HN user
Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
I've never forgotten this SIGGRAPH demo from almost twenty years ago, in which the authors effectively switch camera and light source computationally (... in a static scene) [1]
Ever since then, I have viewed scenes such as the "lingerie store scene" from Enemy of the State [2] with a little bit less eye rolling...
No, they do not, and they did not.
They started throttling devices based on battery age after "Batterygate" in 2016, after a wave of news that their phones were suddenly shutting off on high load because the batteries terminal voltage dropped. They do not "artificially slow down before a new release".
The were sued because in their typical arrogance, they neglected to _tell_ people about that. They did not lose, they settled a class action suit.
As a result, they made battery management and state a lot more transparent in iOS, as they should have done in the first place.
Claiming malicious planned obsolescence, as you did, requires facts not in evidence.
Never mind cleaning up, you also have to understand the language just to judge and review the LLMs output. How else are you to separate good design and implementation from a bad one?
I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
You know, right this second I am listening to a MIDI recreation of the soundtrack to a very obscure German Atari ST puzzle game from '84. Something somebody recreated where I would be surprised if more than 500 people in the world ever heard the original.
Even though you might never learn of it, given the vast number of people out there, it is entirely likely that what you did already touched somebody out there. You do not need to have built a community in order to have done something of significance.
This brought a wide smile to my face. Thank you for telling that story.
I would describe myself as strict and dogmatic about email etiquette and consent as they come, but I am with avianlyric about the subscription reminders.
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.
According to Michael Tsai, they did use encrypted notification payloads. The OS just then stores the decrypted payloads in its notification database. [0]
[0] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/04/10/notifications-privacy/
Different Westbam. The DJ you're thinking of is still alive.
For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.
About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.
Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.
Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
Another vote for the HT3. My wife and I have one each, and we are perfectly content with them — nice battery life, decent build quality, good connection to multiple (two?) sources.
The ANC is not in the same league as a $300 pair, but one certainly would not expect them to.
Ooh, it's time to pull out the classics! Please feel free to check the boxes as you see fit, as I am currently too lazy to have Claude do it for me.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!Of course you do not, that's what makes you such a pillar of the Fatherland.
Be proud of that!
Then you have my sympathy, because I can absolutely picture myself in your shoes. For what little it may be worth.
May we all see better times.
Just did Galway-Rome and enjoyed it! I'll check back in a while when you've had time to implement the minimap and tourist center, as you wrote elsewhere.
What was weird: Paris did not seem to have any public transport - I had to walk from one train station to another for 70 minutes, and the only bus I could find was an overland bus, not an inner city one.
Also, it's a bit unintuitive that the "Journey Details" at the end start at nine hours — to me, when I begin my journey at 9 'o clock, that is hour zero.
I... well, you are welcome :-)
Playing around with it for ten seconds, it looks to me you might even use the Shortcuts app to
- Take interactive screenshot - Extract text from screenshot - Copy text to clipboard
and assign that to a keyboard shortcut to at least clean up this abominable workaround a bit.
Full-stack Rails has been my day job pretty much exclusively for almost twenty years now, for both long-term projects and one-offs in agency contexts. So I am generally interested.
Two things put me off:
1) I have to hunt around to find out whether this would fit into my project, dependency and workflow-wise — turns out it doesn't. I use neither Hotwire nor Tailwind, and "latest Rails point release only" is a rather harsh restriction too.
IMO, this information should replace the fluffy marketing speak in "Who is Rails UI for?" right at the top of railsui.com/docs .
2) Absolutely every paid product should have a pricing link in the top nav, spelled out in large, friendly letters. If the landing page only implicitly implies "paid product" but is then going to be sneaky about that fact, I close the tab and do not come back; in this case, I only stuck around because it's a Show HN.
Oh, and _that_ perennial topic ... a subscription? No thank you. Especially for the kind of money you're asking, I expect a perpetual license for the version at time of purchase, plus at least a year of updates.
All together: not for me. Best of luck to you!
Aah, don't worry, that's why they introduced system-wide text recognition in images, powered by Apple Intelligence!
Just take a screenshot of that album description, and ... sigh
We cannot, no. A break break, as clean and hard as can be under the circumstances is required.
There will be gnashing of the teeth, doomsaying galore, a few actual minor catastrophes... but we will be okay.
Not just okay, but we will be better off for it. The Internet will be better off for it, because the inescapable side effect will be at least a bit of re-decentralization.
Any European equivalent replacing what is lost will be better. Not because we have better coders or are even better people, mind you - far from it. It will be better because we will have the gift of hindsight; any replacement for web-based productivity services, search engines or social media springing up will be the product of a society and legislative system which has caught up at least in some sense to technological progress and which has been there, done that. The actual web two point oh.
So let's pull out as many plugs as we can. It'll hurt for a bit, but not only is it without alternative - it'll be fresh, it'll be fun and it'll be good in the end.
Let's get to work.
One is a sitting president, one hasn't been in a decade. What do you believe is more pressing, and why?
Wow, in the age of affordable LLM-results, there is something heraldic to posting primitive Markov-chain results such as these. The question I have never been able to answer, though: why bother?
That is Blink, not Webkit. Both have diverged significantly enough over the last fifteen-odd years to be counted as separate engines, even if one is a fork of the other.
I primarily use Safari — same story here as with you and Firefox.
They would still need other sensors if omitting the camera, alongside a slew of other safety systems: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/document/download... . Curious.
It is a commonly used abbreviation for "the f...ine article". On discussion sites of the Internet of yore, people would tell you to RTFA — "read the fucking article" — when it appeared you were chiming in without having first read the item under discussion. This is an extraction from that.
I discovered Ruby (through Rails) about twenty years ago on the dot. Coming from Perl and PHP it took me a while, but I remember the moment when I had the same realisation you did.
I still love this language to bits, and it was fun to relive that moment vicariously through someone elses eyes. Thanks for writing it up!
While I am not interested for the same reasons many others have stated here, I would like to point out that their privacy policy is exemplary:
Helium does not make any network requests, including to the Services, unless such requests are the result of user actions (for example, visiting a website or installing an extension) or are part of features that the user has explicitly enabled or configured during setup. If Helium is making any network requests without your consent, please file a bug report.
Gold standard.
Hey, some of us use these things exactly like that. I have an Asus ROG Ally, which runs steamOS and never leaves its dock, KB+M and monitor.
I would have gotten a mini PC, but strangely enough the Ally was the cheapest steamOS-compatible option I could find.
Apple stole my entire music library. I have had one library going back to the first release of iTunes on Windows (2003?) — thousands of songs, most of them CD rips.
I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.
Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.
It's a real mess.
In recent years, a sizeable amount of people has begun to end questions in regular discussions — such as for recommendations — with the current year, as in which framework should I choose for X in 2025?. Presumably due to SEO filth and its effects on Google.
I seem to have missed the memo that we're primarily writing for AIs now.
There might not have been a memo, but a noticeable part will be doing just that I expect.
"Programming Ruby" [0] ("the pickaxe book") and "Agile Web Development with Rails" [1], both from Pragmatic Programmers.
I learned Ruby and Rails through them in the late 2000's; they are still being released as new editions. It has been a while since I bought new books from PragProg, but they used to have a recurring sale of ~40% off around late autumn (thanksgiving?).
[0] https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby5/programming-ruby-3-3-5th-e...
[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/rails8/agile-web-development-wit...