Hacker News: mrWiz

New comment by mrWiz in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

mrWiz — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:03:14 +0000

I’m surprised to hear that it was such a common failure. I used plenty of lighting devices back in their hay day and plenty of USBC devices since they became common. I don’t tend to treat those devices gingerly and have far more issues with USBC than I ever did with Lightning, even accounting for the fact that lots of devices have USBC but only phones and mp3 players had lightning.

New comment by mrWiz in "15 Years of Forking"

mrWiz — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:42:50 +0000

My naive fix would be to disable extensions from accessing form field data without explicit approval. Hell, add different approval boxes for read, write, and hidden-text.

What am I missing?

New comment by mrWiz in "Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw"

mrWiz — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:57:26 +0000

I think that "it's better to know" only really holds up if the scope / context is also included. To put it in concrete terms, I'd amend your statement like this:

Kagi indirectly funds the Kremlin's regime by paying for Yandex API access.

New comment by mrWiz in "Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport"

mrWiz — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:42:20 +0000

Is it OK to comment on and critique the message, though?

New comment by mrWiz in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

mrWiz — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:47:43 +0000

All they have to do is pretend to be a concerned neighbor who wants to help give mutual aid and hope that someone in the group chat takes the bait and adds them in. No further convincing is needed.

New comment by mrWiz in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

mrWiz — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:46:15 +0000

It's even easier than that. They're simply asking on neighborhood Facebook (and other services too, I assume) groups to be added to mutual aid Signal groups and hoping that somebody will add them without bothering to vet them first.

New comment by mrWiz in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

mrWiz — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:52:57 +0000

> In general, considering the overall cost of the measures, I would think that there is a valid reason and that "it does not make sense at first glance so it's just a security theater" does not hold.

What’s your sense of the overall cost of the measures? It’s not clear to me if you’re saying that high or low costs help justify them.

New comment by mrWiz in "VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV"

mrWiz — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:47:32 +0000

There's a strong argument that you should never be plugging in USB devices while driving but it's hard to argue that you shouldn't adjust the lane centering settings while in motion.

New comment by mrWiz in "All of Apple's services are abysmal"

mrWiz — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 21:56:30 +0000

Apple Music got extremely slow for me in (atypical, granted) situations that used to be perfectly snappy. I keep recordings of a radio show in my Music library, with the whole series tagged as a single album, each "episode" as a separate disc, and each half of the episode as its own track. This makes it easy to scroll through, browsing to pick what I want to listen to. But now with 26 Music has been chugging whenever I open the album - it takes ~20 seconds before it starts responding smoothly again. I'll concede that having 1000+ discs within a single album isn't a normal use-case, but this has worked properly for the last decade before they screwed it up.

New comment by mrWiz in "Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic"

mrWiz — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:25:05 +0000

In practice they tend to substitute A with B, and B is often times even more destructive (black market fentanyl rather than medical opioids, or just inhalants).

New comment by mrWiz in "50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player"

mrWiz — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 02:58:03 +0000

Where can you buy just the cardboard cover?

New comment by mrWiz in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

mrWiz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:52:25 +0000

I'm also curious about this. They're coming to Minneapolis next year, so apparently they're confident in their ability to figure out cold / unpredictable weather (in urban conditions at least).

New comment by mrWiz in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

mrWiz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:41:36 +0000

But they're exclusively used in areas that allow both human and AI drivers, so this hardly seems relevant.

New comment by mrWiz in "Show HN: FuseCells – a handcrafted logic puzzle game with 2,500 levels"

mrWiz — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:20:13 +0000

I like it. One thing I found frustrating is that I used a hint when I was stuck, and the hint just said “Impossible! Square X needs N matching neighbors.” This was obvious, why did spend a hint just for it tell me the rules of the game instead of any advice?

New comment by mrWiz in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

mrWiz — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:26:14 +0000

IMO 500 watts of sustained electrical power is a fair bit, especially compared to every other electric device these households are likely to have.

New comment by mrWiz in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

mrWiz — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 14:50:50 +0000

You also need a buttload of electric power, which is the bottleneck.

New comment by mrWiz in "Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue"

mrWiz — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:21:32 +0000

You could just put a backup dumb thermostat in parallel with the smart one.

New comment by mrWiz in "How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch"

mrWiz — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:06:36 +0000

What brand of pliers were they, and did they seem to be made from recycled gum wrappers?

A trick I learned when you want to flip the breaker but don't want to go all the way back to the panel is to just stick a screwdriver into a light socket.

New comment by mrWiz in "How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch"

mrWiz — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:56:58 +0000

Plenty of non-metal materials melt with heat, too. Solder is the only one relevant to the comment, which is presumably why it was the only one mentioned.

New comment by mrWiz in "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP"

mrWiz — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 21:27:54 +0000

I'd prefer to have full IMAP support without needing a specialized app, otherwise Proton seems like a better choice than Zoho, which is definitely overkill for my needs.

[edit] I just found purelymail, which seems like a good fit.