Hacker News: ale42

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: Encarta 95 Web"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:45:10 +0000

Tried it removing the pixelated in the Dev tools. It looks like an old Win32 app running on 150% or 200% HiDPI scaled Windows with slightly blurry text. In any case much better than irregular pixelated scaling.

New comment by ale42 in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:42:14 +0000

Inconsistent? I feel the opposite. Right now, every app seems to have its own UI design. Back then, most apps were native Win32: maybe ugly, maybe too serious, somewhat limiting, but mostly consistent. And relatively fast, despite running out of a spinning HDD and a single-core CPU.

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: Encarta 95 Web"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:59:22 +0000

It's because it's basically a fully emulated PC running Windows 95. It's not a recreation of Encarta for the web, which would me much nicer IMHO.

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: Encarta 95 Web"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:55:32 +0000

And PovRay, Super Pi and some other stuff...

Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: Encarta 95 Web"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:54:34 +0000

Yes and no. It was pixelated, not irregular and ugly. Here is bad quality rescaling at work.

New comment by ale42 in "16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows"

ale42 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:29:43 +0000

It's not a VM, as far as I understand. Possibly OTVDM.

New comment by ale42 in "Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices"

ale42 — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:24:27 +0000

That's quite blocking for a phone ;-) But this sounds so cool if it's going to work!

New comment by ale42 in "CVE-2026-111943: Compromised Intermediate Certificate Authority"

ale42 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:07:10 +0000

It's the Go version of it, I think.

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare"

ale42 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:51:50 +0000

Well, then not at all...

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare"

ale42 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:14:45 +0000

> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted

Don't forget that metadata is not encrypted, so Meta know who you are writing to, who writes to you, who your contacts are, all the usage pattens of the app, and more metadata (not sure if it's still the case, but a few years ago WhatsApp even uploaded the battery state of your phone to Meta).

New comment by ale42 in "Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare"

ale42 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:10:00 +0000

There's still a difference between a person deciding to share one or a bunch of messages they receive --usually I know the people I write to, so I know more or less what to expect-- and systematically uploading received message to some AI. Fine if they do it locally, not fine if the messages I write end up at Google, OpenAI or anybody else.

New comment by ale42 in "I love software rendering"

ale42 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:31:14 +0000

The article says that "even a 3.3GHz quad-core Xeon “isn’t quite enough to run Shadow Warrior at full 1600 by 1200”." But we are on DOS, so I guess three cores are just not doing anything there?

New comment by ale42 in "LineageOS 24.0"

ale42 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:11:29 +0000

What about actual cameras? I still have to see one with a LiDAR.

New comment by ale42 in "LineageOS 24"

ale42 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:29:13 +0000

Running apps that require a phone and are not available for Linux, without putting them on your actual smartphone (if any)

New comment by ale42 in "Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen"

ale42 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:04:25 +0000

I thought that the dripping rainbow ones were enough. Maybe you have to ask for rainbow unicorns flying on the screen.

New comment by ale42 in "Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts"

ale42 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:15:11 +0000

There's also much more recent research where you can actually track the position of people by the changes to the Wifi signal. Passive monitoring only, no device involved. See https://github.com/Saad-Imtiaz/WiFi-Sense for example (first thing I found by looking up now, never tried myself).

New comment by ale42 in "Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts"

ale42 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:13:28 +0000

Isn't it rather detecting UWB or pings from NFB reader? But at least the latter should work also do detect Android phones (see also https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1jsr9jv/eavesdroppi...).

New comment by ale42 in "It may soon be possible to create "mirror life""

ale42 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:26:28 +0000

About L-Glucose: according to Wikipedia, "the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects."

New comment by ale42 in "Attention is all you have"

ale42 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:21:38 +0000

Knowledge and intelligence are not the same, although there might be some link.

again today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857442

New comment by ale42 in "Attention is all you have"

ale42 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:19:24 +0000

> they also seem significantly smarter than older generations.

They seem or they are? In many places, statistically, they're actually NOT smarter. It's the other way around.

https://cepr.harvard.edu/news/2026/05/why-us-test-scores-are... https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-read...