Hacker News Reader

kotaKaton RAM Altman: Linux Script Emails Sam Altman Daily How Much Unused RAM in Your PC

if you're on ubo lite, move from 'optimized' to full for that page and it shoooould dump adshield out.

kotaKaton Yes, You Can Pass a Nuclear Missile Driving on Interstate 80 Through Wyoming

And for the other section mentioned from the DOE Office of Secure Transportation:

"The Safeguards Transport program is so secretive that only three photographs of the unknown number of vehicles have been publicly released."

... here's quite a few hundred more (moving) photographs of them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8yLYLSzoIw

kotaKaton The Ubuntu 26.04 Rust sudo is not compatible with standard sudo

Sidebar: TFW I haven't updated Thorium Mac since V150.

I got dumped to https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-bad/cspace-old-browser.... trying to visit the page.

kotaKaton Hospital gave sick doctor a special PC for his personal, erm, pleasure

Partially! Fight Club. Never make any assumptions to the doctor. It's not their porn, it's somehow porn.

Silently document/log it including evidence and report it to your supervisor.

The project manager, when he was a PFY on the desk, made assumptions to the doctor. The angriest doctor on staff. I'm surprised he's still alive to this day after that, let alone in the C-suite now.

kotaKaton Hospital gave sick doctor a special PC for his personal, erm, pleasure

Yep. Happens all the time in healthcare IT. "The doctor is one of our multi-million-dollar revenue generators, so we let it slide" is the excuse. Every time.

I've personally written up a chief radiologist before for it. Zero action, because "he made the facility $6m+ last year" in rural nowhere.

It was actually one of the helpdesk's interview questions - "how do you handle responding to a doctor whose machine is full of porn?"

No wonder years later they got slammed by ransomware.

kotaKaton App Store 2026 in numbers: AI, pricing, abandoned apps

Do you even need the top chart when you open the app and every other day it's either a Scopely property or Monopoly Go?

It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freeca...

kotaKaton Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late

> practically unusable

Hey, as one of the people that flashed Android onto one of my old HTC Windows Mobile phones and tried to daily it, I resent that!

(We used to make it work in the 1.6-2.x era...)

kotaKaton Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late

That thing was so cursed because it was in the dark "inbetween" times of Windows Mobile 6.5 (and how desperately it was trying to cling onto) and WP7 (that they thought was going to kill Apple).

But damnit, the Kin ONE was a beautiful form factor and I loved that pebble. The software was terrible and I always wish I could have bailed it out to a generic CE desktop to make it do more dumb things.

kotaKaton Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base

... My mind wandered to the old Xbox font exploits. Bert & Ernie Reloaded!

http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...

kotaKaton Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders

Somehow it feels like it's real (for some people) in experience. I've dealt with both Spectrum/TWC and Verizon FiOS support within the last couple of years and been pleasantly surprised that I could talk 'tech' with the first person I encountered and we cut right through all the troubleshooting bullshit to get things fixed.

Spectrum - we had a voice and a data cable modem (due to location and cabling requirements). Lost the phone service. Called in and the first things I offered them were the MAC addresses off both modems and which one was supposed to be which. That set off the "shit, he knows what he's doing" moment and we got both modems running correctly in less than ten minutes, including IVR and hold time.

Verizon - had a weird ticket that ended up being a NOC issue. Explained the odd backstory of events, a ticket that happened a couple days prior that I was part of a regional outage, and the Tier 1 guy had me hop on a video call to point my camera at my computer at the ONT where I basically did everything without him asking me to (cabling direct, pulling up IP status info, etc, live reboots) and he ran it by a NOC guy remotely and it ended up being a bigger ticket above me. Took an extra day of a regional outage, but that data helped them get rolling.

kotaKaton Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders

There was also the horrifying Trojan Condom Dash button.

Envisioning the gigolo opening up their nightstand drawer, shocked they're down to their last couple rubbers... slapping the button and getting back to some other slapping.

kotaKaton Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late

Now if someone could just unearth a copy of Blackberry Internet Services (the proper BIS, not the enterprise BES) to get ancient Blackberries online again...

kotaKaton Postal Service Surveilled Protest Activities Online with Little Rules, Oversight

https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/us-postal-insp...

"The Postal Inspection Service’s activities must have an identified connection to the mail, postal crimes, or the security of Postal Service facilities or personnel (postal nexus) prior to commencing. However, the keywords used for iCOP in the proactive searches did not include any terms with a postal nexus"

Turns out it's supposed to be used to protect the integrity of the mail system, though "postal crimes" can cast a super wide net in the USPS purview.

It also turns out according to the USPS Office of the Inspector General that they don't do that.

"We determined that certain proactive searches iCOP conducted using an open-source intelligence tool from February to April 2021 exceeded the Postal Inspection Service’s law enforcement authority. Furthermore, we could not corroborate whether other work analysts completed from October 2018 through June 2021 was legally authorized"

kotaKaton Hackers hit French national blood bank

Something akin to Mikrotik's "device mode".

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/93749258/Dev...

If I have to enable a privileged operation (like enable container support), I have to change a device-mode flag. To confirm it, I have to either physically push the Reset button on the device or pull the power from it physically within a set window of time.

Push the setting to the freezer but require a physical button press/power control action from someone locally to confirm the new setting change.

Have a big pop-up message on the HMI that says "TEMP CHANGE REQUEST: CURRENTLY 0C, REQUESTED 66C - OK?" so someone can yelp and go This doesn't look right! and call in the experts for help.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be feasible for some applications? Yes.

kotaKaton Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand

Depends on level of "prosumer". If "work pays for it", then a $5000 Thunderbolt connected LTO-7 is on the table. These have been lurking around the Mac space for a few years now for video folks to dump footage to LTFS.

https://mlogic.com/products/mlogic-mtape-desktop-thunderbolt...

kotaKaton Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines

Don't forget having to shove all the "recommendation" and "suggestion" systems into it, too, so they could add random sponsored apps to your Start menu primed and ready to install as soon as you clicked on them at the same time they push more notifications at you to use more OneDrive.

kotaKaton OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats

> This isn’t the only legal case Annie has been fighting against Sam and her other relatives in recent years. She also successfully sued the family over money left by the Altman siblings’ late father, Jerry Altman, that the family withheld from her for several years.

The family has a grind to pick against her and is defending their golden child.

kotaKaton Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI

That's what every Big Tech company has done when threatened with loss of access to their children: weaponize the children themselves with poor gaslighting to fight the adults so Big Tech gets its way.

Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.

When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.

kotaKaton uBlock Origin filter to block autoplay videos in TechCrunch

Any solutions for eBay? The super hostile "eBay Live" videos intertwined everywhere on the main page are awful.

Either it's bad AI coverart (bonus points for 'glamming it up' with a 'sexy lady' as your stream photo to lure desperate men in), or it loads into a stream with some random middle-aged chud trying to hawk bad baseball cards for "$2 starts!" as you're trying to scroll through the listings.

kotaKaton Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal

Kids also got a toy based off of Timex Datalink - I had one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8ig2UPjOXQ

... The DSI e-BRAIN is also fully working in timex_datalink_client, which amuses me so: https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client/issues/111

kotaKaton Ballot Rejections Have Soared in Rural Counties as USPS Reduces Mail Service

Yep. Welcome to "regional transportation optimization". Every single day is painful being in an RTO territory for the post office.

https://www.savethepostoffice.com/rto-n2024-1/

It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.

If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.

I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.

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

Boonies? No. Literally EVERYONE has a damn Alexa and it's on the network. The coverage map is staggering. https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/

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

They don't have to cut direct with the operator. They can go up a little higher in the chain to a global "wifi offload" operator like Wefi.

https://www.wefi.com/wifi-offload

Then they can just get Passpoint access through a shitton of various endpoints.

kotaKaton Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare

... funny thing, that. How about Uber for Amazon? Literally just gigwork in the warehouses at this point, in four hour shift chunklets.

https://hiring.amazon.com/promotions/anytime-shifts

kotaKaton Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions

Verizon forces me if I want battery backup for my ONT to provide 12 D cell batteries.

https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...

What a fuckin' joke.

kotaKaton Hackers hijack Egypt highway billboard and Malaysian screens to show porn

Iunno, but it was a blast going back through Rockos Modern Life as an adult and catching all the shit I missed as a kid.

kotaKaton Anthropic takes steps to block Claude from reverse-engineering video games

That’s about five months of wages up here in rural nowhere NY doing IT, for what it’s worth.

Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.

kotaKaton Show HN: A USB-C LTE modem that gives my computer a phone line

They're not fully confident yet on the mmWave to go in the Macbook.

There's a reason they carefully have been bringing their own modem in via "weird" devices. The C1 came in on the 16e, C1X was the Air (phone+iPad), and they're finally confident enough to bring C2 to the mainline iPhones, but it seems like maybe not ready until C3 comes around next fall.

kotaKaton Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts

"Scan this QR code!"

kotaKaton How long do you need to hold down the power button to turn off a PC?

The cool thing is my office Microsoft Surface Laptop that will randomly wake up and sit there with its keyboard backlight full on and act dead... then you have to hold it for 30 seconds!

I guess I'm the one contributing to those crashlogs.