Hacker News Reader

karhutonon Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs

Asahi and GNOME teams, please take this as an guide to implement ”Mac input compatibility mode”!

Dual booting between a MacOS and Linux is a painful process of manual keyboard and shorcut overrides to get the linux side somewhat to the (better) mac way of doing this.

karhutonon The EU Bans Social Media for Under-13s

Atleast some EU countries have ”strong authentication” services, which work like Google login, except there’s a network of trusted providers - like banks or telecoms.

To get started, you need get an account at one of the providers by physically visiting their store or office and show your ID. With their account you can sign up to the services or other auth providers fully online. Auth providers use 2-factor auth (typically website username + phone app), but they also include physical sim cards or key generator devices…

Anyways, while it’s currently used to pass some required personal info to the other party (name, social security number), it could propbably be changed to send just one bit: adult true/false.

karhutonon Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance

Your cheesing startegy sounds more like what would actually happen in movies, where the protagonists get a last minute dangerous idea to skip jump past the overwhelming enemies and save the day…

Funnily enough doing it yourself in the game may feel like just cheating, but watching a movie one would be celebrating along.

karhutonon How powerful is your passport? What's your mobility score?

Ad/paywall.

Direct link to ranking data source: https://www.passportindex.org/

Menu > Rank > Global

karhutonon Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

Big thank you for your work!

Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.

karhutonon If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

My understanding is Apple / Webkit is blocking custom element extension on native HTML elements, which would cut down this 500 line monster to:

class SaganButton extends HTMLButtonElement { … }

Anyone know the reasoning they’re blocking this?

karhutonon The 15-minute city is a dead end

I’m currently living in a Northern European one and the income island thing was solved with city planning: the same area has mix of private and city owned apartment buildings. Some buildings are mix-owned too, so city owns like 50% of the apartments.

Here you’m find a person living on social security and someone with half a million apartment loan, having a neighbourly chat while their kids playtogether in the common courtyard.

karhutonon All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

These are amazing. It feels so clear to see a visual ”map” of the cooking process before you even start.

This would help coordinate two cooks to make prepping more independent.

I’m trying to figure out if an landscape Ipad, with interactive elements for extra details if needed, would be a good UI for this.

Edit: Showed it to my non-Engineer wife and she said ”this is horrible” after staring at it for 10 seconds. Maybe not for everyone…

karhutonon Show HN: Iron-Wolf – Wolfenstein 3D source port in Rust

Stein means rock. Wolfenstein is something like Wolf’s rock.

Eisen means Iron. You could name it Wolfeneisen?

karhutonon Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Great work. As a European designer, really happy to see competition. Figma is slowly jacking up prices and companies are starting to lean on seats.

Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.

So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.

Your pricing is way too high.

World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!

How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.

P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:

- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)

- components

- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support

Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.

Edit: I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?

karhutonon My review of the Nüborn Baby at 3 months

Did it and can’t say yet I’d be very happy with the decision.

The first new feature we got on BOTH models was synced alarms! Why? It was already most hated feature on a stand-alone setup.

Also, their communication system between the models is a VERY noisy ad hoc wiresless audio mesh network.

(I have to admit it works better than our Wifi across the apartment – but I guess it’s because there’s no legal TX Watt limits!)

karhutonon Mana LLM OS

Great, finally something ambitious enough.

However, may I make a speculate here a little..

The brand and presentation seem to try to appeal to (young) tech savvy people; but those are the ones who are hardest to win due to so many different needs they have for their OS and software running on it. Similarly why people don’t move from Windows to Linux.

Thus, I’d be afraid this might very easily end up in the ”toy” category like the many alternative cloud or browser OSes.

So, instead, why not take a chapter from Chromebook’s.. book, and target the users with simplest needs: the non-technical. Those, who just ”need a browser in a laptop”.

New selling points: - No need to update it, it takes care of its self - No need to install suspicious apps, it can make the things you need - No menus full of apps, settings and actions you will never use; only what you actually want - You can’t break it, it can protect itself from accidents - Never again odd error messages, it can always explain them to you ELI5 and help to fix them

And lastly: - Nothing to ”learn” - always just ask and it’ll do it for you

karhutonon Show HN: Til.re – The URL is your timer, no signup required

Great, thanks. Bookmarked.

Note: The last buttons slide below the browser chrome on iPhone Safari, when the there’s nothing to scroll.

Sometimes 100dvh helps instead of 100vh, if the document vertical size is used to define layout.

karhutonon We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

I made this because I got tired of screensharing issues in corporate environments: https://bluescreen.live (code via github).

Screenshot once per second. Works everywhere.

I’m still waiting for mobile screenshare api support, so I could quickly use it to show stuff from my phone to other phones with the QR link.

karhutonon Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

Finnish to the rescue:

Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.

karhutonon Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.

It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.

Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.

The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.

I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.

Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:

These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.

karhutonon The disguised return of EU Chat Control

”2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right EXCEPT such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

Are we reading the same thing?

This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.

karhutonon Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language

Wow. Looking at the schema for gif, it’s so readable, I can’t help to wonder why something like this hasn’t become the standard way to work with binary formats over the decades already!

Seems like eveything has to be JSON and text based these days, because binary is more difficult DX.

When reading articles discussing binary formats, I usually see them using box diagrams of packets, description tables or hexdumps.

This neatly describes nested structure, names and ”types” - just enough.

I wonder if there’s a hexdump like viewer in IDEs that can present binary files like this? I can also imagine a simple UI to make the files editable using this.

karhutonon Show HN: AirAP AirPlay server – AirPlay to an iOS Device

You can give this a go. Made it for just this type of scenarios: https://bluescreen.live

If it works for you, happy the help you setup a private instance or something. And for in-office use, maybe optimize for quality rather than minimal updates it is now.

karhutonon Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) [pdf]

After certain age, all school students up to university use/have a computer.

If they end up in an office job, they very likely will have/keep one around.

And even when not, people with higher education tend to like use the home computer for certain things. For example ”official stuff” like doing taxes, using government services. Maybe throw in some more detailed trip planning, hobbies, spreadsheets…

karhutonon A single line of code cost $8000

To be as user friendly as possible, always ask if user wants automatic background updates or not. If you can’t update without user noticing it, please implement manual updates as two mechanisms:

1) Emergency update for remote exploit fixes only

2) Regular updates

The emergency update can show a popup, but only once. It should explain the security risk. But allow user to decline, as you should never interrupt work in progress. After decline leave an always visible small warning banner in the app until approved.

The regular update should never popup, only show a very mild update reminder that is NOT always visible, instead behind a menu that is frequently used. Do not show notification badges, they frustrate people with inbox type 0 condition.

This is the most user friendly way of suggesting manual updates.

You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.

karhutonon Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.

I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.

It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.

Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.

karhutonon Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

True. When the complexity of the software causes lot of usability issues in ”edge cases”, these technically capable customer connected people are really worth it.

I’ve also seen good things coming from hiring actual ex-users from potential customers that were using competitor’s products. They’d do user training, customer software configuration and development team support. Sometimes even full time.

But these people are good day-to-day at ironing out the details. Maybe even discovering underlying dissatisfaction with the product.

But the startup’s constant worry should be what else software is being used, how to be relevant in the future. Maybe through cutting costs in the process by co-designing new workflows to eliminate current tasks.

Executives at the client may be more intrested in finding ways to eliminate all the staff with automation in the process rather than optimizing their tools.

You’re not getting that input from the people working on the tasks now.

karhutonon Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

Here’s some typical reasons why a startup can fail:

1) it failed to communicate and market it’s product

2) it’s product didn’t fit the user’s needs

3) it’s technology strategy made development too expensive

4) it’s product technical quality was too low

5) it’s product did not look appealing to potential new users

Developers are responsible for 3 and 4, sales and marketing for 1 and finally designers for 2 and 5.

With competent developers you can start a startup and make sure 3 and 4 never come to pass, but lack of good product designer will eventually kill it.

Here I use the broader sense of user-centered designer, which includes:

- research

- testing

- prototyping

- validation

- UI/UX design

- visual design

- …

The first four being the most important for a product market fit.

This is especially important for B2B products, because there understanding the needs of the business and their processes is key to making sure the product fits the user’s day-to-day work but the businesses’ future needs as well.

It may not be common, but you can and should use extended UCD research methods on the customer business processes itself instead of relying on PMs and sales just asking customer’s what they want. (This is often called Business Design or Service Design around here.)

karhutonon Product Development Processes You Might Not Have Heard of (2022)

> Scrum with 2 week sprints may work very well in larger corporates, but startups who need to pivot regularly and change direction may not be as well suited to such a fixed process.

If your pivot frequency < 2 weeks, sprint length is not the problem.