the configuration screens could get it to a Winamp-like UI (or at least XMMS-like)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_(software) confirms a lot of my recollection.

bsammonon The lamps in my house

> I don't know how honeywell of all companies is selling this

Not really the Honeywell. I tracked the lamp maker down at honeywellsmartlighting.com.

Honeywell International is licensing out the name, according to https://honeywellsmartlighting.com/pages/about-us

bsammonon Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant

> I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers,

"I have never seen" is very different from "it doesn't happen".

I'm pretty sure in many countries, border control agents do their worst stuff out of sight of the public.

bsammonon A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

On one hand, at the price point of >$10000 for the whole terminal, it's quite possible that >$100 went into the keyboard.

However, I suspect you're coming at this from the perspective of a coder or a gamer or some other category who types thousands of keystrokes per day (tens of thousands?). With the assortment of special-function keys that enabled the user to execute common tasks with only two or three keystrokes, I suspect that even actively-used Bloomberg terminals may see an order of magnitude less keystrokes.

(On the third hand... I seem to remember reading that the Bloomberg system included chatroom functionality, which may increase keystroke count)

bsammonon Stuck in the Suez Canal – the short version (2021)

> Never got round to reading Stranded in the Suez Canal?

The line from the article makes it sound like the "Brief History of Time" of Middle East history. Or maybe "Truman".

Having never heard of this book (and not even sure whether it was a book), I turned to Wikipedia, and found:

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

Which includes a brief mention of the book.

bsammonon 13 Months Sober (2025)

"teetol" has two additional connotations beyond simply "no alcohol" for some readers/listeners:

  ** abstaining from caffeine also
  ** has a religious motivation (e.g. mormons)

Similarly, I've considered describing myself as "straight-edge", but that has the connotation (for some) of being disapproving/judgemental of drinkers.

bsammonon IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]

(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song.

IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.

bsammonon Kobo can run apps now

Another didn't-do-my-homework mistake: Beware of buying one of the waterproofed models if you want to hack/mod your Kobo. On un-waterproofed models, the case is easily opened, and the main storage SD Card (IIRC - maybe it was a different kind of flash card) can be removed/replaced easily. On waterproof models, the SD Card is under the waterproofing layer, which would have to be cut through to remove the card.

My experience is over 2 years old, so I'm sure some details have changed.

bsammonon HTML Can Do That

The main thing I'd like to see HTML (maybe more accurately, without-Javascript) do is AI-bot protection.

Browsing the web with Javascript turned off makes things much more tolerable on my low-RAM computer. Until a year or two, I could access the vast majority of the sites that I cared to. With anti-AI-bot protection becoming prevalent, this has gotten a lot worse lately.

I've read somewhere that recent versions of Anubis support no-JS mode. I haven't seen it in use much yet. I wonder if that's because sites are still using old versions of Anubis, or because it's turned off by default in the new version, and sites haven't bothered to enable it, or some other reason.

One instance I've noticed is codeberg, which seemed to be using some no-JS-compatible bot protection -- I'm not sure if it is/was Anubis -- I don't use codeberg regularly (I haven't needed an account there yet), so I'm not sure about details.

bsammonon Show HN: Automatically detect and patch walking-dead states in Sierra games

The discussion here reminded me of the "Cruelty Scale" (https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale) It was originally created specifically in relation to text adventure games, but seems appropriate to a broader range of game types.

The rankings are based on criteria like how far the game lets you go after making a get-stuck choice before you realize you're stuck, and whether that realization comes with clear information about what the wrong choice was.

bsammonon As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

> While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it,

This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)

bsammonon Don't use your phone while you poop

That's an interesting article/study.

I've heard this claim before and I've suspected it came from "using phone one the toilet correlates to more time spent on the toilet, and more time spent on the toilet correlates to more hemorrhoids" without (I don't know the proper terminology here) analyzing how those two correlations relate.

This article/study asks the question that I've wondered about: Is sitting on a toilet while using the phone (and not really trying to poop) different in some important way from sitting on a bench/chair/whatever while using the phone? The article hypothesizes that the shape of the seat may be the important distinction.

AKA "sitting and waiting for a poop" vs "sitting and waiting for a bus".

bsammonon The tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view

> Every bedroom of a rental is required to have a window in New York.

I don't think you meant this as specific as it sounds -- I suspect this requirement applies to coops, condos, and maybe even if you want to get official permission to use it as an owner-occupied single-family dwelling.

bsammonon I'm a USB-C Maximalist

> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)

My solution to this was to get an electric razor that doesn't use batteries. My 20-year-old no-battery electric Norelco razor was bought in a chain pharmacy. I've looked in recent years, and I don't see them any more in brick-and-mortar stores, but they're still made, and available online.

The (minor, IME) downside is that electric razors without batteries are generally on the low-end of the spectrum, rarely including the fancy (even non-battery-related) features found on the high end electric razors.

bsammonon Green River Residents Shut Down License Plate Reader Camera Project

Green River, home of the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Green_River_Intergalac...)

(I went to wikipedia to get some general context on the city of Green River)

bsammonon Show HN: Chiptune Radio

There was Blip Festival in New York, 15 to 20 years ago. As I had family in the area, I went to most of them.

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

After Blip Festival NY stopped, there were some other festivals and festival-ish events in other cities that were not as convenient to me, so I stopped following as closely.

bsammonon Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

I seem to remember reading somewhere that, even at his worst, Linus limited his toxicity to professional-programmer kernel contributors (i.e. people who were employed by linux distros or hardware companies to contribute to Linux). Can anyone else remember/confirm this?

Regardless, to a newbie potential kernel contributor, that high level of toxicity can be intimidating, and the professional-programmers-only aspect is non-obvious, so it's easy to see why this would discourage hobbyists/free-time programmers from contributing.

bsammonon Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

It's interesting that (in one regard) Sony is getting a PR win with the "StudioCanal has done this" narrative.

Another perspective: In accordance with the licensing system that Sony and their lobbyists helped establish, Sony's licensing agreement with StudioCanal came up for renewal. Sony decided that they didn't want to pay StudioCanal's perfectly reasonable() asking price.

this is StudioCanal's perspective.

bsammonon Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

I own a Nintendo Switch, and I've noticed that in the Nintendo store, old games regularly go on sale for in the ballpark of 80% off. Does that happen in the PS store?

bsammonon .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting

I think they're describing a scenario where the cash was stolen by a postal worker or for some other reason didn't make the full trip.

bsammonon Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)

I'm reminded of Chuck disabling a bomb by surfing to a malware-infested webpage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddtpyR6WIlY

bsammonon Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)

I'm guessing when you say "ask frontend developers" you mean "at job interviews". But I like to think you mean something like "at cocktail parties" or other social situations.