Hacker News Reader

dddddavidddddon "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks

> I think the Canadian mortgages linked to Chinese accounts will likely all be paid.

If Canadian banks agree with this risk assessment, they have little incentive to actually verify income in these cases.

dddddavidddddon Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

I used to like auto-synching with accounts, but I found this encouraged a pattern where I would only look at my budget periodically, long after the information would have been useful (e.g. in the moment of asking whether I should make a purchase).

Instead, I've switched to software that requires me to manually input each transaction (firefly-iii with lychnos, a custom front-end I wrote). This keeps me aware of the budgets since I get in the habit of looking at them each time I make a purchase and record it.

dddddavidddddon Super Mario 64 on the Web

I opened up Super Mario World today, and it just has one intro slide before going into the first levels.

dddddavidddddon Killing Windows 10 in 2025 could turn PCs into eWaste

I'm using syncthing: https://syncthing.net/ It requires that at least two machines be up for syncing to happen, but if you have a home server that isn't a problem.

dddddavidddddon Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes on macOS Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur

I'm impressed by the ingenuity of people who keep old software running just a bit longer! When Catalina first came out, I used Retroactive for iTunes. This let me get one last update out for my track joiner (https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat), targeting both the new Music app and iTunes.

dddddavidddddon Ford's Theatre Front-Row Tickets from April 14, 1865

Most of the theatres I've been to in my city (Montreal, Canada) have boxes on the side, e.g. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b5b4d25af2096...

dddddavidddddon macOS Sonoma is available today

Settings -> General -> Software Update, then Command-R if you still don't see it.

dddddavidddddon The casino in your pocket

You can just read the machine's manual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658844

dddddavidddddon Touch Pianist

I love that they have the Bach Partita -- I used to listed to this piece on repeat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuPr9m98XQQ Knowing the melody makes it a lot easier to 'play' in this app.

dddddavidddddon The modern sea spider had started to diversify by the Jurassic, study finds

They're not arachnids, but they do look like spiders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_spider

dddddavidddddon Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

This site was invaluable for maintaining my early '70s Peugeot bike. It always had the right measurements, and great practical ideas for solving problems. For example, because my frame spacing was too narrow for modern wheels, I decided to have a shop bend it ('cold set') to the right size. Without this site I never would have thought of it.

dddddavidddddon Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

I find it overwhelms any kind of image search.

dddddavidddddon Show HN: I built a transit travel time map

Beautiful. I did something similar recently with the Google Maps Distance Matrix API, but I like that this doesn't require an external API for every calculation.

dddddavidddddon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://www.davidschlachter.com/

Infrequently updated, mostly open source work or research these days. It's been online since I've been in high school.

dddddavidddddon ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't.

I experienced this a couple years ago when I somehow had a directory name with a UTF-8 byte order mark, causing mysterious Time Machine failures: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-no...

dddddavidddddon Like the macOS Dock but for macOS System 7

I used A-Dock for years before I could afford a Mac OS X-capable computer, with Kaleidoscope too. Despite my excitement when I actually got 10.2 installed on something, I found myself dual-booting for a while. I didn't find that Mac OS X was quite ready for actual daily use until 10.4, and it took a while for my OS 9 apps to be ported over.

dddddavidddddon A broken man's homemade, seaworthy ship rests in the Canadian prairie (2015)

My understanding is that roofs of church naves in the style of a ship's keel are fairly common: https://www.google.com/search?q=keel+nave+roof+church&tbm=is... The metaphor is that the Church is a ship that protects and carries its congregation.

dddddavidddddon Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way

For the second always-on machine, a router running OpenWRT would be ideal since it would always be up anyways.

dddddavidddddon Mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis at Meta

> Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends' activities.

I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.

dddddavidddddon Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

It can, but when I last looked, you needed the paid version to have similar features.

dddddavidddddon The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)

In 1996, I'm not sure what their options would have been, but today a Personal Locator Beacon or some other satellite communication system is good to have if you're in a remote place with no cell reception.

dddddavidddddon Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

I use third-party apps to stream audio to my HomePods from Android and Windows.

dddddavidddddon GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

In this article, it seems to mean syntax highlighting and hiding the help bar.

dddddavidddddon Project Butterly: restoring and preserving the IBM ThinkPad 701

See the sliding keyboard in action: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ChlD_ZfpPdw

dddddavidddddon FreeBSD Cope with WiFi Fuckup

Personally I find that wifibox is seamless, giving me modern 802.11ac speeds on my FreeBSD laptop. Not ideal, of course, but it removes a major pain point.

dddddavidddddon 90s Cursor Effects

> an extension that added physics to dragged icons (you could even throw them!)

I remember this, what a joy! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/

dddddavidddddon Orcas are breaking rudders off boats in Europe

Link to the episode: https://youtu.be/v1uaLWAZXfk

dddddavidddddon GitJournal: Mobile first Markdown notes synchronized with Git

I've been using this on my Android device, but have been thinking of making a simple web front end. Having to manually work with git on the desktop adds a lot of friction.

dddddavidddddon Mummified baby woolly mammoth found in the Yukon

My understanding is that genetic material needed for cloning is more complex than just the DNA sequence. The epigenetics (e.g. chemical modifications of the bases, histone-mediated packing of the DNA) aren't necessarily easy to examine or replicate in the best of cases with fresh material. DNA is like source code that requires a compatible compiler (i.e. everything around it in real life) to actually build.