Hacker News Reader

dshepon Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

Nokia suffered from lack of direction from the top... They had both symbian and maemo, both officially blessed, but incompatible. Symbian was the past and maemo had promise, so what did management do... a hail mary bet on microsoft? It came out of nowhere and seemed desperate, I believe the market's reaction reflected this sadly.

dshepon Alan Kay: A Conversation with CMU Faculty and Students (2007) [video]

If you are talking about the Butler Lampson talk that Alan Kay mentions, I would also be interested if anyone has found this somewhere ...

dshepon Stripe Press

Sweet website, been meaning to pick up a copy of the Dream Machine...

dshepon My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

Steve Yegge had a lot of similar stories about Amazon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiqYKF0WzjQ

dshepon Raspberry Pi 2.5 Gbps OMV NAS Performance

https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Non-Raid-Adapter-Desktop-Sup...

Haven't tried it personally, but maybe it works? :)

dshepon Raspberry Pi 2.5 Gbps OMV NAS Performance

Pretty neat. I have been thinking about how I can build a tiny NAS, but I would like ECC so that rules out the pi, etc.

Best option I have found so far might be this ASRock 4x4-v2000 https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4-V2000M , it has an 8-core cpu and supports ECC. Would need to get a M.2 to 4x SATA adapter. The hard part seems to be figuring out how to buy the board itself...

dshepon Jonathan Blow on the “Stack”

It might not be a great analogy but its hilarious.

dshepon Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal

I guess this is cool, but maybe they should focus on actually making Windows Terminal into a usable terminal emulator first. I've found so many bugs with it and it still doesn't even have a GUI for its settings.

dshepon The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)

Seriously watch every Alan Kay (not the survivalist) video on youtube, you will not regret it. It's practically criminal that they have such low view counts.

dshepon How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

Am I the only one that finds these BD robots kind of repulsive? They are so weird and alien and... unnatural.

dshepon Ask HN: What is the most inspiring documentary film in your opinion?

For 2020 its gotta be:

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

dshepon Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)

I was a cog at Nokia during the time the iPhone was released. So look forward to reading this and hope it sheds some light on Nokia's implosion. It felt like Nokia cut its own head off pretty needlessly. Nokia was still making better hardware in lots of ways (better call quality, better cameras). Symbian was pretty terrible though. It could do a lot but was hard to use. I always thought Nokia should have ditched Symbian and adopt Android, as it was pretty clear that had potential coming from Google, and they needed better hardware partners. I would like to see how what would have played out in an alternative reality...

dshepon Ask HN: Brave Instead of Firefox?

I replaced Chrome with Brave more than a year ago and I recommend it as basically a better version of Chrome. The script blocking feature is especially useful for nytimes, and other paywall sites. The one problem I have had was my computer crashed at one point and Brave completely lost my session (4 windows, probably ~100 tabs in total). So now using Firefox mostly, even though I like it less, with Brave as a 2nd browser.

dshepon An iOS zero-click radio proximity exploit odyssey

Excellent video and nice write-up!

dshepon Why Use ECC? (2015)

i3-8100 cpus support ECC

dshepon Brave Browser Passes 20M Monthly Active Users and 7M Daily Active Users

Noscript is incredibly fussy and hard to use. Also it does not have the 'allow scripts [to run] once' ability afaict.

dshepon Brave Browser Passes 20M Monthly Active Users and 7M Daily Active Users

I've been using Brave most of this year and really like it.

The killer feature for me is that it lets you disable scripts for individual websites or 'Allow scripts once'. This basically makes most paywall news sites readable.

dshepon Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use?

bazqux.com, highly recommend.

dshepon On the foolishness of “natural language programming” (1979)

For better or worst, reading Dijkstra always reminds of these funny (I think) comments that Alan Kay made in 1997...

"Arrogance in Computer Science is measured in nano-Dijkstras" --Alan Kay

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KivesLMncs

dshepon BEHEMOTH – Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy

I imagine a lot of people here might be too young to know about Steve K Roberts. He had an earlier bike called WINNEBIKO (II?). Imagine yourself as a kid in the 80s watching something like this on TV, it was super cool.

High-Tech Bike on Spectacular World of Guinness Records - 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2G6DtfZFUU

Xerox PARC Winnebiko presentation by Steve Roberts - 1989

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU6MXakwcjI

It's easy to overlook how inspiring this was without knowing about the context in which we lived back in the 80/90s. No one had cell phones, few people had computers, or had ever used a computer network, let alone the internet. I'm not sure I had even used a computer at the time, and I saw this guy on TV talking about being able to: write a book while riding his bike, talk to people all over the world via computer network, work remotely, it was poof mind blown. Like looking 15 years into the future.

Later on during University, after my first summer programming internship I read his book, "Computing Across America", which I highly recommend. For me at least, Steve was also kind of a lifestyle guru. Reading his book you realized you that you didn't have to be chained to a desk in an office, that technology would open up new lifestyles. It was a wake up moment where I tried to visualize my ideal life, and where the normal way of things was no longer interesting and something to avoid.

Steve Roberts has a youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/microship/videos

dshepon Uber Is Hurting Drivers Like Me in Its Legal Fight in California

These discussions always remind me of this MMM blog about his experience being an Uber driver:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/22/mr-money-mustache...

This is one of my favorite quotes:

"Imagine developing a company specifically to take advantage of people’s ignorance of how expensive it really is to drive their own car. What would this company look like?" (the answer is of course that it would look like very much like Uber or any other ridesharing company)

dshepon Jaron Lanier on social media

I am a big fan of Lanier. I think he provides a very interesting perspective on social media and the future that I haven't found elsewhere. I really recommend watching this recent talk he gave, long, but worth it:

Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOlqzMd2Zw

dshepon WordPressiOS Locked by App Store

You would actually need to raise your original price 43% to cover Apple's 30%. And yeah I agree, I am surprised more Apps don't take this approach. But perhaps it is discouraged somehow.

dshepon Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

Trying to paint this 17-year old kid as a criminal mastermind strikes me as rather gross. I can see it as a kid doing it to see if he could, and using an obviously meme-worthy fake post that got out of hand. I think everyone has done some dumb things at this age without thinking about the consequences. If that is the case here, I hope this doesn't ruin the guys life.

dshepon Insured price $2,758, cash price $521

I recently took my GF to the ER because she had been stung by a bee and was worried she was allergic. She was feeling dizzy but once we were in the ER she started feeling better. They basically took her vitals, waited 30 minutes or so, gave her a steroid, and then sent us home. They told us it probably wouldn't be very expensive as she was uninsured.

Later the bills arrived: $1300 from the ER ($1900 minus a $600 uninsured discount) and $600 from the PA who saw us. Insane!

dshepon Linux Kernel Developer Criticizes Intel for Meltdown, Spectre Response

I get the impression OpenBSD isn't so happy with Intel:

Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17829790

dshepon The new MacBook Pros with T2 chips do indeed kernel panic randomly

I hadn't ever noticed that, but it must be because of the trackpoint. The trackpoint is centered in between the home keys so you can reach it with your index fingers, mouse buttons below that for thumbs, and thus trackpad below buttons. The root issue is that the place you rest your hands on a qwerty keyboard is slightly left of center.

Edit: now I can't unsee that MBP has its trackpad right of home key center :)

dshepon Dell XPS 13 Review from a lifelong Mac user

As far as non-apple laptops go, XPS13 seems a solid choice but I think this Huawei would be my first choice now (look at that screen!) https://consumer.huawei.com/us/tablets/matebook-x-pro/

dshepon Want airline food? Take Amtrak

I've only taken Amtrak once, from Portland to San Francisco. One of the best parts was having dinner in the dining car. Two older ladies invited me to join them because I was by myself and we had a nice chat while cruising through the mountains. Sad to see it go, but I guess it was only a matter of time.

dshepon Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

Is this why Google News on mobile is so terrible? Feels like using an android news app inside of Safari. Thumbs down.