Hacker News: altitudinous

New comment by altitudinous in "Claude Code removed from Anthropic's Pro plan"

altitudinous — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:20:53 +0000

Chickens have come home to roost. Someone had to pay for the servers and the debt, and its us!!

New comment by altitudinous in "LibreOffice hits back at critics, says its UI is better than Microsoft Office's"

altitudinous — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:42:53 +0000

Arrogant. End users decide by deciding what they want to use. Thats all there is to it.

New comment by altitudinous in "C64 Copy Protection"

altitudinous — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:43:56 +0000

Interesting to see this stuff. I really enjoyed cracking this back in the day, just for friends, but took a different approach of using sector editors to read the code on the disk to find where the checks wer done to see if the protections were present and replacing it with NOPs ($EA), or changing BNEs to BEQs. What was more interesting was how the code that did the check was also moved about the disk, I remember seeing for a particular piece of code it did a B-E (Block Execute) on Track 5 Sector 5. I could plainly see the protection check on that spot on the disk. My young self was very excited about working it out. The puzzle of copy protection was more fun than playing the actual games. Very frequently the directory tracks (18?? I think) were overwritten but it was obvious looking over the disk to see the headers for various programs and the load start address so it was easy to rebuild. Golden times. I've coded since then, and only recently have stopped as AI has finally got better than me!!

New comment by altitudinous in "GPT-5 for Developers"

altitudinous — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 04:55:16 +0000

Indeed context awareness is the big difference here, GPT5 is a vast improvement. It doesn't lose track (as easily)

New comment by altitudinous in "It's unlikely that there will be any further releases of mt32-pi"

altitudinous — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 06:57:32 +0000

A discussion of the victim is not relevant. A discussion of the root cause is.

New comment by altitudinous in "It's unlikely that there will be any further releases of mt32-pi"

altitudinous — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 06:40:45 +0000

NO. I work on very public software, I receive pretty terrible criticism in reviews and email. Generally a vocal minority of people are unkind scammers and want it all for free and let me know. Blaming the recipient of the emails (victim blaming) or saying the individual may be suffering from wider issues is not on. It is irrelevant, it is their private life. At issue are the scum who scam.

New comment by altitudinous in "Apple passwords deserve an app"

altitudinous — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 05:18:45 +0000

I agree (and its not often I agree with folk on Hacker News), Apple provide a far superior password service inside a far inferior UI. The handling of authentication codes is particularly great in the Apple ecosystem, but very poorly promoted.

For a company that markets itself as secure these are retrograde steps.

New comment by altitudinous in "Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems"

altitudinous — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 11:44:04 +0000

Blah Blah Blah. I use ChatGPT for this every day to write code to save my own efforts and it is doing just fine thanks. I also use it for creative content in my apps, although I edit this work to get the tone in its writing correct. It is excellent for this.

New comment by altitudinous in "Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps"

altitudinous — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 03:16:25 +0000

Terrible idea, the reason why Apple is so popular is that the apps are extremely diverse. Being suggested here is an app store with apps curated by computer nerds who think they are diverse but are probably left biased. Terrible. If you want curation, go on to the Apple app store Today, Games and Apps tab pages. For everyone else there is the Search tab. A good balance.

New comment by altitudinous in "Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?"

altitudinous — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 01:49:48 +0000

A book called "Astronomical Algorithms" was written back in the 80's or 90's. It was very exciting and inspirational for me that the sun and moon and the position of planets - nature itself - could be predicted by code. It still is an inspiration for me today.

New comment by altitudinous in "I hacked my car"

altitudinous — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 14:22:55 +0000

Outstanding blogs, really enjoyed reading them. Someone talented actually performing a hack, rare these days.

New comment by altitudinous in "How many decimals of pi do we need? (2016)"

altitudinous — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 02:09:24 +0000

This comes up often in various postings and forums, and I enjoy it every time I read it. I like the perspective.

New comment by altitudinous in "I Write Letters to CEOs (2018)"

altitudinous — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 01:50:13 +0000

It is important here that he wrote LETTERS. Not emails. LETTERS.

Folks are firing off emails all the time. Taking time to write a letter is more likely to get a response, from just about anyone.

New comment by altitudinous in "Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?"

altitudinous — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 12:32:05 +0000

Whatever laptop you already own.

New comment by altitudinous in "Prince of Persia has been released for the Atari XL/XE"

altitudinous — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 06:01:12 +0000

Looks amazing, but the youtube video on the site is so frustrating, endless demos and credits, not much gameplay - takes nearly 3 minutes of viewing to get to anything Prince of Persia related. Not the way to sell a game, but it does look great.

New comment by altitudinous in "5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0"

altitudinous — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 03:06:25 +0000

This. Especially on the app store. I have several successful side projects myself and am semi retired.

But it is a waste of time trying to tell people that discoverability is the key to success. Everyone who owns an iPhone thinks they are an app expert and the first thing they do with a new idea is to come up with an unsearchable, undiscoverable name.

New comment by altitudinous in "Developers aren’t impressed with Apple’s App Store changes"

altitudinous — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 03:38:21 +0000

A lot of vocal small developers are unimpressed. A vocal minority is not a majority - most just don't care knowing what the outcome was going to be already - lawyers making a lot of money, and marketing teams posturing. Move on.

New comment by altitudinous in "FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website"

altitudinous — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:26:54 +0000

My unpopular but realistic opinion as a successful financially app dev is - just post a Google compliant link to a payment system. Take the 15% hit. The payment link is likely to be more direct and user friendly, so you will likely end up earning more even after the 15% cut. Having a link to a website and then having users have to scroll to the bottom in order to donate means you are likely to be earning near $0 from it anyway.

New comment by altitudinous in "The Problem with Perceptual Hashes"

altitudinous — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 05:42:52 +0000

The scanning is to take place within iCloud Photos, which handles images / videos etc on an individual basis. It would be a pretty easy thing to do for Apple to calculate hashes on these. I'm not sure how iOS handles archives, but it doesn't matter - remember it isn't 100% or 0% with these things - say only 50% of those people store images in iCloud Photo, catching out only 50% of those folk is still a good result.

New comment by altitudinous in "The Problem with Perceptual Hashes"

altitudinous — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 03:06:54 +0000

This article focusses too much on the individual case, and not enough on the fact that Apple will need multiple matches to report someone. Images would normally be distributed in sets I suspect, so it is going to be easy to detect when someone is holding an offending set because of multiple matches. I don't think Apple are going to be concerned with a single hit. Here in the news offenders are reported as holding many thousands of images.