Hacker News: fffrantz

New comment by fffrantz in "Why I don’t vibe code"

fffrantz — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:00:32 +0000

Life without a car is not an exotic luxury at all, far from it, and all your points are just proving the point. Cars are a luxury, from the amount of taxes paid towards car infrastructure to the social costs associated with “the car culture” (insurance, public health, climate change, etc.). There are countless examples of urban and rural areas where alternative modes of transportation (LRT, bus, bicycle, ferries) are the norm and where cars are barely necessary/used. Not every place in the world is Anywhere, USA…

New comment by fffrantz in "Google nerfs Pixel 6a batteries following fire hazard"

fffrantz — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 22:10:09 +0000

Sorry for double posting, missed it at the time!

Google nerfs Pixel 6a batteries following fire hazard

fffrantz — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:41:14 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/a-mess-of-its-own-making-google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535604

Points: 67

# Comments: 52

New comment by fffrantz in "Cross Views"

fffrantz — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 19:49:13 +0000

Yep, same here. Discovered I was stereoblind quite late as well as I thought it was the norm and my brain just got used to it.

New comment by fffrantz in "Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022)"

fffrantz — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 22:07:10 +0000

Second that. I do see the difference at work where it's impossible to install Firefox and/or extensions; it's god awful to browse the web without it.

I even installed it on my parents laptop and they never complained that ads suddenly started appearing.

New comment by fffrantz in "In the trenches: on being an Engineering Manager"

fffrantz — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 12:39:09 +0000

Also, and it's striking to me that there never was a crackdown on this, but in a lot of countries, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you have an engineering degree from a vetted higher-ed institution and are part of your provincial/state engineers' association.

For example, in N.S., your job title cannot contain the word engineer unless you're registered as an engineer with Engineers Nova Scotia, the provincial regulatory body. And to get the EIT status (engineer in training, the provisional period before becoming a professional engineer), you must hold a CEAB-accredited undergraduate degree. So, software engineers rarely exist and it's mostly software developers in N.S.

New comment by fffrantz in "The Man in the Midnight-Blue Six-Ply Italian-Milled Wool Suit"

fffrantz — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 12:20:32 +0000

Came here to say this. And he also gives a lot of insight on how men's clothing is made and why it's made that way.

He also regularly gives tips on where to shop and what to look for. I really like the fact that it's not totally focused on bespoke tailoring.

He's also on bluesky for those who do not have a Twitter account: https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social

New comment by fffrantz in "Show HN: Ultra-portable Gantt chart tool for very regulated environments"

fffrantz — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:50:17 +0000

Gonna give this a shot! Looks promising for SharePoint sites that are internal.

New comment by fffrantz in "Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB"

fffrantz — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 17:03:45 +0000

I think it should, yes. I'm going to try as soon as I can find my raspberry pi buried in the garage.

It should work anywhere a USB keyboard works, realistically.

New comment by fffrantz in "Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB"

fffrantz — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:36:28 +0000

Damned, I just purchased a new keyboard with a 2.4 GHz dongle because my Bluetooth keyboard cannot with GRUB and I got tired of having to plug it in every time I rebooted.

What a cool little project. I might build a couple of these for the KVMs at work.

New comment by fffrantz in "Octopuses seen hunting together with fish, punching those that don't cooperate"

fffrantz — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:48:10 +0000

Thought exactly the same!

New comment by fffrantz in "Hezbollah Walkie-Talkies Blow Up Across Lebanon in Second Wave of Attacks"

fffrantz — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:06:02 +0000

https://archive.is/34wxJ

New comment by fffrantz in "How a 16th Century Explorer's Sailing Ship Works"

fffrantz — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:11:44 +0000

Perfect companion to the Captain Hornblower series of books.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower

New comment by fffrantz in "Ente Auth: open-source Authy alternative for 2FA"

fffrantz — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 20:01:31 +0000

And it seems to be totally generic, just 7 digits, and switching every 10 seconds instead of 30.

Bitwarden can import them too.

New comment by fffrantz in "SUSE upgrades its distros with 19 years of support – no other Linux comes close"

fffrantz — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 21:58:16 +0000

Well, I'm still running critical services on Solaris 10 everyday and will be running them for the foreseeable future. Granted it's on an airtight network, but still, every time I see CDE, I'm brought back 15 years ago.

I wish we could migrate to something more modern, but vendor lock-in is strong in certain instances, let alone in the embedded space.

New comment by fffrantz in "OSRD: Open-Source Railway Designer"

fffrantz — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 19:07:09 +0000

Here in Europe , a lot of former public utilities companies and the public sector in general has been really pushing niche OSS and OpenData projects in Europe.

It's not always useful (rarely actually) for the average Joe, but it's definitely cool to see them embracing OSS and OpenData.

New comment by fffrantz in "Microsoft's full-screen reminders – upgrade to Windows 11 are back"

fffrantz — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 21:23:05 +0000

That's why using immutable distros is awesome. Worst case scenario, you can boot the previous version.

I've been using Fedora Silverblue for a while and never got a borked upgrade. It's not without its own flaws, but if you can live with mostly flatpak apps, it's a pretty compelling package.

New comment by fffrantz in "Days since it was DNS"

fffrantz — Sat, 18 May 2024 20:06:03 +0000

Lately, MTU has gotten up my list of things to check when stuff goes down.

It seems carriers can't get their MTUs straight as of late, especially on MPLS links...

I really thought we had this figured out 20 years ago...

New comment by fffrantz in "Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs"

fffrantz — Mon, 06 May 2024 19:23:46 +0000

Agreed 100 percent. Software is the easy part. Getting HVAC, power and network up to the levels of cloud providers is difficult to get right and prohibitively expensive.

For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs. These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.

New comment by fffrantz in "Windows 10 will start nagging you to switch from local account to MS Account"

fffrantz — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 18:29:27 +0000

Honestly, if you're not playing video games or require Windows for certain apps and if you're a little tech savvy, why are you still using Windows?

It's not a rhetorical question, it's a real one. I'm really interested in what's keeping people on Windows nowadays, considering all the spying, nagging and overall hostile attitude Microsoft has against its users.