Hacker News: arkx

New comment by arkx in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

arkx — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:19:12 +0000

If you want a good panel, you're going to have to buy a smart TV.

Just don't ever let it connect to the internet.

New comment by arkx in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

arkx — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:05:10 +0000

In a word, yes. While Wine has been an option for decades, Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream. You can check compatibility reports from https://www.protondb.com/ for whichever games you're interested in.

New comment by arkx in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

arkx — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:52:05 +0000

Me too. What good is a status page that's not automated?

New comment by arkx in "Bazzite would shut down if Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit"

arkx — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:48:21 +0000

Isn't Steam (or more specifically steamwebhelper.exe) using Chromium Embedded Framework for web views? It's already a 64-bit process for me on Windows.

I also do wish they'd upgrade the client completely, but WoW64 isn't going anywhere. It's probably discussions like this on Linux side that would move their hand, if anything.

New comment by arkx in "KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader"

arkx — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:28:07 +0000

I wish it supported vertical text and reading right-to-left (Japanese). It's a long-standing issue that doesn't seem likely to be solved (https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/4353). The relevant standard is https://www.w3.org/TR/css-writing-modes-3/, which is part of supporting ePub 3.

New comment by arkx in "You might want to stop running atop"

arkx — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 23:59:16 +0000

Another xz case?

New comment by arkx in "Discworld Rules"

arkx — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 20:33:24 +0000

Ukraine did have Soviet-era nuclear weapons at the time of their independence, which they let go of in exchange of US, UK and Russia security guarantees in 1994. It is amazing to me how this fact is being memoryholed.

New comment by arkx in "About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)"

arkx — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:21:07 +0000

The essentials for me are private email, calendar & cloud storage. Here is my post-Google setup:

https://tuta.com/ is a German privacy-focused alternative that I'm currently using for email & calendar. Easy switch, although I was already using web clients rather than IMAP before the switch.

I looked at Proton Drive for cloud storage, but their CEO Andy Yen is a Trump supporter (https://archive.ph/2025.01.15-162500/https://www.reddit.com/...), which makes me question his decision-making.

I settled on a 5€ / month VPS from Hetzner and using Syncthing instead, but this requires some minimal amount of technical skills to set up and maintain.

There is no alternative to YouTube, unfortunately.

New comment by arkx in "Amazon now discloses you're buying a license to view Kindle eBooks"

arkx — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:24:30 +0000

Kindle readers are far from the best and completely locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak.

ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM.

I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.

New comment by arkx in "Windows 11 system components use the default browser to open links in Europe"

arkx — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 14:47:35 +0000

Your web browsing habits reveal a lot more about you than your desktop habits.

New comment by arkx in "Alpine Linux in the Browser (2020)"

arkx — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 09:27:23 +0000

My understanding is that it’s because of node-gyp, used to build native addon modules for Node.js.

New comment by arkx in "“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996)"

arkx — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 19:12:45 +0000

I see where you're coming from in the general case; I think it has been well established that leadership positions attract people well described by the dark triad. However, I don't agree that being a leader has to revolve around manipulation and dishonesty, and I've certainly seen this in the real world.

Even if Bill Gates has the dark triad traits I do not think they were on display in this particular email exchange. I truly don't think they were engaging in any "face-saving" here -- Nathan had been working for Microsoft for 10 years at this point, leading Microsoft Research and rising to the first ever Microsoft CTO. They coauthored a book called "The Road Ahead" in 1995. Bill has called him the greatest hire he made at Microsoft.

From every single source I've come across it seems clear that Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are friends and share a deep mutual respect. No wonder they are still working together in 2021! You'd think after a lifetime of supposed abuse Nathan would have stopped working with him after becoming a billionaire, right?

New comment by arkx in "“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996)"

arkx — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 18:27:39 +0000

I don't think you understood correctly.

A wise leader surrounds themself with people they can truly trust in. In this message we see a glimpse into the dynamic between Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, and my main takeaway is that Bill truly trusts Nathan here, enough to be vulnerable and speak openly about his worries.

While it's humorous and perhaps even enlightening to think of him as a "child king", I don't think he was only "seeming hurt" here or manipulating (unless you count all forms of emotional appeal as manipulation). Being honest and straight is a very effective way to lead those close to you.

It's also the leader's job to worry about threats like this and direct the attention of his advisors.

New comment by arkx in "Lisp Game Jam 2018"

arkx — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 13:45:14 +0000

https://discord.gg/XvVKBwe

New comment by arkx in "Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2017 Faraday Medal"

arkx — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 13:08:25 +0000

"Dealers of Lightning" by Michael Hiltzik was an excellent book on Xerox PARC.

I haven't yet read "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner, which covers Bell Labs.

New comment by arkx in "Humble Book Bundle: Hacking Reloaded"

arkx — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:30:10 +0000

Last time there was a bundle like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255) dsacco wrote an awesome comment with recommendations on which books to pick up. Any chance for another round?

New comment by arkx in "The Website Obesity Crisis (2015)"

arkx — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 23:28:51 +0000

> I've heard that airplane fuel is becoming prohibitively expensive

Why not verify what you've heard? Kerosene prices have actually fallen dramatically from just a few years ago.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...

New comment by arkx in "You might not need JavaScript"

arkx — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 08:50:57 +0000

He is parroting a year old clickbait headline (https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/) where the main gripes were that

- Apple didn't attend EdgeConf 2015

- https://webkit.org/blog/ was not updated often enough

- Safari 9 had a seriously buggy IndexedDB (fixed in Safari 10)

New comment by arkx in "Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music"

arkx — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:29:15 +0000

s/surprisingly/un&/

New comment by arkx in "SICP in Clojure"

arkx — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 12:43:10 +0000

ClojureScript is a very good tool without any Java commitment.