Hacker News: akurtzhs

New comment by akurtzhs in "Magnolias Are So Old That They're Pollinated by Beetles, Not Bees"

akurtzhs — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:09:26 +0000

Lavender is what we see swarms and swarms of bees come grab in the Pacific Northwest.

New comment by akurtzhs in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

akurtzhs — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:12:32 +0000

Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.

To be fair, I had stretches of 2K, XP, 7 and 10 working acceptably.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels"

akurtzhs — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:33:14 +0000

Nothing by Adam Warren? He took the Dirty Pair comics somewhere very cyberpunk in the last three volumes.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Winamp Skin Museum"

akurtzhs — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:27:49 +0000

Reading my skin notes thirty plus years later is a very strange experience.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb"

akurtzhs — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:59:21 +0000

"We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding process--the childhood, if you will--that has the most far-reaching repercussions."

- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft

New comment by akurtzhs in "Facts don't change minds, structure does"

akurtzhs — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:55:39 +0000

He indirectly called the Pope a simpleton, and the Pope took offense.

New comment by akurtzhs in "xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app"

akurtzhs — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:52:56 +0000

Paypal paid people to open an account or to refer new accounts early on. Inspired Dropbox to do the same thing with free storage.

New comment by akurtzhs in ""Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen"

akurtzhs — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 03:53:35 +0000

I’ve tried custom launchers but never found anything as good as the Nvidia Shield interface before Google fucked it over with ads.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud"

akurtzhs — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 16:03:18 +0000

Yes, can’t remember the name, but there’s an old short story about alien explorers who find a dead Earth with futuristic buildings.

They revive a knight who attacks them and gets killed, a hippie who they kill off after questioning, and finally a future human with psychic powers who steals the revival device.

New comment by akurtzhs in "America desperately needs more air traffic controllers"

akurtzhs — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:06:17 +0000

Kids really need to spend time outside.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148707

New comment by akurtzhs in "FTC takes action against GoDaddy for alleged lax data security"

akurtzhs — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:13:56 +0000

I used Gandi for a long time and switched after they were bought out and registration prices started rising. HN article from 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777

After that I've used spaceship.com, NameCheap's rebrand, without complaint and most recently porkbun.com due to support in dnscontrol.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server"

akurtzhs — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 04:40:28 +0000

If you’re willing to pay for proprietary software, I’ve been incredibly happy with Roon for music organization. Handles 99% of albums I add without an issue, great multi-room support, best suggestions of any existing service (Rest in peace Google Play Music). They added remote streaming a few years ago and it’s all I use now.

New comment by akurtzhs in "We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour"

akurtzhs — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 04:53:26 +0000

Ages ago Metafilter was $5 for a lifetime registration. It was a great site and community for a long time.

New comment by akurtzhs in "HTML Form Validation is underused"

akurtzhs — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 00:10:17 +0000

Unfortunately the number input is lacking and inconsistent. We’ve always fallen back to JavaScript validation.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century status symbol (2015)"

akurtzhs — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 18:05:17 +0000

Other fallen status symbols that come to mind, although lower costs were the reason over better alternatives.

Aluminum before better material science dropped the price. Dishes, utensils, the cap on the Washington Monument.

Pineapples before Dole setup plantations.

Gelatin had two phases: before refrigeration, it needed hours of work in the kitchen. Then the status came from electrification and owning a refrigerator.

New comment by akurtzhs in "93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)"

akurtzhs — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 23:03:49 +0000

“What’s in the box?”

“Perl.”

New comment by akurtzhs in "Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay"

akurtzhs — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:28:33 +0000

YMMV. I prefer hybrid with two days a week in the office.

You can dedicate those days to meetings and conversations and keep the remote days for more heads down work.

And if you can’t make it to the office due to snow or travel, you’re prepared for remote work.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python"

akurtzhs — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 19:30:51 +0000

> I've resorted to making an "actual_requirements.txt" file manually listing only direct dependencies and whatever version constraints make sense.

Pip-tools has an elegant solution for this. You write an requirements.in where you list packages and optionally versions, then pip-compile turns that into a requirements.txt with every package including dependencies specified by versions. You can use it to update specific packages as well.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python"

akurtzhs — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:37:02 +0000

Python Foundation support ended that long ago, but vendors maintained it for longer. Red Hat support for it through RHEL 7 ends 30 June 2024, however, and my guess is they’re the last ones.

New comment by akurtzhs in "Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative"

akurtzhs — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 05:23:58 +0000

Blizzard used BitTorrent for distributing full games, patches and trailers for years.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader