Hacker News: elondaits

New comment by elondaits in "The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games"

elondaits — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:20:42 +0000

Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.

New comment by elondaits in "Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them"

elondaits — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:10:57 +0000

I think they want regulation for them as well, because they have the money to comply… but regulation eliminates the threat of open source models, foreign models, and small independent companies.

New comment by elondaits in "Vite 8.0 Is Out"

elondaits — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:14:36 +0000

But it’s not just convention… JSX files are not valid JS files. Also, as a programmer, I would be annoyed to open a JS file and find out it’s actually something else.

New comment by elondaits in "Rijksmuseum researchers discover new painting by Rembrandt van Rijn"

elondaits — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:50:58 +0000

Because part of the price of a work of art is its perceived historic / cultural importance. Autographs are taking this to the extreme, where only the mark of the author exists, on its own, and still gets a high price. On the other end, fakes and very accurate reproductions, would never be as valued even if the effect as a visual piece is practically the same.

New comment by elondaits in "MacBook Neo"

elondaits — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:21:48 +0000

AirPods have too much latency for playing music. You want wired audio for running GarageBand or Logic Pro with a MIDI controller. They could have gone with a USB-C to audio adapter, but then you wouldn't be able to plug the MIDI controller and charge the computer.

... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

New comment by elondaits in "Netflix Backs Out of Warner Bros. Bidding, Paramount Set to Win"

elondaits — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:39:33 +0000

My guess is that they are looking forward to juicy licensing deals with OpenAI, Google or Meta for the rights to generate AI content featuring Batman, Harry Potter, and other characters in the WB stable.

New comment by elondaits in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

elondaits — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:53:52 +0000

Typically “Game” mode, on TVs, turns off post processing, to avoid the extra frames of lag it causes.

New comment by elondaits in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

elondaits — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:52:31 +0000

My thought. There should be a mandate to allow downloading all data on account closure from any service.

New comment by elondaits in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

elondaits — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:50:47 +0000

Back in 2015, I traveled to the US and wanted to buy a Macbook Pro at the Apple Store. The configuration I wanted wasn’t available in Apple Stores, and I couldn’t buy it online because at that point there was some limitation in the online store like they only took US credit cards, or something.

At the Apple Store, the employees suggestion (a more senior one, who was consulted) was to buy a gift card for the computer’s cost (~$1500) and pay at the online store with that. I didn’t do it because buying “virtual stuff” for that amount seemed crazy (this was a huge amount of money for me, at the time).

New comment by elondaits in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

elondaits — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:22:02 +0000

I don’t think I’ll live long enough to trust AI coding assistants with something like schema validation, just to name one thing I use dependencies for.

New comment by elondaits in "Disney Lost Roger Rabbit"

elondaits — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:31:25 +0000

For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source.

That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.

As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.

New comment by elondaits in "Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to"

elondaits — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:37:43 +0000

I administer a PHP website with very little legit traffic per month, but a few thousand pages probably. The bot traffic is crazy. We're not using Cloudflare for that site, but we're using a local static-page cache... and without it, the site simply can't function.

You don't need to be the target of a dDoS to use a CDN.

Also, using CDNs (Fastly via Github pages, not Cloudflare, in this case) once allowed us to be featured in a very large newspaper without worries, extra expenses, or extra work.

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

elondaits — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:01:59 +0000

I self hosted on one of the company’s servers back in the late 90s. Hard drive crashes (and a hack once, through an Apache bug) had our services (http, pop, smtp, nfs, smb, etc ) down for at least 2-3 days (full reinstall, reconfiguration, etc).

Then, with regular VPSs I also had systems down for 1-2 days. Just last week the company that hosts NextCloud for us was down the whole weekend (from Friday evening) and we couldn’t get their attention until Monday.

So far these huge outages that last 2-5 hours are still lower impact for me, and require me to take less action.

New comment by elondaits in "You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say"

elondaits — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:55:05 +0000

It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.

New comment by elondaits in "Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads"

elondaits — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:03:19 +0000

QR code generator would be good. Many of the online generators don’t link directly where you ask, but through a tracking domain.

New comment by elondaits in "Why I gave the world wide web away for free"

elondaits — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:01:46 +0000

It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.

The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.

What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?

New comment by elondaits in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

elondaits — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 04:33:35 +0000

In his review of AirPods Pro 3 he says they now stay on better.

New comment by elondaits in "Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters"

elondaits — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:53:49 +0000

What about a malicious DNS (on a public spoofed or hacked WiFi) that forwards you to a lookalike domain? Unfortunately many times public WiFi doesn’t work with Google’s or Cloudflare’s DNS servers (I think the Deutsche Bahn’s WiFi was such a case, if I remember correctly, but I know I came across a few on the last few years while traveling). I don’t think there’s anything protecting against that when you’re using a browser.

Sometimes circumstances force one to connect to a public WiFi (e.g. airports, where WiFi is always super dodgy).

New comment by elondaits in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

elondaits — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 16:07:49 +0000

The “Hey *” (Meta, Siri, Alexa) is typically handled by a simpler mechanism on a short buffer that triggers the proper recording and speech recognition workflow in order to save battery. But if you’re not going to trust the company, then the fact that it responds to Hey Meta shouldn’t make any difference because it could still be quietly recording. The fact that it responds to a wakeup prompt changes nothing.

New comment by elondaits in "We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails"

elondaits — Sat, 03 May 2025 20:47:19 +0000

I’m hardly an expert with Rails, and I integrated React twice, on two very different sites, using API controllers. The nice thing about React is that you can limit it to an island on the page, and don’t need to buy into the router, etc. that said, I did disable Hotwire to make my life easier.