Hacker News: mig39

New comment by mig39 in "The locals don't know"

mig39 — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:35:55 +0000

I spend summers in Central Portugal after enduring the winter of Canada's North. Sometimes my Canadian friends want to spend a couple of days in Portugal and ask me what's for a good place to visit, or a good attraction to go to, etc. I always answer the same:

I have no idea. I don't go as a tourist. I go to live in my family's home town for 6 or 7 weeks and not think about work. I don't have any recommendations for a checklist. I avoid the touristy places if I can.

I then turn it around on them. If someone was visiting Canada for 2 or 3 days, where do you tell them to go? I dunno.

New comment by mig39 in "Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster"

mig39 — Tue, 05 May 2026 01:14:47 +0000

This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta

New comment by mig39 in "Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster"

mig39 — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:05:25 +0000

My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done.

I guess it's a form of a canary trap.

It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them.

New comment by mig39 in "In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition"

mig39 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:51:02 +0000

Coming to Canada soon, though in a limited way:

https://nationalpost.com/news/massive-risk-chinese-evs-are-t...

Hopefully this means competition with the other EV manufacturers in Canada too.

New comment by mig39 in "How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll"

mig39 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:14:53 +0000

Archive link: https://archive.is/k4Pxr

New comment by mig39 in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

mig39 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:41:33 +0000

I'm Backblaze user -- multiple machines, multiple accounts. I'm going to be dropping Backblaze over this change, that I'm only learning about from this thread.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

New comment by mig39 in "15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die"

mig39 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:02:04 +0000

I didn't know about Webminal until today. Going to try it with some college students this afternoon!

New comment by mig39 in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"

mig39 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:02:53 +0000

Base model M4 Mac Mini -- takes 2 seconds to load Word (and ready to type) without it being cached. Less than 1 second if I quit it completely, and launch again, which I assume is because it's cached in RAM.

New comment by mig39 in "The bee that everyone wants to save"

mig39 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:57:06 +0000

Neither are earthworms.

New comment by mig39 in "Kuwaiti F/A-18's Triple Friendly Fire Shootdown Gets Stranger by the Day"

mig39 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:19:38 +0000

That could explain one accidental shootdown. It cannot conceivably explain three.

New comment by mig39 in "US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows"

mig39 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:53:08 +0000

If you read the article, you'd know most of the information came from Bellingcat and ABC.

New comment by mig39 in "US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows"

mig39 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:52:43 +0000

I think it means that the entire site, including the school and several other buildings, were all hit at the sae time:

> Wes Bryant, a national security analyst who served in the US Air Force, also confirmed it was a Tomahawk missile.

> Bryant added that the evidence for multiple strikes on the entire IRGC compound "is indicative of a deliberate and precise" US operation.

> N R Jenzen Jones, director of Armament Research Services, previously told BBC Verify it was unlikely an Iranian missile had caused the significant blast damage seen at the school because they carry "relatively small explosive warheads".

New comment by mig39 in "19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack"

mig39 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:33:41 +0000

You didn't read the link, did you? This is addressed in the article.

New comment by mig39 in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

mig39 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:30:19 +0000

Why are they using Discord instead of Teams? Is this an internal Microsoft group? They don't dogfood?

New comment by mig39 in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

mig39 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:28:34 +0000

I'm with you. Low-tech works just fine. I hate the idea of having to depend on a working phone just to pay for things.

But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

New comment by mig39 in "What does Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin teach us? (2017)"

mig39 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:33:19 +0000

It was big on TikTok a few months ago, which makes sense that it's on Instagram now.

New comment by mig39 in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

mig39 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:07:29 +0000

AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?

New comment by mig39 in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

mig39 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:30:24 +0000

And those poor people are objectively poorer because of Brexit. But as long as there's fewer foreigners coming in, then they're happy?

New comment by mig39 in "Are we all plagiarists now?"

mig39 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:28:42 +0000

I take suspicious student papers and feed them to Turnitin, as well as the popular LLMs. Hey ChatGTP, give me a report on the likelihood that this paper was generated by an LLM. Do that with Gemini, Claude, etc.

Then if there's a high probability, I look through the references in the paper. Do they say what the student attributes to them?

Finally, if I still think it's AI-generated, I have the student in and ask questions about the paper. "You said this here in this paragraph -- what do you mean by that?"

AI detectors are a first-pass, but I think a human really needs to be in the loop to evaluate whether it's cheating, or just using something to clean up grammar and spelling.

New comment by mig39 in "Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged"

mig39 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:22:50 +0000

No, he's saying that the area is international waters because Finland and Estonia agreed it was not either's territorial waters. It doesn't have to be international waters.