HN user

iforgotpassword

8,465 karma
Posts2
Comments2,450
View on HN

I mean I consider all the big tech companies evil, but somehow meta consistently manages to raise the bar in that discipline. I don't understand how any dev left at that company doesn't feel like a spineless POS. And I don't say that for trolling or pure provocation. I seriously don't understand how you can ignore all the shit they pull and just go "but the technical challenges are really interesting". I really want to know.

Yeah this, although it seems to have slowed down I development. Last time I checked, scrolling was really laggy on Linux, and the according bug report was quite old. Man I wish I had more free time to dig into stuff like that.

Window Activation 12 months ago

Huh I'm also on i3 but I never run into this problem. If any program would start stealing focus I'd just uninstall it and yell at the author/vendor.

Window Activation 12 months ago

Haven't used windows in a decade, but there is (was?) a registry setting that would disable focus stealing prevention. Some egregious tools "helpfully" changed that setting for you when you installed them, because they couldn't get focus management to work properly. Maybe it's that?

Appliances that only have touch controls and make beeping sounds for every button pre^Wtouch. UX design has truly peaked. >:(

Yep, on the rare occasion I deal with someone who uses Microsoft for email, I give them a heads-up that they probably miss an email every now and then. I remember my last employer's mails often didn't reach them, and at some point they added a big warning to their sign up page when you used one of the Microsoft domains for your email.

Emacs: The macOS Bug 12 months ago

What terminal are you using that doesn't support a mouse? Or is it emacs that doesn't have mouse support?

Made that experience once ca. 2011. I hosted a Minecraft server ona box with raid1.

The "cool" part was that I ran a cronjob that rendered the map to a png file once and hour, and at some point a friend asked why there were holes in the map. Back then, Minecraft stored every 16x16 chunk of the map in an individual gzipped file. When the raid1 decided to read the chunk from the bad drive, it couldn't unzip it. If that happened to the renderer, there was a hole on the map. If that happened to the game server, it would regenerate the chunk, and overwrite the old one on both drives, even the healthy one. Luckily as far a I remember that only happened on random terrain, otherwise someone would have ended up with half their house missing.

Animated Cursors 12 months ago

Yes, happens occasionally. I just wiggle it left/right or up/down so I can see where it is. No big deal. But put of curiosity I might still try that one day, with a more subtle effect though. ;)

You can use that app in different ways:

1) you dated a guy on tinder, he became all pushy on your first date, touched you inappropriately even though you said no. Or some guy became violent during your relationship and you even found out he has a history of that.

2) you dated a nice guy but he dumped you for whatever reason, and now you want to get back at him so you make up stuff like mentioned above, and post it there.

Most annoying to me is Google maps. On web it is wasting so much more screen real-estate when showing a route, I can barely see the map itself. The app has much smaller ui components. (android)

To add to the pile:

- The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.

- We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea.

I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there.

But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.

Imo it wasn't that bad, but maybe that was just because code-centric sites like github didn't exist yet. It tried to provide you with a simple landing page for your open source project that can offer you a download button, centered around releasing compiled, versioned software. Their offering of a VCS (svn and CVS IIRC) was more of an added bonus. But once github was there you started wondering how sourceforge ever seemed good.

Fuck secure boot. A fun project, even if mostly for educational purposes, would be to collect all the different exploits that have been found over the past years and try to create a universal secure boot bypass loader that targets as many of those as possible. I guess chances are that if your vendor didn't update the firmware to include the newer ms keys, they also didn't patch any of the exploits. So we just need to also get this super exploit loader signed so that it works everywhere :o)

Most important reasons imo:

1) even though reality has proven us wrong time and time again, we can just not look at the dependency too closely and just act as if it's written and maintained by competent, caring people and is of highest quality. No worries!

2) in case shit hits the fan, let's assume worst case and there is a vuln in the dep and you get hacked... It's somebody else's fault! \o/

This is not what the article is talking about.

It's talking about how the EOCD contains both the size of the central directory and the offset of the start of the central directory, which is redundant. So we end up with some tools honoring the offset, while some subtract the size from the EOCD.

Like everything, this goes in cycles. When the iPhone launched, its UI was touted as revolutionary; simple, discoverable, not the convoluted mess that a typical windows experience was. "lol lolyou have to click start to power off your computer" and the likes. You had the physical home button, or the three buttons on android. They were discoverable, you handed an old phone to your grandma and she could just try things and figure it out.

Nowadays everything has to be clean and minimalist. No scrollbar, no buttons, just gestures. Hand a modern smartphone to someone who never used one in their life and see how they struggle to ever leave the first app they open. What are the odds they discover one of the gestures?

I currently use photoprism, but it's moving rather slowly. Facial recognition misses a lot of faces, the automatic clustering works fine at first but once you tagged a few thousand faces the implementation grinds to a halt and the background worker runs for hours pegging single cpu core.

The dev is really reluctant of accepting external contributions, which has driven away a lot of curious folks willing to contribute.

Immich seems to be the other extreme. Moving really fast with a lot of contributors, but stuff occasionally breaks, the setup is fiddly, but the Ai features are 100x more powerful. I just don't like the ui as much as photoprism. I with there was some kind of blend of the two, on a middle ground of their dev philosophies.

I stumbled upon that feature in the (MS-DOS based) bios flashing utility for some mainboard, via some command line option. Just don't remember which one it was, it was ages ago.

Then you can't tell it apart from systems that were actually built by Asus. But given that most smaller shops don't seem to have access to the tool anyways, we'd then just have the opposite situation.

But that's exactly the point. Computer shops that sell complete systems are supposed to put their name in the "system manufacturer" field. If you bought the mainboard yourself and built your own system, then who do you think should have replaced that string?