Hacker News: grahamburger

New comment by grahamburger in "Pixel 11 doesn't yet meet the GrapheneOS security standards and may be skipped"

grahamburger — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:03:58 +0000

Sometimes, yes, but not that often IME. Maybe 10-15% of the time.

New comment by grahamburger in "Pixel 11 doesn't yet meet the GrapheneOS security standards and may be skipped"

grahamburger — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:52:38 +0000

Definitely a good idea to plan on this at all times. In my case this looks like:

* All photos auto upload to Google photos

* All other important files are in a syncthing folder with at least two other devices (laptop+desktop)

* 2fa in Authy with cloud-sync

* Passwords on Firefox sync

* Google Fi is my carrier, and pulls eSIM when I log in to the app even without my old phone

* Google voice number is my main phone number. I don't lose access to incoming or outgoing sms or voice calls if I lose my phone.

In a pinch, I can buy a cheap prepaid phone and sim while traveling and be fully functional and reachable. I've had to do this before, and while I probably wouldn't go to the trouble for work, I feel compelled to be at least reachable for family.

I've thought about de-googling this further; photos could go straight into syncthing and I could port my # to a generic SIP provider that offers SMS. So far neither have seemed quite worth the trouble.

I've always felt very uncomfortable treating my phone as anything other than a rather overpowered thin-client.

New comment by grahamburger in "Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock"

grahamburger — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:32:24 +0000

Apparently! That or I just have a trustworthy face haha

New comment by grahamburger in "Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock"

grahamburger — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:25:26 +0000

How fun! Once, after climbing around in a dusty old church attic like this, I had to head straight to the airport for a flight. Barely made it on because something in the dust kept flagging as dangerous. They were using a test strip on my backpack and clothing and analyzing it in some kind of machine. Stressful as I was already pressed for time! Finally got a clean test and they let me through.

New comment by grahamburger in "I said no and Apple said yes"

grahamburger — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:59:43 +0000

I know what you mean, but my System 76 laptop comes pretty darn close to 'just works.' Certainly closer than Windows ever did for me.

New comment by grahamburger in "Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP"

grahamburger — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:33:07 +0000

Haven't all the major browsers had sync for ages? I've been using Firefox's built-in sync for so long I don't even remember what it was like without it.

New comment by grahamburger in "Saving Jet Fuel"

grahamburger — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:55:22 +0000

I just had this happen on a flight yesterday. Exactly as you describe, extra fuel put the plane over weight, so we sat there letting it burn for an hour.

New comment by grahamburger in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

grahamburger — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:57:36 +0000

I played a few hours of Alyx and, I'll be honest, it started to kinda freak me out. I noticed myself getting a bit of anxiety when putting the headset on to play, and a relief when I took it off to see the real world was still there! I've never experienced something so immersive, but I haven't picked it back up to finish it yet. Someday.

I also still mini golf regularly. It's such a fun, low effort way to hang out with friends and family that we wouldn't otherwise see all that often.

New comment by grahamburger in "Will there be a 7G?"

grahamburger — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 21:08:05 +0000

'best' is relative here; lower bands travel further, which is great for maximizing coverage footprint, but not great for high-density. Each node can only handle so much traffic, and you can pack them in more densely with short-range spectrum. mmWave really is the best frequency for very high density, high capacity networks, but the bottleneck is you have to deploy all the extra nodes to get the coverage.

New comment by grahamburger in "Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS"

grahamburger — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:41:25 +0000

uBlock Origin has been fully supported on Firefox for Android for a long time.

As world rages over Flock, SLC creates new rules for its license plate readers

grahamburger — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 05:01:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/08/25/flock-isnt-used-slc-utahs-capital/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49444177

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by grahamburger in "AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them"

grahamburger — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:34:52 +0000

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

New comment by grahamburger in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

grahamburger — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:00:17 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is the one he wants:

https://supercassetteband.bandcamp.com/merch/ouroboros-flopp...

New comment by grahamburger in "Recycle – Floppydisks"

grahamburger — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 06:03:56 +0000

My son told be today that he wants to buy a floppy disk drive because one of the bands he likes started releasing singles on 3.5" floppies.

What a time to be alive.

New comment by grahamburger in "Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice"

grahamburger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:22:33 +0000

Neat! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time, well before LLMs came around. It was one of the first things I tried out with an LLM in the early days of ChatGPT. My son and I made little mysteries for each other and just pasted them in a chatgpt conversation with instructions for it to pretend to be the other characters and whatnot, then handed the keyboard to the player. Mine didn't work that well, I don't think he ever solved it; partially because chatgpt kinda led him astray. When I started his, I just point blank asked the mystery and it told me the solution. I felt bad about that, he had put a good amount of effort into it, but I had reminded him to tell it not to reveal the answer and he didn't. Anyway, I figured someone would make this eventually! Excited to give it a try!

New comment by grahamburger in "Severance"

grahamburger — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:54:57 +0000

Ha, that's a good one. At a job 10 years ago or so I had a similar premonition of upcoming layoffs—lots of closed door meetings between the execs, travel and expansion plans getting cancelled, etc. One day my immediate boss, who I genuinely like, walked into my office, closed the door, and told me he was gonna have to lay me off in two weeks. He said if I would handle x,y,z tasks (a few days of work) I could just stop showing up until the layoff day and he'd make sure I got a good severance. Listen, I appreciated this! it still sucked, but he wasn't supposed to tell me at all.

Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me ." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.

New comment by grahamburger in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

grahamburger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 06:18:23 +0000

Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!

New comment by grahamburger in "Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning"

grahamburger — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:31:27 +0000

As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.

New comment by grahamburger in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

grahamburger — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:35:59 +0000

And the remainder is people complaining about all the AI

New comment by grahamburger in "How to Get What You Want"

grahamburger — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:18:40 +0000

The nice (?) thing about the shitty mcDs graveyard job is that, probably, no one has let you borrow a million dollars yet, so you don't have to pay it back. If you also don't have any dependents, well... You're probably in a better spot than you realize.