Hacker News: Hellion

New comment by Hellion in "Spelunking Apple’s Open Source"

Hellion — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 02:07:50 +0000

> and memory on the computer to hold an entire page of pixels. I mean, at 72dpi that's 50KB just for the data!

Fwiw it was common for text editors at the time to render/raster in chunks and then send that off to the printer. For complicated documents, the printer sometimes had to take pauses while the computer worked

New comment by Hellion in "[dead]"

Hellion — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 19:44:33 +0000

Applying the slightest scrutiny to this Twitter thread revealed that the Twitter thread was actually the complete fraud the entire time

New comment by Hellion in "Apple's Popularity with Gen Z Poses Challenges for Android"

Hellion — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 19:40:05 +0000

You can just not donate.

New comment by Hellion in "[dead]"

Hellion — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 19:39:28 +0000

That was just one example of an egregious mistake. There are more, many more.

also, It’s the fundamental claim of the thread, and it casts the rest of the logic into doubt. His correction is just as un based in reality and also has errors.

New comment by Hellion in "[dead]"

Hellion — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 10:50:28 +0000

It’s worth noting that this tweet thread makes some major mistakes, both in dates and in roles. For example, while she was hired by NASA after Apollo 8, she had already been working in a substantial capacity on Apollo software at the Draper lab at mit, which was contracted/hired to do the work. Much of the software written for and by NASA at that time was not actually written by engineers under NASA’s employ.

Which is to say, by the time, NASA hired her she had been working on the software for many years. And, additionally, she had been working on similar software even before that!

I think that it would be safe to describe that Twitter thread as suffering from a deviation from reality.

New comment by Hellion in "Apple's Popularity with Gen Z Poses Challenges for Android"

Hellion — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 19:16:13 +0000

The chat landscape is dire. I view Signal as a least bad option for my friends to use.

New comment by Hellion in "Apple's Popularity with Gen Z Poses Challenges for Android"

Hellion — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:55:25 +0000

It’s vastly more complicated than “apple opens an api”. iMessage does a lot more than just messaging, and key components of apples spam and fraud story are tied to individual devices.

For Apple to open iMessage, would require that android manufacturers enroll the devices.

I use an iPhone, and I try to get all my friends to use signal

New comment by Hellion in "Apple's Popularity with Gen Z Poses Challenges for Android"

Hellion — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:52:46 +0000

Feature by feature, and doing a cost comparison, shows that iPhones are very good value. But they don’t have a phone under $400. And even in the developed world that’s a lot of money.

New comment by Hellion in "Apple's Popularity with Gen Z Poses Challenges for Android"

Hellion — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:51:16 +0000

Yeah, you can get an android phone that will take pictures, send messages, play, music, run Uber/maps, and take calls for under $50. Those phones aren’t great, but they are usable. They can do everything that you “need” a smart phone to do.

New comment by Hellion in "Burning a NeXTCube (1993)"

Hellion — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 02:17:33 +0000

Considering the Phoenix like rise the platform made, it was accurate at the time but short sighted.

New comment by Hellion in "Ask HN: What are the worst names given to employees of specific companies?"

Hellion — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 02:57:43 +0000

Credit Karma’s Karmanauts. Oof.

New comment by Hellion in "What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?"

Hellion — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:15:35 +0000

Very possibly, the FBI has some strong leads, and are building a case.

This is something on the national scale with lots of federal internal attention - reports likely even having hit the potus desk.

I doubt we’ll hear much about this again unless there’s an arrest.

New comment by Hellion in "I hacked Gumroad’s API and broke a bunch of tools"

Hellion — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 09:36:38 +0000

Any shop worth their salt is going to embed the cert chain in their app. In fact, you get that for free with pretty much every drm lib, such as the ones major providers like steam, gumroad, etc suggest

Cert pinning can defeated, but like I said, easier said than done. Not super advanced, but still requires specialized knowledge and a willingness to put the effort in.

New comment by Hellion in "I hacked Gumroad’s API and broke a bunch of tools"

Hellion — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 07:46:55 +0000

Gumroad is part of a movement of “friendly” drm. You’re paying for support and updates. Intercepting a tls call is easier said than done, but the ethos is around accepting pirates gonna pirate.

New comment by Hellion in "Tesla finally breaks and offers round steering wheel on Model S/X"

Hellion — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 04:15:51 +0000

There are significant and effective federal regulations around this. If you are telling the truth, your steering wheel is way too high, and you need to lower it

New comment by Hellion in "Tesla finally breaks and offers round steering wheel on Model S/X"

Hellion — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 04:14:08 +0000

Mercedes put a bunch of these in the $100k plus EQS.

Car companies: we are begging you, please stop with controls without pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback. Copy apple if you need to, just cut it out!

New comment by Hellion in "Ask HN: What happened to Magic, the text-message concierge?"

Hellion — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 16:11:39 +0000

If I’m paying them to answer me, yes.

New comment by Hellion in "E-ink art frames are a scam (2021)"

Hellion — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 21:27:11 +0000

The page linked doesn’t say a lot, but it does say “local web interface”

New comment by Hellion in "Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement"

Hellion — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 20:41:57 +0000

Apple has really set the standard on battery life - 10-11 hours would be considered on the short end for any modem Mac laptop. My air performs on par with some high end ultrabooks, yet easily does 12+ hours on a single charge. I usually have the brightness turned up quite a bit as well.

It’s stunning how far apple is ahead of the pack right now, I really hope the others catch up

New comment by Hellion in "Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year"

Hellion — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:29:03 +0000

While I believe that this is actually a simmering threat to society, I have a lot of trust that the current slew of devices are not eavesdropping on you. I believe smartphones to be a much bigger threat.

I’m more worried about smart phones acclimating people go carrying tracking and microphones. But, we find those tools indispensable now, so instead, we seem to want to focus on smart speakers