Hacker News: chrisballinger

New comment by chrisballinger in "OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS"

chrisballinger — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:35:36 +0000

Auto mode works on Bedrock now!

New comment by chrisballinger in "ClickHouse Cloud is now in Public Beta"

chrisballinger — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 15:21:29 +0000

At first I was a bit confused about why The Onion’s spin-off site had a cloud offering, but that one is called ClickHole.

New comment by chrisballinger in "Apple Studio Display Runs Full Version of iOS 15.4"

chrisballinger — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 15:55:46 +0000

In theory couldn't it tunnel ethernet over the TB4 cable?

New comment by chrisballinger in "My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs"

chrisballinger — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 19:40:05 +0000

You can now renew your AppleCare+ on eligible iPhones, iPads and Macs at a monthly/yearly rate after the 2-3 year coverage period expires as long as you do it within 30 days of expiration: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210580

Would highly recommend extending for a laptop needing this many repairs.

New comment by chrisballinger in "Dflat: SQLite FlatBuffers"

chrisballinger — Sun, 04 Apr 2021 16:04:19 +0000

Very interesting concept, but I'd recommend people check out GRDB[1] if you're in search of a mature persistence layer for your iOS apps. It's a modern SQLite wrapper with a lot of conveniences for application development like value types, Codable mapping, Combine observables, etc.

I've deployed it in production on a few apps so far, and it has been a real joy to use.

1. https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift

New comment by chrisballinger in "WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app"

chrisballinger — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 01:56:51 +0000

Signal: https://signal.org/

New comment by chrisballinger in "Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants"

chrisballinger — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:03:38 +0000

I would love to see all “Share the Road” signs replaced with “Bicycles May Use Full Lane” [1] signs. This is the law in California but many motorists are unaware, or don’t care.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycles_May_Use_Full_Lane

New comment by chrisballinger in "Yet another macOS privacy protections bypass"

chrisballinger — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 16:51:16 +0000

I would appreciate these disclosures a lot more if the author didn’t always include a flippant dismissal of security architecture improvements in macOS. Yes, it’s harder to write software with sandboxing and other modern security techniques, but that doesn’t mean we should go back to how things were.

New comment by chrisballinger in "How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient?"

chrisballinger — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 14:54:22 +0000

If you’re concerned about your carbon footprint and live within 2.5 miles of work, you might want to consider a bicycle instead! Regular cycling has made a profoundly positive impact to my life, and I would highly encourage you to explore that as an option.

New comment by chrisballinger in "Apple responds to Epic Games lawsuit, says CEO asked for special treatment"

chrisballinger — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 22:32:44 +0000

If you keep a customer with a recurring subscription for a year, Apple reduces its cut to 15%. This applies to all developers: https://www.apple.com/ios/app-store/principles-practices/

New comment by chrisballinger in "Ring fired employees for watching customer videos"

chrisballinger — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 16:34:11 +0000

Whenever end-to-end encryption is not used, scenarios like these are bound to happen eventually.

As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1].

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210538

New comment by chrisballinger in "Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links"

chrisballinger — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:02:33 +0000

I guess this will get lost in the noise, but a few years ago Apple relaxed its restrictions on IAP donations and allows developers to offer a "tip jar" where IAPs don't unlock any specific features. I've been shipping a free and open source app with a donate button on the App Store since mid-2017 [1].

1. https://chatsecure.org/blog/sustainable-open-source-starts-w...

New comment by chrisballinger in "Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features"

chrisballinger — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 13:05:30 +0000

Yes it does? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

New comment by chrisballinger in "Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1"

chrisballinger — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 15:49:11 +0000

If you don't mind disabling SIP, you can still run Mojave on a lot of older hardware: http://dosdude1.com/mojave

New comment by chrisballinger in "Apple SIM"

chrisballinger — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 02:04:43 +0000

The “One Plus” plan has unlimited international 256 kbps LTE and is juuuuust fast enough to get by. The low latency of LTE is helpful to make it feel a lot faster than a 2G connection of similar speed.

New comment by chrisballinger in "Telegram apps fall foul of iOS App Store content rules"

chrisballinger — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 18:42:06 +0000

Articles about App Store rejection are always a bit sensationalized. I'm not very familiar with Telegram, but I think the issue here is that by default on a fresh install there are public channels that could contain "obscene content".

There are no public channels in Signal, so there's nothing objectionable for an app reviewer to see on first launch. Apple doesn't restrict any form of end-to-end crypto... except VPN apps in China. :-\

New comment by chrisballinger in "U.S. To Probe Apple Over Updates That Slow Older iPhones"

chrisballinger — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 19:44:14 +0000

The issue is that the peak power consumption could exceed the maximum power that the battery could deliver, not that the batteries were running out of charge. By throttling power consumption you can prevent unexpected shutdowns at the expense of maximum performance. This is especially problematic in colder climates where phones were shutting down because the cold battery couldn’t deliver enough juice, regardless of its charge level.

New comment by chrisballinger in "In California, Where Cancer Warnings Abound, Coffee Is Next in Line"

chrisballinger — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 21:38:13 +0000

Probably for exhaust from cars idling at the entrance. You'll see a similar warning in the walkways to your plane in the airport.

New comment by chrisballinger in "Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype"

chrisballinger — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 18:55:12 +0000

Yep. You can use Signal Protocol over XMPP by using an OMEMO-compatible client [1]. You can pretty "easily" host your own XMPP server using Prosody [2] on a Raspberry Pi.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO 2. https://prosody.im

New comment by chrisballinger in "A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance"

chrisballinger — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 04:02:00 +0000

I run LineageOS on an old Moto G and think it's a great way for us technical people to keep our devices relevant beyond their intended lifetimes. For people less technically inclined I will always recommend Apple devices, however if Apple keeps rushing out buggy software releases this may change.