Hacker News: acrophiliac

New comment by acrophiliac in "Show HN: Zanagrams"

acrophiliac — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:32:00 +0000

I'm stuck. Does that mean I chose the wrong word earlier and used up an essential letter? Does the sequence of word guesses matter? Is there an Undo feature so I can back up and try a different order of guesses? Can I get a hint? Is there a way to give up and see the solution (order of word guesses)?

New comment by acrophiliac in "Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other"

acrophiliac — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:12:15 +0000

Personally, all the animations of stick figures moving and jumping is slightly annoying and offers little valuable information. I might enjoy something like showing a person's national flag (for where they are logged in from), or a timer for how long they've been on the site. Instead of the "street" metaphor for the graphic (benches, trees), maybe a Mercator Projection that locates an emoji at each person's location.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Muxcard, a DIY credit card size computer"

acrophiliac — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:07:11 +0000

dyi = Do Yourself It?

New comment by acrophiliac in "Show HN: ShadowCat – file transfer through QR Codes in a Browser"

acrophiliac — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:49:22 +0000

What's the length limit? I tried pasting some text and got this message: code length overflow. (85700>18672)

New comment by acrophiliac in "Show HN: Docking – Extensible Linux dock in Python"

acrophiliac — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:39:37 +0000

Error installing from .deb: Dependency is not satisfiable: python 3.10. So I have to downgrade from 3.12 to use this?

New comment by acrophiliac in "Should QA exist?"

acrophiliac — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:13:01 +0000

The article seems to equate QA with testing, which is a short-sighted view. QA also includes things like standards, and importantly, design and code reviews, which are actually the best way to improve quality.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

acrophiliac — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:17:46 +0000

I wonder if you might be relying on a stereotype of victims. Here's some recent data: "The 2024 FTC Consumer Sentinel Network reported that 44% of all 20-somethings claimed losses in 2023". More data here: https://www.synovus.com/personal/resource-center/fraud-preve...

New comment by acrophiliac in "Payphone Go"

acrophiliac — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:28:37 +0000

Cool, thanks for this. It seems this data comes from OpenStreeMap and has some phones not listed in Payphone-Go. Curious about the discrepancy.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Payphone Go"

acrophiliac — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:31:25 +0000

This is a fun idea. It occurs to me that I would enjoy seeing unvisited phones on the map in a different color. [Edit: Oh, now I see green dots for visited phones. Was this always there and I just hadn't noticed?]

New comment by acrophiliac in "Payphone Go"

acrophiliac — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:15:15 +0000

I know of a working payphone that is not on the Payphone Go map. Photo: https://i.postimg.cc/Dw4sCDpJ/payphone.jpg The fact that I know of one makes me wonder, are there are others? Is the list the author obtained from PUC incomplete? Is this phone operating unlicensed? Has the phone died since I last visited a year ago?

New comment by acrophiliac in "The Adolescence of Technology"

acrophiliac — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:45:14 +0000

Geez, how is this comment so far down the list? Reading Dario's list of all the bad things AI could do, I kept asking myself "who would be so stupid as to give AI control of said instruments of destruction?" Dario writes as though the AI just assumes control of the physical world because it is SO POWERFUL.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Show HN: mdto.page – Turn Markdown into a shareable webpage instantly"

acrophiliac — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:23:32 +0000

I'm guessing it doesn't handle images because you'd have to upload the image, right? I tried one in this format: ![title](P1090910.JPG) with no luck. (Update: it works with URL links)

New comment by acrophiliac in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

acrophiliac — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:45:54 +0000

Perhaps off-topic, but: "Testing doesn't show the absence of errors, it shows the presence of errors" Willison says we need to submit code we have proven to work but then argues for empirical testing, not actual correctness proofs.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker"

acrophiliac — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:26:02 +0000

As an old-timer who learned programming with punched cards, this visualization blows my mind. I want to turn it into my desktop screen saver.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Beets: The music geek’s media organizer"

acrophiliac — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:39:40 +0000

Here's what I did: $ pip install beets $ beet config -e $ beet import Music/BillEvans The database directory /home/user/.beets does not exist. Create it (Y/n)? y configuration error: import must be a collection, not NoneType

I was momentarily flummoxed by the error message. I pretty quickly realized I had mistakenly commented out all the lines in the import section of the config file. But for a nontechnical person the error message might be a bit hard to interpret. Maybe consider a more beginner friendly message with hints on how to correct the problem?

New comment by acrophiliac in "How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM"

acrophiliac — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:16:54 +0000

That sounds simple, but wouldn't the ebook you "pulled off" the Kindle still be in Amazon's format with DRM? I don't think this solves the original problem.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage"

acrophiliac — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:14:16 +0000

Digression ... you must be using "wilderness" in it's colloquial form, because technically, if he's in a cabin he can't be in wilderness. Federally designated wilderness areas don't allow permanent human habitation.

New comment by acrophiliac in "Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS"

acrophiliac — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:16:33 +0000

I like what EndlessOS is trying to do but it prioritizes the ability to be a complete OS that doesn't need an internet connection, whereas the article wants a browser-first OS (and assumes an internet connection). So aren't those kind of different use cases?

New comment by acrophiliac in "Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS"

acrophiliac — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:17:45 +0000

Hopefully there would be an option to turn off cloud sync.

New comment by acrophiliac in "I made my VM think it has a CPU fan"

acrophiliac — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 18:31:40 +0000

Misread the title as "I made my VM think it WAS a CPU fan" and was a bit disappointed to find the actual article was not about a VM with an identity crisis.