Hacker News: _nickwhite

New comment by _nickwhite in "Microsoft Outlook app now showing paid spam/phishing ad's"

_nickwhite — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:04:25 +0000

This is bad, but not as bad as the "Unlock Premium" ad every single corporate/enterprise Teams user got (locked in the title bar on Windows and macOS). Hiding the ad required an admin to turn off "self-service", a hard to find setting buried in the "Org Settings" within Microsoft 365 admin center. I can't even blame this on AI/Microslop.

https://blog.mindcore.dk/2025/10/unlock-teams-premium-prompt...

New comment by _nickwhite in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

_nickwhite — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:03:44 +0000

"128GB ought to be enough for anybody."

New comment by _nickwhite in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

_nickwhite — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:26:02 +0000

Thanks a lot eth0up, we all went down waiting on you to accept that Moto update.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

_nickwhite — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:30:26 +0000

Anyone still using SMS for 2FA codes, here is your official notice to change that ASAP.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

_nickwhite — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:19:52 +0000

It's also weird that some people here in the office on Verizon work fine, and others are on SOS. No correlation between phone versions or hardware that I could deduce. I also see the same on X: https://x.com/CPTholen/status/2011520566159982758

It came up for around 5-10 minutes at 15:00 EST, but is currently still down.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

_nickwhite — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:34:48 +0000

At 2:14PM EST, Verizon said:

"Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible."

As someone responsible my whole career for uptime and network response, I really feel for the engineers, at the same time hoping my service comes back up soon. SOS

New comment by _nickwhite in "Amazon Prime AI overviews can't even get the basics right"

_nickwhite — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:38:42 +0000

The "ask Rufus" AI feature of every Amazon product page is almost as bad. It has misguided me on product specs so many times now, I am convinced I can find a better answer manually grepping through the page and reviews.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector"

_nickwhite — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:32:08 +0000

I think an important caveat here is that down detector was not actually down, the cloudflare human verification component was (AFAIK). I wonder if this downdetector down detector accounts for that aspect? It was technically "not down" but still unusable.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Sign in with Google in Chrome"

_nickwhite — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 22:34:12 +0000

Use ungoogled-chromium (or Firefox).

New comment by _nickwhite in "Apache ECharts"

_nickwhite — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 22:05:58 +0000

This is super slick. I remember spending hours maybe days trying to make MRTG or rrdtool graphs look like these.

New comment by _nickwhite in "[dead]"

_nickwhite — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 02:17:11 +0000

Where's Canada? And Mexico?

New comment by _nickwhite in "Classic Duck Hunt game made in JavaScript and Kaplay"

_nickwhite — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:06:11 +0000

Great job, this is kid tested and approved. My 12yo son, who plays a lot of FPS games discovered how bad he is using the trackpad on my MacBook Pro. It was a lot of fun seeing him as frustrated at the laughing dog as I was in 1986 on my NES.

New comment by _nickwhite in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

_nickwhite — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:35:01 +0000

This is Trump playing chess. ByteDance, Greenland, The Gulf of Mexico, Panama Canal- All this, and he's not even President yet. It's all part of a bigger picture and a bigger plan with sizable levers. Some love this, others find it terrifying.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Windows 11 will let you reinstall your OS without wiping your files"

_nickwhite — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 04:38:50 +0000

I believe it does not touch HKLM\SOFTWARE or HKCU\SOFTWARE. But the machine I fixed a couple weeks ago had all the apps from the windows store & third party apps working fine. :shrug: I use macos & debian for my daily drivers.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Windows 11 will let you reinstall your OS without wiping your files"

_nickwhite — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 02:23:36 +0000

This is sort-of an existing feature since Windows 10. You can download the latest Windows 10 (or 11) media creation tool and create a USB. Click Setup.exe, and even if it's the same build of Windows, you can reinstall it, keeping all existing apps and data. This will effectively reinstall the existing OS, even fixing horribly broken installs (given the user profile isn't also corrupt). I did it a few weeks ago & helped a student to get through finals.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Tell HN: Microsoft.com added 192.168.1.1 to their DNS record"

_nickwhite — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:06:45 +0000

An entry-level admin is now unemployed, just before the holidays.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Firefox’s latest update adds a nifty PDF editing feature"

_nickwhite — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 03:10:25 +0000

Why is the date on this article 5-months ago? (OCT 18, 2022) Is this really a new feature?

New comment by _nickwhite in "Moving away from AWS reduced our annual server costs by 80% – from $1M to $200k"

_nickwhite — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 01:39:22 +0000

I'm not 100% sure what the destination platform was that was only 20% the AWS cost. Digital Ocean? A "myriad of other SaaS platforms"? Self-hosted in a colo datacenter somewhere? How does this newer solution scale? What are the intangible costs, and are there additional staff considerations? Do you answer the pager at 2AM when a physical piece of hardware goes down?

New comment by _nickwhite in "Ask HN: Why is there no way to log out of a Google account?"

_nickwhite — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 01:33:33 +0000

This is the #1 reason I use Firefox Container Tabs.

I can have a container for my work, personal, project, etc. where Google is logged in, and not commingle any of them, and all of the tabs are a different color, clearly distinguishable from one another. I have containers for separate Microsoft accounts as well. My "normal" tab is not logged in to any Google or Microsoft accounts, because why would I want them tracking me all over the web? Seriously, container tabs is one of the primary reasons I stick with Firefox, and it's FANTASTIC if you have multiple identities you need to manage.

New comment by _nickwhite in "Windows 10 China Government Edition"

_nickwhite — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 20:02:53 +0000

Published "May 23, 2017"

I'm not sure why this hit the HN front page?