Hacker News: Apfel

New comment by Apfel in "Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack"

Apfel — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:47:20 +0000

Similarly common in the UK, or at least where I am (Glasgow, Scotland).

Completely normal to say "Tesco's", "Aldi's" etc.

New comment by Apfel in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

Apfel — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:54:46 +0000

Honestly, as someone who is not particularly pro Apple but bought (and returned) the Vision Pro, I cannot stress enough how much you need to try it out.

The issue with the product is entirely the lack of an ecosystem - the interface is unbelievably polished. The eye tracking & finger touch to click feels absolutely perfect. It really did feel like living in the future.

I returned it because the security policy at my work didn't allow me to pair it with my macbook, otherwise I would be using it all day every day.

New comment by Apfel in "We all dodged a bullet"

Apfel — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:00:57 +0000

The one big problem Renovate brings is when it automerges and breaks everything with e.g. a TypeScript upgrade. It's simple enough to handle and prevent but has required quite a lot of developer education for those who are not particularly frontend-focused in my experience.

New comment by Apfel in "All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair"

Apfel — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:08:08 +0000

Wowee! What an unpleasant response. As both a parent and an employee, I found the article extremely useful and shared it internally at my org. Maybe step back from the computer a bit.

New comment by Apfel in "Electric bikes might just be the healthiest thing to ever happen to teenagers"

Apfel — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:21:15 +0000

Sidepoint but they're also a complete gamechanger for the elderly and infirm.

My 70 year old, double-ankle replacement mother who I don't remember ever walking very comfortably bought an ebike a couple of years back.

The sheer joy on her face watching her whizz up a hill made me realise just how transformational these things can be.

New comment by Apfel in "Linda Yaccarino is leaving X"

Apfel — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 03:49:02 +0000

Twitter only showing a sample of posts for non-logged-in users allowed me to see just how weirdly hung up on "Europeans" that guy is.

New comment by Apfel in "Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes"

Apfel — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:58:26 +0000

I think you may be operating under a misapprehension. The word "progressive" is the one people have taken issue with.

China is many things but progressive is not my adjective of choice (I've spent many years living there).

New comment by Apfel in "Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface"

Apfel — Sat, 03 May 2025 01:22:52 +0000

There's at least one easter egg! use developer --color (sorry, I have a habit of digging through source)

New comment by Apfel in "Making Software"

Apfel — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:31:17 +0000

Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.

I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.

New comment by Apfel in "Our New AI Website Builder"

Apfel — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:28:53 +0000

If anyone's interested in the prompts they're using here, they're viewable via devtools.

Full dump of what was showing on my end here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/furnivall/aa95e8d9dc330f3...

New comment by Apfel in "Show HN: Atari Missile Command Game Built Using AI Gemini 2.5 Pro"

Apfel — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:52:04 +0000

Sorry - couldn't find a security.txt but thought I should alert you your API is currently vulnerable to prompt injection on at least a few of the fields in the structured JSON you send when analysing the game.

Happy to give more details if there's any way to get in touch outside this thread.

New comment by Apfel in "Show HN: Searchable Vim Cheat Sheet with Favorites (Open-Source)"

Apfel — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:56:18 +0000

Had a play with this - good idea, well executed and I'll return when you've got more levels!

New comment by Apfel in "Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace"

Apfel — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:50:37 +0000

He's being as helpful as possible, there's no need to go hard on his language like this.

New comment by Apfel in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

Apfel — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:01:52 +0000

Probably the best on the civil liberties front are the Liberal Democrats (they were pretty good at quashing mandatory national ID cards back in the day, at least).

That being said, they still have a lot of folk angry at them for allowing university fees to be introduced 15 years ago when they were in coalition government (a Tory policy!).

New comment by Apfel in "Let's Encrypt is 10 years old now"

Apfel — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:31:16 +0000

Tsb bank in the UK still do exactly this

New comment by Apfel in "12 Months of Mandarin"

Apfel — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:11:52 +0000

I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).

New comment by Apfel in "A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots"

Apfel — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:24:44 +0000

Is this true in a marginal cost sense? I was under the impression most of the environmental impact occurred during the training stage, and that it was significantly less costly post training?

New comment by Apfel in "Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers"

Apfel — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 19:10:15 +0000

I've come across bitwise shift operators literally once in enterprise webapp world, specifically on this precise problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12900504/13238134.

I made a concerted effort to understand the code before I made any effort to adapt it to the repo I was working on. I'm glad I did (although honestly, it wasn't in the remotest bit necessary to solve the task at hand!)

New comment by Apfel in "Four Thieves Vinegar Collective – Harm Reduction for the Living"

Apfel — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 14:57:14 +0000

Saw these guys talk at DEFCON this year, absolutely fantastic presentation. It was so powerful and important that I'd actually recommend watching it before pretty much everything else from the con.

New comment by Apfel in "Flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out"

Apfel — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 13:46:28 +0000

I've spent a lot of time in China over the years and most of their tech systems are built on the assumption that only Chinese folk will ever use it. In this case, the vast majority of Chinese people have a 2, 3 or 4 character name ('why would you EVER need 16, silly 老外?')

It's a bit of a 'Foreigner in China' stereotype to whine about how absurdly difficult it is to go to e.g. the bank or a hospital as a non-native because it happens so often.