Hacker News Reader

jackstraw14on Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?

ProtonVPN blocks ads and trackers, it's my solution and reasonably affordable.

jackstraw14on Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?

Brave browser + uBlock Origin is still great for a Chromium-flavored experience too.

jackstraw14on Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source

it certainly isn't an exercise for every meal. meat should be a delicacy, but we've turned it into a product and commodity.

jackstraw14on Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s?

They said they end up wanting what they wanted in their teenage years, not what was new then.

jackstraw14on Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s?

who said anything about coveting cars from the 80s.

jackstraw14on Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s?

Any lag at all helps the value of collectibles, especially stuff that deteriorates like cars and cards.

jackstraw14on How Apple Rules the World

An article written for 2012. It's not so bad now.

jackstraw14on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

That's so cool, mine was about 30 years ago. I had no idea they were still doing this!

jackstraw14on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

> A trusted third party

And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.

jackstraw14on Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

thanks for wearing it ironically but it's not helping.

jackstraw14on Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance

you should write a book on friendship. we kinda need it.

jackstraw14on France high-speed rail traffic disrupted by 'malicious acts' on Olympic ceremony

Destabilization. You can usually count on it if Russia is involved.

jackstraw14on Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

I think https://gwern.net/ is a pretty good example of a "personal site" that in another universe could be a regular blog. https://gwern.net/changelog is the only log part of it.

jackstraw14on Windows NT for Power Macintosh

> It also required a hefty 16MB RAM but as with all minimum system requirements from Microsoft, it really shined on 32MB+.

This is just me going down memory lane, but my aunt gave me her corporate Toshiba laptop with NT4 back in 1996 since she hated the idea of working from home back then. I made friends with a kid who brought his dad's work laptop to school with similar specs and it always ran blazingly faster, always wondered why. I remember my aunt's laptop had 16mb of RAM. Thanks for clearing this up :)

That Terraserver wiki article has my head spinning a bit. Crazy how time flies.

jackstraw14on Windows NT for Power Macintosh

Hard to say why.

Windows NT was something pretty interesting though. It was meant for a corporate environment but was well known as a much more "stable" version of Windows than 95 and 98. All happening in parallel, with the Power Macintosh even!

jackstraw14on Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

> What makes people so bad at swimming? Our big heads?

I never learned and never found the time to. But I'm pretty good at video games :)

jackstraw14on Tokyo's oldest train line – in pictures

Hmm, as a 6'2" person with claustrophobia issues, I'm quite certain my height makes it much worse!

jackstraw14on Show HN: A free minimalist daily habit tracker

Ever made a side bet with yourself to remove the middleman?

jackstraw14on Ask HN: Who Wants a Penpal?

Those really were the days. Met a few people online back then that I would have called real friends, but I didn't even know their real name.

jackstraw14on Ask HN: What book bit, stung and shook you deeply?

Infinite Jest. It haunts me mostly because of the sheer density of the information in the book, it's impossible, to me so far, to fully process everything in the book. Once I feel like I have a good sense of what was going on, I remember another detail that sends me on another year or two of random daydreams trying to figure it out.

Parts of it also feel like it was written specifically for me. So that doesn't help.

jackstraw14on Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

It looks like the companion app is in the App Store, but yeah if it's going to be open source then I don't understand either.

jackstraw14on What Is Generative Art? (2022)

> Is there no other way to make this a source of income other than NFTs?

If you really enjoy generative art I think this shouldn't distract from that enjoyment. It's a way to create unique digital outputs that can be owned by collectors (ie its not just right-click saving PNGs), so in a generic sense it's a natural fit. You don't have to get caught up in a crypto frenzy or spend hundreds of dollars to collect NFTs from a generative artist whose works you really like. The author of this article has many wonderful projects available in a reasonable price range (for art) on both Ethereum and Tezos blockchains.

jackstraw14on A knight's tale

That's fair, not sure if I had seen any of his movies when I was that age either. Maybe 10 Things I Hate About You. It was a big deal at the time and his death still makes me more sad than any other pop figure that's died in my lifetime, I think. I'm not sure if the death of River Phoenix felt the same way to his fans, but Heath Ledger made such a big impact for the short time he was with us... it's so sad that he didn't get more time to grow because he was one of the best.

jackstraw14on A knight's tale

I hadn't heard about this, how terrible. It sucks to give in to the attackers, but 20 BTC seems like a small price to pay compared to rebuilding from scratch.

One interesting bit toward the end of this article indicates the royal family has paid ransomware attackers too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240412005905/https://www.newyo...

jackstraw14on What if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?

Pot brigade? I'm not sure what that means but nightly smokers aren't having many dreams.

jackstraw14on No one buys books

how many years of print dominance?

welcome our overlords.

jackstraw14on Apple has reportedly acquired Datakalab

Well, my point was that the first iPhone set a standard for smartphones that wasn't there before. After iPhone v1, people knew that "apps" were how things were going to be packaged and sold in the App Store and other app stores. It was better than anything else at the time like the Vision Pro seems to be also.

jackstraw14on Apple has reportedly acquired Datakalab

True, but it seems more like it's placing a bet in the VR space like the first iPhone did. No one wanted iPhone v1 forever, and so I think the next few versions of the Vision Pro will be pretty interesting if this is the starting point. It also raises the bar of expectation for other VR/AR headsets. Seems like a net benefit for an area of tech that has been pretty stagnant for a while.

jackstraw14on Working with Qubes OS at the Guardian

> Their adversary collects hardware backdoors like baseball cards.

link?