HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

randomfool

1,679 karma · joined May 1, 2012

submissionscomments
randomfool··on Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
Sinofsky kept talking about how many devs were making apps in JavaScript and how they would just be at home in Win8. This was before React, ES5 (no native classes! or promises!), etc- jQuery was still very popular and SPAs were extremely rare. He completely overlooked how dependent many of these devs were on their servers- Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.
randomfool··on Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
They were recovering from all of the security fiascos of software that wasn’t being updated. So they pushed as much as they could into the core libraries and forced only one version to be installed at a time- so they could easily push security fixes.

This led to one of the trickiest things for early .NET consumer apps- getting the latest runtime installed.

randomfool··on Amazon targets as many as 30k corporate job cuts, sources say
Took MS 14 years to figure that one out. Even with accelerating tech timelines, Jassy has some time.
randomfool··on Inside Palantir: Profits, Power and the Kill Machine
This is why the military is supposed to stay out of US cities and spy agencies respect citizens privacy.

Cowards all around with no moral compass.

randomfool··on High Altitude Living – 8,000 ft and above (2021)
So easy to protect from the sun and the reward in the mountains is so wonderful. Terrible waste to stay locked in.

Wouldn’t be surprised if this were another contributor to less heart disease- so much incentive to get outside and do stuff.

randomfool··on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
From a source closely involved with this- Amazon tracks many productivity metrics of employees and was seeing very significant differences between in-person and remote people, which drove the decision.

Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved.

Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.

randomfool··on The Factory Timezone
Sounds more like https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-gli...
randomfool··on The case against conversational interfaces
And yet here we are, discussing this in a threaded conversation.
randomfool··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
The actual issue is that the winning bid was $7m- $1.75m cash + $5.25m in debt forgiveness. The question is whether that bid is higher than the competing $3.5m all-cash bid.

That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.

randomfool··on Show HN: Wat – Deep inspection of Python objects
For object inspection in Jupyter if doing more numpy type things, check out penzai: https://github.com/google-deepmind/penzai
randomfool··on Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
These limits are far below standard scraping rates and deeply affecting the casual users, have to presume intentionally.
randomfool··on Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
Same- rate limited after 20 mins. Way to force me to move elsewhere.

Advertising must really be in the hole to force users off the site like this.

randomfool··on Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs
Maintaining services that no one knows anything about, management afraid to let anyone touch anything because no one understands what may break. Everyone griping about the systems they don't know, wanting to re-implement from scratch but not having the time to do so.

Sounds like a blast.

randomfool··on Hackers drain $100M off Solana-based DeFi platform Mango Markets
We’re laughing at the game creators. They’re the ones who decided to rewrite the rules, often with little understanding of economics.
randomfool··on Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking
Not using your Garmin for hiking is very surprising.

Primary reason is that tracking position for the duration drains battery where Garmin can do 50hrs of it. This gives me a .gpx file of the route for future reference and passing to friends.

Second is that while tracking it's 10x easier to check current distance and elevation on a watch vs phone. I head out with a list of mileage for every notable waypoint (water, turns, elevation of passes, etc). I'm constantly checking this and only if I'm questioning my route do I pull out my phone.

Weight: Fenix is heavy- 945 is better, Coros Pace 2 even better.

randomfool··on Disentangling the facts from the hype of quantum computing
If I invest right now, what are the chances that this round strikes it rich? The problem is that if a breakthrough is not achieved in this particular round then the company essentially goes bankrupt and my investment is worth zero.

Quantum is far enough away that unless you have deep pockets it's a donation to a charitable cause. The capital requirements are large enough that profits will be sucked up by later investors who would sooner let the company go bankrupt than let you get a decent return on your money.

randomfool··on Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port
Years ago I bought a bag of Bluetooth 4.1 USB dongles for development only to find every single one of them had the same MAC address. Ugh.
randomfool··on Twitter Terms of Service Diff
What if the ToS change is to curb abuse? Can users just opt-out and continue their abuse?

What if the abuse is costing Twitter significant money? I see language about decompiling. Do they have to continue providing service to companies who may be exploiting loopholes in the ToS?

randomfool··on TodoMVC App Written in Vanilla JavaScript
Seriously- just do the innerHTML assignment on li.innerHTML omitting the title, followed up by a simple li.querySelector().textContent = todo.title.
randomfool··on TodoMVC App Written in Vanilla JavaScript
Please do not re-implement HTML sanitization. Just replace that escapeForHTML and innerHTML assignment with a later textContent assignment. Please. Pretty please.
randomfool··on Meta's A.I. exodus: Top talent quits as lab tries to keep pace with rivals
If these are the leads or mentors then it can have a significant cascading effect.
randomfool··on Critical cross-account vulnerability in Microsoft Azure automation service
You skipped over Omigod which was right after ChaosDB. https://www.wiz.io/blog/omigod-critical-vulnerabilities-in-o...
randomfool··on Amazon Pip Horror Story
VP level often has fairly high turnover, maybe that's where this originates from.

In my experience at the VP level you have many highly skilled reports who are gunning for your job. Once you get the VP job then there may be many more enticing opportunities at other companies with just tough competition in the current position.

randomfool··on Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial ‘buy now, pay later’ feature for Edge
You've never gone to the grocery store with $10 for a week of food for you and a child.

A whole lot of people are living day-to-day- lying to the IRS about their number of dependents, just trying to make it through today.

The basic daily needs lead to some poor long-term decisions. The people pushing this 'pay later' scheme are scum.

randomfool··on Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?
10 year Topre user (Realforce 87U 30-45g variable)- recently picked up a Niz and it's been an absolute dream. Tactile, light (35g uniform), quiet. This keyboard is awesome.

Could never find Cherry MX Blue/Browns which worked for me- always triggered RSI in my outer wrists. Chiclets caused problems in my fingertips from bottoming out.

Topres gave me a decade of heavy coding after battling RSI and I love them for that. But this Niz is making me smile. I'll get another Niz before I go back to my Realforce.

randomfool··on There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
They're super common now for backcountry hikers and trail runners. The plans start at $15 a month on a per-month plan (no lock in).

There has been speculation that Apple would build this into their phones, which IMHO would be a killer feature. Imagine having an emergency feature that could be used anywhere on earth. How much would you pay per text? $5 per text message would be an absolute bargain in many of these remote locations.

randomfool··on "Secret" Agent Exposes Azure Customers to Unauthorized Code Execution
Specifically- it appears to be mostly C99, lots of macros, lots of ugly buffer manipulation. But it's tooled for PREFast so you know it's secure! (https://github.com/microsoft/omi/blob/4ce2cf1cb0aa656b8eb934...) (j/k... I haven't seen that in ages). Guessing a port of MS's internal WMI codebase?

This codebase just smells of rot all over.

randomfool··on "Secret" Agent Exposes Azure Customers to Unauthorized Code Execution
https://github.com/microsoft/omi/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

"Currently, this project is not accepting contributions or pull requests."

Last changed Aug 17, 2016.

randomfool··on If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
Since land is a limited asset they can effectively corner the market in specific regions and gain pricing power, allowing them to turn that 20% purchase price premium into a hefty profit.

Cities can counter this by allowing more new construction but backfilling Single Family Residences requires land and that may not be readily available within certain commute distances.

randomfool··on Pyodide: Python for the Browser
Try it in JupyterLab using JupyterLite- https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_static/lab/ind...

(choose the pyolite option for Pyodide)

This project is actually quite impressive, I believe they've even gotten some pip install paths working??

Page 1 of 13Next →