Hacker News: jonhohle

New comment by jonhohle in "macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL"

jonhohle — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:24:43 +0000

I honestly don’t think Apple has test automation. So many things have made it out in the past that there’s no way releases have anything close to resembling comprehensive unit or integration level tests.

New comment by jonhohle in "New 'super ice' 10 times stronger, bringing it close to the strength of concrete"

jonhohle — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:43:39 +0000

Coroners are confused about strange cellulose fibers through the entry and exit wounds. “It looks like they were attacked by… celery.”

New comment by jonhohle in "Major ICQ security hole (1998)"

jonhohle — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:57:28 +0000

Wasn’t that how audio avatars worked (not by crashing, but ACr)? What a time to be alive.

New comment by jonhohle in "Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors"

jonhohle — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:23:51 +0000

The idea of banning all ads sounds great, but legitimate content is paid for with ads. Ban tracking and targeted ads. It’s not a far stretch into cyberstalking, wiretapping, and other privacy laws.

There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.

New comment by jonhohle in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

jonhohle — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:43:43 +0000

Back in my day I’d test on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and links/links2/lynx.

New comment by jonhohle in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

jonhohle — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:31:13 +0000

I’ve been using Safari since 2003. I was previously using Konqueror, so the transition was pretty easy. It’s always been fast and reliable and Mac-like. It’s nice to have a browser that is a browser and not something that’s attempting to be another operating system.

New comment by jonhohle in "New Apple TV 4K"

jonhohle — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:06:11 +0000

I was in the car the other day and asked about details of a meeting I was driving to. It wasn’t a meeting in my calendar, just some emails that mentioned it. The response was genuinely good.

Then I asked it about the status of some packages that were already being tracked in wallet and it was a dumpster fire.

New comment by jonhohle in "New Apple TV 4K"

jonhohle — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:03:02 +0000

When compared to $150 (occasionally as cheap as $99 for the high end model) that you could have paid 3 months ago for the previous generation, $300 seems nuts. I put off buying last gen because this gen was perpetually “coming soon”, and now I’m priced out, even out of last gen!

New comment by jonhohle in "Apple HomeView"

jonhohle — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:43:50 +0000

Unless made for a square display, video will not be ideal on this device. Even SD NTSC content is 4:3 and would require cropping or matting. Anything modern would be tiny on this display.

I think the aspect ratio makes sense for the form factor, recipes, FaceTime, music, etc. but it won’t be a very good video device.

New comment by jonhohle in "Ask HN: Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?"

jonhohle — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:49:33 +0000

I use a GL.inet travel router and their UI on top of OpenWRT is actually pretty good and makes connecting to strange hotel and other captive portal networks pretty straightforward. Luci is still available, or SSH.

The OpenWRT version is relatively old, and unfortunately the latest firmware requires reconfiguring family permissions, but I’ve otherwise been happy with the device. I use it for all kind of strange things (ad-hoc extending my home network for getting my solar inverter back online, tethering to my phone, etc.), but primarily use it to make it easy to get my family’s devices online while traveling (6 iPads, 3 phones, and a laptop).

New comment by jonhohle in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

jonhohle — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 02:49:16 +0000

It’s not about what the model was trained on (though it might be), it’s that fair use in reverse engineering relies on transformative, creative work. There are multiple court cases where RE is protected.

What’s not protected fair use is mechanical transformation (automated format conversion, etc.). I’d argue using AI for RE and publishing the result is not creative, and is mechanical transformation. That makes it not protected fair use and puts projects at risk. This also has court precedent (not necessarily the AI case, but mechanical vs creative transformation).

Misunderstanding this is going to ultimately bring harm to the RE communities where legitimate projects get wrapped up with AI projects in litigation and will chill the whole practice even though it’s legitimate fair use.

(US jurisdiction, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer, but I’ve spent a reasonable time reading the landmark cases, EFF’s opinions, USPTO opinions, etc.)

New comment by jonhohle in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

jonhohle — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:01:17 +0000

I think it’s purely a community size issue. When a community is small, everyone’s an owner. Dealing with bad actors is straightforward. When it grows into the hundreds or thousands the scale means you can’t know everyone anymore, you need hall monitors, need to be more guarded and intentional about how you communicate.

It’s not bad or wrong, just different. When the changes forced by a group who didn’t build it, it’s frustrating.

“Hey, here’s this thing you love doing, but now a computer does it and you don’t have to any more. See, same!” Thanks for allowing me to not do the thing I like to do?

New comment by jonhohle in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

jonhohle — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:35:55 +0000

Also stepping into a fair use minefield.

On the one hand, I feel like there was this nice little niche of hyper technical people that had formed nice communities. Then AI bros came in took all the attention and resources.

On the other hand, I have significant concerns that this is a mechanical transformation that will blow up for everyone and undo the last 40 years of fair use progress.

New comment by jonhohle in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

jonhohle — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:10:04 +0000

Wait until you get a tyrannical HOA board and realize you have to make a choice between dealing with them or moving. Dealing with them typically involves lawsuits which come out of your HOA fees, which will go up along with all your neighbors who are now angry that their fees have gone up as well. (Ask me about open records my HOA hasn’t delivered for over 350 days.

I pay my city for sewer, water, and trash. I pay an ISP for fiber to the home, a power company for electricity. If you get all those things for $2500/year from your HOA, congratulations.

New comment by jonhohle in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

jonhohle — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:58:17 +0000

But they didn’t do nothing. They put up capital for a resource. Generally more capital than anything else until late in career.

New comment by jonhohle in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

jonhohle — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:52:52 +0000

If it wasn’t combined in the same bill, the people will just have two taxes going forward. Effectively every “temporary” tax becomes a permanent tax. During the last local election, our city council was asking people to vote to replace an expiring tax with one at a lower rate and trying to sell it as voting for this reduces your tax.

New comment by jonhohle in "Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry"

jonhohle — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:25:43 +0000

It really is that simple. No different from a BSD or even a non-GNU (busybox, etc.) Linux distribution. If you like GNU tools, use them.

New comment by jonhohle in "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops"

jonhohle — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:57:05 +0000

> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.

Citation needed.

New comment by jonhohle in "Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years"

jonhohle — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:18:15 +0000

If it’s a con, the kid is probably enslaved.

New comment by jonhohle in "Beauty in DVD Menus"

jonhohle — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:22:48 +0000

Seppuku?

Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.