HN user
The percentage of quality content on the web has gone down but it still exists. I usually use Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) when I'm researching something and not finding any good results on Kagi or Google.
You can get rid of most of those by enabling the "EasyList – Annoyances" filter in ublock.
The challenge that the Trump administration faces is that any regulatory action to prop up the domestic AI companies will put the rest of the tech sector at a disadvantage compared to its foreign competition because they'll have to pay 10-50x more than the rest of the world for tokens.
In the US tethered pins with cords aren't really a thing, instead most bowling alleys use mechanical pinsetter machines. These machines are large, complex, and expensive (see here for a video on how they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iod6uwUGM2E ) which is why he's talking about the equipment being 70+ years old- with the revenues most bowling alleys make, it's not economical to replace a pinsetter instead of maintaining the current one. This also means that the alley needs to have a mechanic on staff to keep the pinsetter running smoothly.
The way the machines detect the pins is still fairly simple. The assembly that puts the pins into place moves down after the ball is thrown, and has sense switches above each pin that detect which pins are still standing.
Another thing to keep in mind if you have an old netbook lying around is that a lot of the later models that came out after Windows 7 have PowerVR graphics (rebranded as "Intel GMA 3600") instead of the basic Intel chipset graphics. The only operating systems that will work with the GMA 3600 are 32-bit Windows 7 and whatever version of Fedora was current in 2012 (thanks to a closed source beta driver Intel released).
A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.
A lot of netbooks will lock the CPU into 32-bit mode in the BIOS, so getting them to boot a 64-bit OS also requires patching the BIOS. It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.
Thanks for the correction, I had a brain fart and wrote CVS instead of SVN.
Anyone who's worked with cell modems knows that AT commands are very much still a thing, see here for example: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/127000_127099/127007/17...
There's a reason why Microsoft didn't use SourceSafe internally, it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits". If you tried to commit multiple files at once and one failed to merge, the repo would just update the files that successfully merged and then the developer would have to fix the conflicts and try to commit again. Additionally, if you deleted a file, it would give the option to "permanently delete" it. If you checked this, it would completely remove the file from all past commits. VSS would also randomly corrupt files and the way to fix this was by permanently deleting the file from the repo and then re-adding it. The combination of these factors meant that VSS could not reliably show what the state of the codebase was at a given point in time, which is one of the main reasons for using version control in the first place. I sometimes do software archival work and it's fairly common that you'll find a VSS repo for a project and then you can't compile any commits older than a few weeks because of missing files.
It's been a while since I last used Windows 11, but as far as I'm aware using a Microsoft account will automatically sign you into Edge and Edge sync is enabled by default unless you go into the settings and disable it.
That could be how they initially associated the hacker with his GDID, but the criminal filing explicitly mentions that they were able to use Microsoft records to determine that his computer visited specific webpages:
According to Microsoft records, on or about May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC—when, according to ngrok records, the ngrok account was created—the device with the GDID accessed, among other ngrok pages, “https://dashboard.ngrok.com/signup,” the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account.
Microsoft records also indicate: (1) the user of the device assigned the GDID accessed multiple sites from Tzulo servers in May 2025, including the .168 server (the IP address used to create the ngrok account) on May 12, 2025; and (2) the user of the device assigned the GDID, on May 12, 2025 at 22:47 UTC, a little more than three hours after the ngrok account was created, the user visited “[Company F].com” from the .168 proxy server.
Edge has a feature where it will periodically pull the bookmarks and browsing history from any other browsers you have installed, so they'll then get sent to Microsoft and associated with your Microsoft account. This was initially enabled by default without the user's consent, although I believe now you may have to opt into it if you do a fresh Windows install. I only realized this was a thing because one time my work PC rebooted to install an update, then Edge came up instead of Firefox, but with all my Firefox tabs. I guess this was part of some effort to try to trick old people who wouldn't notice the difference into switching to Edge. Here's a news article about someone else running into this when it started happening: https://www.theverge.com/24054329/microsoft-edge-automatic-c...
Nobody's saying they'd actively round up and kill everyone, they would just have no reason to keep the "unnecessary" people alive. The elite class is generally in favor of doing things that worsen human suffering and cause additional deaths if doing so helps their financial position. See the recent cuts to SNAP and Medicaid for an example. If large swaths of the population got laid off from their jobs because they were no longer economically necessary, what incentive would the people benefiting from AI have to make a little less money in exchange for funding programs to keep the former white collar workers fed and healthy? They didn't do anything to help the former blue collar workers after they pushed for free trade deals that decimated the blue collar workforce.
The 32X used the cartridge audio input for its PWM audio channels. For one example of how this worked, Knuckles' Chaotix used the extra channels for the percussion in its music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6BSQVK9gSc
The Sega CD manual says that the RCA jacks are for connecting the Sega CD to a stereo system or stereo TV. I guess they found that doing the sound mixing on the Sega CD made the output cleaner which would have been useful for people wanting to use it as a CD player instead of just for games. The mixing cable is necessary to use the RCA jacks on the Genesis 1 because the system does not have a sound OUTPUT on the expansion connector, only a sound INPUT. The Genesis 2 repurposed a couple of previously unused expansion pins as sound outputs, which let the model 2 Sega CD do the audio mixing without needing a patch cable.
Yeah Silpheed is a great example of designing a game around the strengths of its target hardware. Because they were able to focus the art design around what could be streamed at high quality off a 1x CD drive, the FMV works a lot better than it did in games like Night Trap and Wirehead that tried to shoehorn live action video into a console that wasn't capable of displaying it at a decent quality. The actual gameplay is similar to an early 1980s arcade game like Galaga, but I agree with you that the presentation makes it worth playing at least a few levels of Silpheed even now.
From the article:
I spent the past two weeks reverse engineering the FMV format in my spare time. That was a departure from how I normally work since I did not write a single line of code. I will likely write something about my A.I framework (and opensource it) next month. But I can already tell this is an overall pleasant way to work.
The way the hardware is set up, you wouldn't be able to display anything onscreen that's not one of the predefined font characters, so it's not that much of a loss. The official Nintendo BASIC cartridge had the same issue, but at least on that they had a bunch of tiles that could be used for games rather than just font characters.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, the most advanced keyboard famiclones were made in the mid-90s by BBK Electronics. They had a floppy drive, BASIC interpreter, assembler, and debugger, and ran a clone of MS-DOS. Other software included a paint program, file manager, word processor, and spreadsheet. You could even connect the computer to a DOS PC and access its files remotely. They could also play Famicom games by loading them off of floppy disks into memory. There's more information here: https://helloacm.com/the-8-bit-dos-by-famicom-clone-bbgdos-i... . These days, BBK is better known for being the company behind the OnePlus and Oppo cell phone brands.
Note that, Microsoft had already flagged Stokes to the FBI once before, in an October 2024 criminal referral describing “online services telemetry.”
I don’t like the idea of Microsoft taking it upon themselves to proactively report what their customers are doing to law enforcement. I guess this makes it unwise to use Windows to i.e. look for information on where to get an abortion if you live in a red state.
Yeah FPV drones have massively increased the cost of invading a country. It's basically a return to WWI style trench warfare, except no man's land is the size of the range of the drones (20+ KM).
Yeah the 7800 library was basically a bunch of ports of early 80s arcade games that GCC had done for the initial 1984 release date, then ports of whatever computer or arcade games the Tramiels could get cheap licenses for, done by external contractors. Their strategy with the 7800 was competing with Nintendo on price rather than the quality of the game library. Tramiel led Atari wasn't willing to put a bunch of money and effort into pushing video games forward like Nintendo was, they were mainly focusing their internal efforts on the ST computers.
Nintendo was about to release a next-generation console, the Famicom, in Japan. They wanted to export it to other markets, but didn’t want to do it alone. Nintendo really wanted to license the Famicom to Atari and have Atari distribute it in North America. Atari CEO Ray Kassar was going to sign the deal at CES in June, but delayed due to the spat over the Coleco Adam version of Donkey Kong. Then the deal fell through the cracks after Atari forced out Kassar as Atari CEO on July 7, 1983. Atari’s next CEO, James Morgan, never revisited it.
There's a leaked memo about this deal available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080327135150/http://www.atarim... . Atari had already paid General Computer to design the 7800 when Nintendo reached out to them about distributing the Famicom. Atari viewed the 7800 hardware as likely being superior to the Famicom, so their strategy was to string out the negotiations for as long as possible until the two systems could be directly compared. The Coleco Adam dispute was probably just a convenient excuse to continue delaying.
When Ray Kassar was forced out due to insider trading (he sold a bunch of Atari stock around half an hour before Atari reported much lower than expected earnings), the business press was generally dismissive of the idea of introducing a new console into an already oversaturated market. The 7800 ended up getting delayed into 1984, then Jack Tramiel bought the company and didn't want to pay General Computer royalties on the consoles or software so they sat in a warehouse until 1986 when Atari finally paid up.
If Atari did end up going with the Famicom instead of the 7800, I imagine it would have ended up delayed and hamstrung the same way the 7800 was. If anything, maybe this would have left space for the Sega Master System to take over in the US.
StatCounter uses browser tracking as its data source, and it seems like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all froze the OS version they report in their user agent at Mac OS X 10.15 in order to avoid breaking sites that have poorly written parsing code by bumping the major OS version. I imagine that browsers that expose enough information to identify the actual OS version get shown as "macOS" and browsers that don't get shown as "OS X". See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1680516
When Xbox launched its Game Pass subscription service in 2017, executives set a goal of reaching 77 million subscribers by fiscal year 2026, which ended last month, according to a document published during a lawsuit contesting Microsoft’s 2023 purchase of Activision Blizzard. Today, the platform has just 30 million subscribers, according to a person familiar with the matter, 4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the subscriber numbers.
Employees had been growing concerned that the number of Game Pass subscribers had peaked, according to two former employees. Later, millions of customers canceled their subscriptions after Game Pass announced last October it was raising prices by 50%.
Underlying Game Pass’s problem was a central flaw, according to the people. While consumers might be willing to pay a monthly fee to Netflix Inc. to stream thousands of TV shows and movies, most gamers don’t take the same approach, preferring to stick with a handful of favorite games they play on repeat. Research from Circana shows that the majority of US gamers buy two games at most per year and a third of the market doesn’t even purchase one.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
A non-Edge browser would give the OS the domain name from the HTTPS connection and the page title because that's what it sets the window title to. I think that would be enough to identify the URL in a lot of cases (i.e. the sign-up URL sets the title to "ngrok Sign Up".
Topre keyboards feel nice to type on and are quiet. They're rubber dome but they have the thing most mechanical keyboards have where you don't have to have a key pushed all the way down for it to count as "pressed".
Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).
As far as I understand it, the missing cycle at the end of the pre-render scanline means that the first scanline will start a cycle early every other frame. When this happens, that scanline will be drawn one pixel to the left of where it should be. In practice, this typically causes the first few scanlines to get skewed slightly (you can see this at the top right corner of your Mighty Bomb Jack screenshot) but I don't know enough about NTSC decoding to explain why this happens. This is more noticeable if you can get footage of the system displaying tiles on the top of the background, rather than the plain blue background at the top like your Mighty Bomb Jack screenshot has.
U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former American officials.
Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April.
Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States, according to some of the officials, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.
In April, Mr. Ghalibaf was set to travel to Islamabad to meet with Vice President JD Vance. But Iranian security officials were concerned that Israel would use the opportunity to assassinate Mr. Ghalibaf or Mr. Araghchi to derail the talks, the officials said.
Iranians sought guarantees from the United States, through Pakistani and Qatari intermediaries, that Israel would not carry out any covert operations targeting the Iranian delegation, the officials said.
Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.
But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.
Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.
Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.