HN user

svl

296 karma
Posts12
Comments35
View on HN

This might be country specific? Specifically dependent on laws in the fields of consumer-protection and keeping things universally accessible.

I don't own a smartphone. I have never owned a smartphone. There are inconveniences, and big organizations definitely try to push you toward the way of doing things which has the lowest costs for them - but there are no actual blockers. There is always a path involving actual humans, and regular phone calls (or emails or paper forms).

Reactions tend to be wistful variations of "I wish I could" or "but how do you?" - and it's really always about the most trivial inconveniences.

Sadly they explicitly don't support that. :(

Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?

Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.

No discussion about roundabouts can be complete without a mention of the (mostly) Dutch "turbo roundabout", where the lane you take going into a multi-lane roundabout depends on where you want to exit, and you can't / are not allowed to switch lanes while on it:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:roundabout%3Dturbo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Turbo_roundabouts

https://www.arcadis.com/en-us/knowledge-hub/blog/united-stat...

I'm "pulling this from" the settings on my browser. When I look at the check box in preferences it's unchecked and greyed out.

The setting being greyed out indicates that the entire functionality is disabled, and the value of the setting is irrelevant. That's a common pattern in Firefox settings when some other setting invalidates the current one. In this case, it's most likely because you have "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" unchecked.

If you care to read deeper, including comments by many of the principal parties involved, there's no better place than https://file770.com/ (also linked to from this news article). It's hard to follow if you come in fresh, as it's a very active blog, with many pages of insightful comments on each post, but worthwhile.

Here's the list of all posts from the last month which are primarily about this. (There are also daily roundup posts, and lots of small and relevant tidbits in there, too.)

  https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-releases-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics/
  https://file770.com/2023-hugo-nomination-report-has-unexplained-ineligibility-rulings-also-reveals-who-declined/
  https://file770.com/chengdu-hugo-administrator-dave-mccarty-fields-questions-on-facebook/
  https://file770.com/hugo-controversy-hits-mainstream-news-a-chengdu-vice-chair-comments-in-social-media/
  https://file770.com/zimozi-natsuco-guest-post-the-hugo-awards-evil-fall-is-a-watered-down-affair-and-certain-issues-to-watch-out-for/
  https://file770.com/dave-mccarty-makes-statement-about-his-facebook-responses/
  https://file770.com/worldcon-intellectual-property-announces-censure-of-mccarty-chen-shi-and-yalow-mccarty-resigns-eastlake-is-new-chair/
  https://file770.com/decoding-the-tianwen-project/
  https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ (the big one)
  https://file770.com/2023-hugo-awards-related-statement-by-kat-jones/
  https://file770.com/diane-laceys-letter-about-the-2023-hugos/
  https://file770.com/glasgow-2024-announces-kat-jones-resignation-as-hugo-administrator/
  https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-wont-account-for-sponsorships/
  https://file770.com/cheryl-morgan-dave-mccarty-resign-from-wsfs-hugo-award-marketing-committee/
The original nomination statistics dropped on January 20th (already bizarre; usually these are released as soon as the Hugo awards are awarded). In the month since then, fans have been puzzling together just what happened. Chances are that more will come to light in the coming weeks.

As others have said, between competing bids for who'd host Worldcon in 2023, China got the most votes (from registered fans at an earlier Worldcon).

However, there was also controversy about this, as a very large number of those votes lacked an address (a minimal safety feature to give some indication that votes belong to distinct people). The responsible committee decided not to count them, but was overruled. If it wasn't for that, Chengdu wouldn't have won the bid.

Please note that Kevin Standlee is a good egg here, and was not involved with this iteration of the Hugo awards and everything which went wrong with it.

His only fault was saying something impolitic at the wrong time, which people feared would be misunderstood due to his position as Chair. (You can see the difference in censured/reprimanded and in the reasoning behind it, but it's easy to skip over that and just retain the list of names. Kevin does not deserve to be lumped in with the others!)

browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.

In Firefox you can set dom.event.contextmenu.enabled and dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false in about:config which will natively prevent most of this type of annoyance.

Personal information about yourself which you have to include on your website, and how to register it, depends on the laws of the country you reside in (e.g. Germany has strict requirements on this), so I can't say anything about that in general, but I believe most countries have pretty lax rules here, which should make it totally fine to run your a personal website.

I can say something more sensible wrt your GDPR and "cookie" questions:

The GDPR has one overarching principle: "data minimalisation".

There are no requirements to preserve things like access logs, but rather the opposite: you should only retain personal information for as long as you _need_ it - and then once you no longer need it, you should remove it. And while you have the information, you should take meaningful steps to secure it, where the definition of that changes based on best practices over time.

The important thing here is that you think about what information you need, for what purpose (so something specific like "prevent abuse" rather than "it could come in handy at some point"), and then consider the tradeoff between privacy of your users and your own need for the information (and document this thinking in some way, so that you can later prove that you've done so).

So for those access logs, write down that you log e.g. ip address, timestamp, UA string, referer, visited page (possibly including querystring with search terms), that you retain this information for 2 weeks, maybe that you then aggregate it in some ways, and that you'll delete the information after this time. Your purposes for doing this are probably insight into usage patterns and detecting and fighting abuse. You're explicitly not connecting these logs to other data sources to identify specific visitors, nor sharing this information with any third party, so you believe the privacy impact for your visitors is minimal.

On your website, have a page (accessible from anywhere, so e.g. linked in the footer) that says the same. Specific wording effectively doesn't matter, but what does matter is that it's understandable by your average visitor.

As for cookies: "Functional cookies" (shopping cart, "remember me" function etc) you can set without any permission. "Tracking cookies" (advertising, analytics, etc), you can only set based on explicit and voluntary permission (visitors need to be able to say "no" as easily as you say "yes", without negative consequences, and if they say give permission, they need to be able to withdraw it just as easily at a later date, so one-click in the footer or somesuch - they also need complete and understandable information what they give permission for, so put that in the question, and link to a similar page as above for the GDPR).

Foobar2000 4 years ago

gmusicbrowser (combined with Ex Falso for more extensive tagging) has replaced foobar2000 for me, and I _think_ that these days I like it even better than I ever liked foobar2000 - but maybe that's just the long years making my memories of its greatness somewhat hazy...

This is the normal procedure in the Netherlands as well, for I think all-but-one of the package delivery services. If you're not home, delivery goes to one of the neighbours (could be 5-6 houses away if the driver already knows that that one is at home). Might not be common in the inner cities, but definitely in towns and suburbs. Good for social cohesion, as otherwise we wouldn't see most of these people for months at a time.

It's common to such a degree that many of the shipping forms on webshops have a dedicated field to indicate that you don't want this, though I've never felt the need to use this; definitely more convenient to walk over to the neighbours than to a pickup point.

I'd say ~30M, rather than 50M.

They explicitly call out the summer holidays effect above the first graph: "Generally, MAU fluctuates over the course of a year, dropping in the summer months and during holidays." So comparing the peak of Jan 2019 to the low of Jul 2021 isn't giving a good idea of the total loss.

  Jan 28 2019: 253.9M
  Jan 27 2020: 229.5M
  Feb 01 2021: 219.7M

  Jul 22 2019: 224.2M
  Jul 20 2020: 214.1M
  Jul 19 2021: 200.4M
Still, definitely not good; we've seen what happens when web developers believe only a single browser (engine) matters, and we _need_ an organization like Mozilla, which puts user interests above commercial interests, to have a seat at the table.

Came to recommend the same one. My first one stopped working after a decade, now been on the second one for six years. (The "stopped working" thing is not ideal, but given the constant use, also not a dealbreaker for an electrical appliance.) I most like it for the big ... 'spout'? that allows filling it without needing the lift the lid.

I do remember it being the only decent option in the store. I guess other people have other priorities in kettles, for all those other models to stick around?

Swimming and diving with orcas is not just regularly done, it's so common and safe that it's something which is offered as a guided tourist activity in Norway. (I personally know someone who went on such a trip.)

The complexity in supporting CSS does not come (primarily) from its individual properties, no matter how obscure. It comes from things like margin collapse, from correctly determining the stacking context, and about a gazillion other things like that.

These aren't things where you can just scan the CSS of the top websites to find out if they're being used. These are things where you'd have to do visual comparisons to the output of at least two other browser engines to determine if you end up with the same result.

Building a browser engine from scratch is imho more doable now than it's ever been before (excepting EME), due to the insane effort by the WHATWG standards to truly describe what is actually happening in browsers (rather than coming up with some theoretically pure description of what is envisioned to happen), and the similar level of detail on the CSS side to the myriad interactions between properties, along with the huge set of testcases for all of that.

Yes, there's _a lot_ - but compared to how loosely specified it all was in the past, when the instruction for building a browser engine was: "reverse engineer the bugs the dominant browser engine of today made in reverse engineering the bugs of the dominant browser that came before, and emulate that to your best ability", anyone starting from scratch nowadays has a way better chance at succeeding.

Nicely done! We've been using a very similar setup at the Dutch public library for the last many years - e.g. https://www.bibliotheek.nl/catalogus/titel.263072924.html/th... - complete with thickness based on number of pages (though only in three steps) - but it took a lot of tinkering to get the CSS down to something relatively clean. Great job making something like this accessible to everyone with a handy tool like this!

One trick we're using which you might care to copy over (and improve upon) is a linear gradient to fake the pages. I think for thin books, I prefer your white version, but for thick books, it feels pretty sterile.

Dutch media reported yesterday that this person (who had been in China and had dinner with the 38 year old "patient 1") still tested negative on a second test, so the search for the real patient zero continued.

No one uses helmets. Most people don't use panniers either; small loads are attached to the back of the bike by the default "snelbinders" (elastic straps). Or what's really popular lately are plastic crates above the front-wheel. Locks and lights (and reflective strips on the wheels) are standard on all bikes. In cities you'd get a second lock, but that's really about it.

Having to use a Google product instead of your own mail server, in order to have your email delivered to Google customers, sounds like anti-competitive business practices to me. You'd think they'd be a wee bit more careful with something like that given EU interest in them...