Hacker News: criddell

New comment by criddell in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

criddell — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:14:38 +0000

I assumed this bell was for alerting pedestrians or other cyclists wearing noise cancelling headphones.

New comment by criddell in "Veracrypt project update"

criddell — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:33:39 +0000

Or create the account but don't use Microsoft services.

New comment by criddell in "Claude Code is locking people out for hours"

criddell — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:19:44 +0000

When you hire a person, you don't know what you are going to get out of them today.

If an hour of an excellent developer's time is worth $X, isn't that the upper bound of what the AI companies can charge? If hiring a person is better value than paying for an AI, then do that.

New comment by criddell in "Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire Hat"

criddell — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:57:21 +0000

Any idea how long the tapes will last? I have a bunch sitting in a box that I should probably verify have all been imported already before they turn to dust.

New comment by criddell in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

criddell — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:26:11 +0000

Ellison owns something like 40% of Oracle which has a market cap of $400 billion. That measly 2% share bump earned him $3 billion today.

New comment by criddell in "Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct"

criddell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:08:55 +0000

> Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo

Apple bought Workflow from DeskConnect (they may have bough the entire company).

New comment by criddell in "Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)"

criddell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:03:57 +0000

As long as there's a way to maintain the current display density, that would be just fine.

However, like on Windows, I suspect macOS would increase the tap target size on lots of the touchable elements. Even if I don't use the touchscreen, I would still have to pay the touch target real estate tax in my applications.

New comment by criddell in "Do your own writing"

criddell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:59:26 +0000

If it's very mechanical you probably aren't losing out on anything by using a machine to produce it.

New comment by criddell in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

criddell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:16:15 +0000

It is doing its one job.

New comment by criddell in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

criddell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:03:07 +0000

I don't know much. She isn't allowed to talk about any operational details. She just started there a few weeks ago.

And Canadian banks aren't known for moving fast. They are pretty conservative (at least the big chartered banks are).

New comment by criddell in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

criddell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:27:36 +0000

There's also a bunch of software that only runs or runs best on Windows.

New comment by criddell in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

criddell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:12:15 +0000

My daughter works at a bank in Canada and she was issued a Macbook.

New comment by criddell in "Apple says no one using Lockdown Mode has been hacked with spyware"

criddell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:03:52 +0000

Which is exactly what they said:

> “We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

New comment by criddell in "Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids"

criddell — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:53:46 +0000

How would that hold anybody responsible? What did you have in mind with respect to parental accountability? Does anything other than the legal system actually have power to make changes when it comes to bad parents?

New comment by criddell in "Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids"

criddell — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:43:00 +0000

PBS is great if you are looking for a workable harm reduction strategy. Eliminating that type of entertainment is probably an even better goal.

New comment by criddell in "Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case"

criddell — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:37:39 +0000

> Parents ought to be held held responsible for how they care for their kids.

If YouTube detects that a child is watching 5 hours of video a day, should Google alert child protective services?

New comment by criddell in "FreeCAD v1.1"

criddell — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:14:28 +0000

You can run Solidworks or Onshape as well. The former via Wine, the latter in Chrome.

New comment by criddell in "FreeCAD v1.1"

criddell — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:45:09 +0000

Freecad is limited by Open Cascade which is the modeling kernel at the heart of the program. I started with Open Cascade then moved on to Granite from PTC (not open source) and the latter is just so much easier, faster, and stable. I’ve heard Parasolid and whatever it is that Autodesk uses these days are both excellent as well.

It would be nice for there to be a more modern open source modeling library.

New comment by criddell in "Apple Just Lost Me"

criddell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:00:08 +0000

The liquid glass debacle seems minor compared to the crappy keyboard debacle five or ten years ago and that didn't really hurt them in the long run.

I don't have a Mac but my tablet and phone are both running liquid glass and it's... fine. I lost my favorite Sudoku app (Enjoy Sudoku) when they updated and for me that's the worst thing about it.

I think on forums like this that tend to have a lot of Apple fans and haters, the impact of UI changes is overblown. Normies mostly don't care. They notice the change when it happens and then two days later they have already forgotten what the UI used to be.

New comment by criddell in "Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms"

criddell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:52:55 +0000

What's an example of an ad promoting an eating disorder? Are ads for eating disorders more difficult to turn off than other types of ads?