Hacker News Reader

mattparcheron Welcome (Back) Network Utility – new free Mac app

A spiritual successor to Apple’s Network Utility, which was removed from macOS after 10.15 (a.k.a. Catalina, c. 2019).

You can download Neo Network Utility from https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware

mattparcheron My take on how DuckDuckGo can outperform Google

The elephant in the room: DDG's search results are primarily sourced from Bing.

Unfortunately, as long as DDG depends on third-party crawlers, the suggestions to improve search results (& "the algorithm") seem far-fetched & naive.

(DDG does have its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, but apparently it's only used for very specific functionality.) https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> For DuckDuckGo, it may be tricky to resolve the issue permanently as long as it relies on Bing. https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-restores-pirate-sites-an...

> According to various online forums, the best way to ensure your site gets indexed by DuckDuckGo is to submit it to Bing and Yandex. https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/03/25/my-website-disa...

mattparcheron Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

As Steve Jobs would say, “real artists ship”. (Except now, they’re shipping at a much larger scale...)

mattparcheron China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app

IANAL, but “evade law enforcement” seems inaccurate.

> HKMAP helps residents comply with the wishes of law enforcement (who communicate their demands by colored flags quickly raised in the dark).

> …[the app] doesn't contravene any Hong Kong law that I am aware of. This app helps answer questions like "will I get shot with a bean bag round if I come out of this MTR station, because the police raised a colored flag I can't see".

—Maciej Ceglowski, the American who runs the Pinboard bookmarking service, who has been in Hong Kong for a while now, to follow the protests.

Thread about how the app works, and how it keeps non-protesters safe: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1179233936582565888

About the use of tear gas and bean bag rounds: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1181790019943452675

mattparcheron Developers don’t want to show gameplay at E3 anymore

Can you expand on your Google comment re. RCS? All I’ve seen recently is that they’re taking the reins from the carriers (at least outside of the US) to speed-up rollout.

mattparcheron Native image lazy-loading for the web

Arguably, Apple already offers a version of a “pre-load” button in Safari (on iOS and macOS), with the setting to “Automatically save Reading List articles for offline reading”. (Not on by default, but the user sees a prompt to turn it on the first time they add an article to the Reading List.)

Ideally, you could add an article to the Reading List on your computer, and then view it later on your phone that downloaded it in the background when it still had network access.

In practice, my quick testing results just now were mixed: Safari kept saying that a Medium article wasn’t available offline, a Quartz article only loaded the header (with what looked like a fully-opaque white overlay covering the content itself), but a Daring Fireball post (i.e., without any JavaScript trickery) loaded just fine.

A how-to for this feature: https://www.macworld.com/article/3252168/how-to-set-offline-...

mattparcheron App Store Improvements

Not ideal, but in case you haven't seen it, Apple's Music Memos app has a built-in tuner.

mattparcheron Turn your handwriting into a font

I realize that you’re referring to traditionally-typed text, but Monotype was recently commissioned to design a typeface for the illustrator of Roald Dahl’s books, and they did indeed include alternates for each letter (along with variations in kerning):

>…He selected four subtly different alternates for each character that, combined, would make the text look random enough to look authentic while keeping the glyph set manageable

Article: http://www.monotype.com/expertise/case-studies/a-bespoke-han...

Visual comparison of the alternates: http://www.monotype.com/media/1837/quentin-alternates2.png

mattparcheron Why Britain banned mobile apps for government agencies

From Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:

>He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4507930/the-revolution-wil...

mattparcheron Apple Legal Process Guidelines [pdf]

Ugh. I’m disappointed that they’re referring to storage capacity as “memory capacity”, perpetuating the pervasive confusion amongst non-technical users.

mattparcheron Understanding the 9.7" iPad Pro's Display: How DCI-P3 and True Tone Work

Also see Craig Hockenberry piece, for more on the implications of all this for developers and designers: http://blog.iconfactory.com/2016/04/looking-at-the-future/

One of his key points: As a developer, you’ll quickly realize that the scope of these changes will make your update to Retina graphics look like a walk in the park.

Craig is also currently working on a book “that helps you understand color in laymen’s terms, use color management with step-by-step instructions for popular apps like Photoshop, and guides you with the work necessary to create great looking web and native apps.”

mattparcheron Picturelife joins StreamNation

One caveat to your point: in that comment, the Picturelife CEO was apparently criticizing Loom for shutting down their service after being acquired by Dropbox. In this case, it sounds like Streamnation really intends to keep running (and improve) the existing Picturelife service. [1]

[1] "We love Picturelife": https://www.streamnation.com/blog/index.php/we-love-picturel...

mattparcheron 80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POLICE_TRACKING_AP...

From the article: Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google's chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be "misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community."

mattparcheron Diversity at Amazon

Note: The two donut charts for "Race and Ethnicity" are visually misleading. The color assigned to each race or ethnicity is not consistent between the two charts, so a visual comparison of the two is much less useful. ("White" is represented by blue on both charts, but green is "Black" on the overall chart and "Asian" on the Managers chart.)

mattparcheron Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?

Thank you for the confirmation — I have had the same bug with the alarm sound several times now. What I found is that I could stop it only by opening the Clock app, and selecting a new alarm sound (e.g., by editing an alarm), triggering it to play that sound instead, which I could then easily stop.

mattparcheron Put.io

I’m assuming that the service cost doesn't come primarily from storage, but rather from bandwidth usage, and the increase in hardware requirements for handling a larger number of torrents.

mattparcheron Gmail Glitch Is Causing 1000s Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account

This made me laugh:

...he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.

mattparcheron MasterCard's Simplify Commerce

Something that caught my eye: the name "Simplify" is pretty close to "Simple", the online bank service.

Different products entirely, I realize—but heck, Simple’s twitter handle is even @simplify.

mattparcheron Google Search Terms Can Predict the Stock Market

Somewhat related, on a more micro level: some have suggested a trend in which news about Anne Hathaway drives up the price Berkeshire Hathaway’s stock.

Six examples from 2008-2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-mirvish/the-hathaway-effec...

A computer scientist who works with hedge funds: "We come across all sorts of strange things in our line of business, strange correlations" http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/03/does-ann...

As the intelligence of our technology grows, I find it amusing to consider these less-logical patterns in the algorithms (indirectly) responsible for so much of our economy.

mattparcheron Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

Definitely worth checking out. Unfortunately, HTML5 YouTube players seem to start playing automatically, so I can’t just open links to YouTube videos in background tabs.

I look forward to a setting (or simply changing the default for non-active windows) to disable autoplay.

mattparcheron George Lucas Will Use Disney $4 Billion to Fund Education

A bit of unsolicited advice for your indiegogo campaign: dropping the f-word in your campaign title (“seed filmmaking equipment for our college, you f ckers”) probably isn’t a great idea. I am not at all offended myself, but I think it may be off-putting to quite a few folks out there who may otherwise be interested in helping.

mattparcheron Take A Closer Look At The Icon For Apple's Terrible Maps App

Note: the linked article was not originally written by SFGate or the San Francisco Chronicle, but rather republished from Business Insider (the small logo to indicate this seems a bit subtle to me).

I would argue that this is a worthwhile distinction, in that Business Insider is generally regarded as being closer to the inflammatory and attention-grabbing nature of a tabloid than a traditional news publication—though I recognize that they are simply one of many popular outlets using similar tactics.

mattparcheron On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

(I understand that you’re probably being somewhat sarcastic, but for the sake of semantics…)

It’s pretty clear by the amount of change (and Apple’s marketing efforts) that each OS 10.#.0 release is a "major" OS update, on par with the relative significance of each iOS #.0 release.

But Gruber may have over-generalized here. Indeed, Apple has added major new features in iOS .# updates, e.g. AirPlay and AirPrint in 4.2, or the Personal Hotspot feature in 4.3.

What they haven’t done is change key functionality in a point update, let alone introduce regressions. (In fact, before this incident, I’m struggling to recall Apple ever removing/crippling existing functionality.) If they were going to perform a full Maps switch-out, maybe they felt that now would be the best time, if only because there is so much positive press out there to temper the backlash.

Edit: Regarding removed features, I was mostly thinking of Apple’s record with iOS. As gurkendoktor points out, they have certainly removed ("simplified") functionality in Mac OS X, often creating great frustration.

mattparcheron MMO in loving tribute to xkcd-1110

Tip: As others mentioned, you can switch to a ghost by clicking on yourself, allowing you to pass through solid objects. Once you are in front of a solid object, you can click on yourself again to return to your normal self and travel more quickly through the solid object.

mattparcheron Has Apple Peaked?

For the unfamiliar, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines[1]:

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

mattparcheron Writing Rules: Advice From The Times on Writing Well

On the subject of “writing rules”:

The submitted article is titled “Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well”, but (as of this writing) the title appears here on HN as “Writing Rules Advice From The Times on Writing Well”.

Arguably, the modified title is readable, and largely conveys the meaning of the original article.

But certainly the run-on converted title is quite different than the source. I wonder if the HN parser would do well to, instead of simply stripping all exclamation marks as a matter of principle, at least convert mid-title exclamations to a hyphen, to indicate the separation within the original title?

E.g. “Writing Rules – Advice From The Times on Writing Well”

(Even then, “Rules” loses its original implication as an excited verb to instead become a noun, but this particular confusion may be unavoidable.)

mattparcheron YouTube launches their iPhone app

Yes, unfortunately. Apps take time to show up in search results even after they are officially on the store. (The time before visibility, either in search results or even at a direct link, can vary by country as well.)

mattparcheron Twitter Reportedly Discontinuing Development of Its Mac Client

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to build a Twitter client. They’re simply not interested in putting in that kind of work for a third party’s product/service, without incredibly strong incentive.

I believe the last time they did anything like this was on the iPhone, when they built custom apps for YouTube and Google Maps—but they did that almost out of necessity for the user experience, since there were no usable alternatives for those services. (Additionally, with the YouTube app, Apple wanted to encourage adoption of "HTML5" H.264 video, because the majority of video content still required Adobe Flash, unplayable on the iPhone.)

This is all besides the fact that Twitter is now strongly discouraging clients, which apparently now includes their own…

mattparcheron Kickstarter Is Totally Disrupting Consumer Electronics, Probably By Mistake

A former roommate of mine is finishing a game (inspired by Ender's Game) with Kickstarter funding, and they've actually released a playable prototype for backers--even though the Kickstarter campaign isn't even over yet.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mercenary-games/vigrior-...

mattparcheron YC Facelift: Flutter

After downloading it, Flutter appears to only Play & Pause in iTunes and Spotify (on Mac & Windows). I imagine (and hope) that they're working on supporting more gestures and more apps!