Hacker News: jasonjayr

New comment by jasonjayr in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

jasonjayr — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:57:45 +0000

MS is ratcheting up the 'mandatory Microsoft account' on Windows, probably for this reason. The 'identity strongly bound with the device' stuff on corporate devices is being tested and secured in that environment, and it is almost certainly one step from being forced onto non-corporate devices, once they 'have to' by law.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Show HN: Every CEO and CFO change at US public companies, live from SEC"

jasonjayr — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:37:17 +0000

Wondering aloud -- this is clearly PII, but it's public information. The site would be subject to GDPR, and other rules from the EU, and folks may want to have their data hidden or removed. What would be the exposure for sourcing EU data?

New comment by jasonjayr in "Top laptops to use with FreeBSD"

jasonjayr — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:19:28 +0000

Windows is cleaning up a lot of legacy drivers. A bunch of printers (+ scanners) that predate updates to the printer driver framework in recent versions of windows just don't have functioning drivers anymore, despite being perfectly functional.

All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.

New comment by jasonjayr in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

jasonjayr — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:31:54 +0000

> 17:27:20 up 1112 days, 10:36, 50 users, load average: 0.20, 0.19, 0.18

I thought I had a record going here with my Dell laptop, but I guess you win. After a certain point, I just decided to see how long I can make it go.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?"

jasonjayr — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:10:44 +0000

Most non-Apple branded keyboards are NOT tested with mac; so it doesn't trust any electronic tags/labels, nor does it keep a database. Easiest thing to make it work 100% without asking the user to identify their layout, is to press random keys so the mac knows where things are mapped.

New comment by jasonjayr in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

jasonjayr — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:46:11 +0000

And sometimes, it seems like there's no fallback if you have no [working] smartphone. I knew someone who had a working smartphone, but a broken camera for few months. Couldn't scan any qrcodes to use these services till the phone was replaced.

New comment by jasonjayr in "How to turn anything into a router"

jasonjayr — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:31:02 +0000

I agree on principal, but I often find that the GUI abstractions don't always map to the linux tooling/terminology/concepts, which often ends with a head bashing against the wall thinking "this is linux, I know it can do it, and I can do it by hand, but what is this GUI trying to conceptualize?!?!"

I was recently introduced to a Barracuda router, and bashed my head against the wall long enough to discover it had an ssh interface, and linux userland, and was able to solve my immediate problem by directly entering the commands to get it to [temporarily] do what I needed. (Of course, using the GUI to reapply settings wiped my manual configuration...)

I've used pfsense, OpenWRT, Barracuda, Verizon's OEM router (Actiontec) and they all represent the same functionality wildly differently.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

jasonjayr — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:13:15 +0000

A few years ago; perl 6 renamed itself to 'raku', so the perl 5 folks can continue to improve/maintain the original 'perl'.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Drugwars for the TI-82/83/83 Calculators (2011)"

jasonjayr — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:08:14 +0000

I LOVED the TI calc forums. I got my hands on enough parts (and went to radio shack to get the rest) to make my own cable from the parallel port to the 2.5mm jack they had back then.

I'm still amazed they cost as much now, as they did 30 years ago, but if you just realize you're buying a license for decent computer algebra system (CAS), at least in the ti-85/89/etc models, it kinda makes sense.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

jasonjayr — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:46:22 +0000

Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s

New comment by jasonjayr in "Oil nears $110 a barrel after gas field strike"

jasonjayr — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:12:11 +0000

The sun will still rise after civilization ends too.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

jasonjayr — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:57:31 +0000

It's an unbelievably thin stranded wire, but the wires are coated so they can be in contact with each other without shorting. It's all twisted around a thin thread of cotton or nylon to add strength, then then encased in it's sheath.

The trick is to gently scrape the stranded wire with a blade for the solder to stick and to make a good connection.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Darkrealms BBS"

jasonjayr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:55:58 +0000

We need a ripscript version for the web!

New comment by jasonjayr in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

jasonjayr — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:00:18 +0000

I'm on Debian bookworm, and a screenshot is one Meta-Shift-S -- I just highlight the region I want to capture, and I get a dialog prompting me to (with one click) copy to clipboard, save to file, or annotate. There's a handful of out-of-the-way options as well, depending on what exactly you want to do. What's --- so abominable about that?

New comment by jasonjayr in "Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting"

jasonjayr — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:40:59 +0000

Luanti(previously Minetest) does a similar trick: c++ core/game engine, but all the game logic is in lua.

New comment by jasonjayr in "Payphone Go"

jasonjayr — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:16:00 +0000

It's in good fun, physically visiting them is way more fun than handing a SIP trunk to a short script + CSV file.

The nerd in me is just always curious about the backend :)

New comment by jasonjayr in "Payphone Go"

jasonjayr — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:18:15 +0000

How is it verifying the calling line? Via ANI, or CID?

New comment by jasonjayr in "Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise"

jasonjayr — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:46:53 +0000

Perl still runs the other half?

New comment by jasonjayr in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"

jasonjayr — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:34:00 +0000

Why do banks go through all the know-your-customer (KYC) process if not to identify the beneficial owner of every account? If they receive a transfer via fraud, then they either get it clawed back, have to pay it back, and/or get identified to law enforcement. If the last bank in the chain doesn't want to play by the rules, then other banks shouldn't transfer into them, or that bank itself should be held liable.

This is more or less how people expect things to work today ....

New comment by jasonjayr in "Show HN: Formally verified FPGA watchdog for AM broadcast in unmanned tunnels"

jasonjayr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:14:30 +0000

I'm curious about challenges (what's bad with AM broadcast in an unmanned tunnel?) and why the formally verified killswitch was necessary?