Hacker News: nerdile

New comment by nerdile in "Surprise, pay $1000"

nerdile — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:55:16 +0000

B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain.

Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want.

If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.

New comment by nerdile in "Why I collect DLES"

nerdile — Sat, 30 May 2026 03:46:52 +0000

I don't understand this

New comment by nerdile in "I want to live like Costco people"

nerdile — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:52:40 +0000

Passports are fine, and the facilities for getting them are nicer.

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

nerdile — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:57:34 +0000

TIL that Backblaze has a desktop app. Seems this is specific to Windows and does not impact anyone using it as just a storage backend for backups through something like rclone.

New comment by nerdile in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

nerdile — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:27:00 +0000

It is different when you have a billion customers, all with different setups. At that scale, you notice real defects through product telemetry, support ticket volume, or trusted channels. You receive a high volume of bug reports that are due to user confusion, misconfiguration, or misbehavior of other software on the device - where solving an issue for one customer doesn't result in improvements for the other billion. Triage, filtering, and winnowing are necessary here.

New comment by nerdile in "History of AT&T Long Lines"

nerdile — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:06:57 +0000

The original article is better: https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-...

New comment by nerdile in "Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops"

nerdile — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:14:09 +0000

Using the same CLI, which shows all the alternative "protectors".

New comment by nerdile in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

nerdile — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:31:00 +0000

? This may be one of those "90% of the audience doesn't care and is increasingly less likely to buy from either vendor the more they fight in public" situations

New comment by nerdile in "When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”"

nerdile — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 16:07:44 +0000

To change it per user, set it in the user's hive instead of in the local machine hive (e.g. HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE)

New comment by nerdile in "Implementing UI translation in SumatraPDF, a C++ Windows application"

nerdile — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 05:07:10 +0000

Since this is a Windows C++ app, why not use MUI? It solves this exact problem, and since it's a standard part of the platform, there's broad tooling support for it.

New comment by nerdile in "The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million"

nerdile — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 02:29:03 +0000

Native US English speaker here, and this is the first time I have ever heard of this. TIL

New comment by nerdile in "Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI"

nerdile — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:24:34 +0000

Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.

Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.

New comment by nerdile in "Pitfalls of Safe Rust"

nerdile — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:56:51 +0000

Title is slightly misleading but the content is good. It's the "Safe Rust" in the title that's weird to me. These apply to Rust altogether, you don't avoid them by writing unsafe Rust code. They also aren't unique to Rust.

A less baity title might be "Rust pitfalls: Runtime correctness beyond memory safety."

New comment by nerdile in "Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)"

nerdile — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 05:42:19 +0000

Agreed.

Bschmidt###... who hurt you? Why is this your life?

New comment by nerdile in "It is as if you were on your phone"

nerdile — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 03:53:58 +0000

why?

New comment by nerdile in "Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox"

nerdile — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 04:03:03 +0000

The software license terms for Word and all the other desktop apps does not include such a clause, no. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/useterms

The Microsoft Services Agreement applies to your use of their online services, like OneDrive and SharePoint, as you say, and there's an explicit consent in the app and a giant off switch there. They employ dark patterns to push you strongly to use their online services, but it's still optional.

It should be readily obvious that choosing to use online sharing or storage features or submit reviews require the data you enter to be sent, shared, or stored thusly...

New comment by nerdile in "Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox"

nerdile — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 02:33:00 +0000

I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it. This is a highly unusual clause that other software doesn't have.

When software has to "phone home" to deliver the functionality you requested, then two things happen: One, a number of privacy regulations kick in, and they need to get you to agree to send your data to them. Two, they now get to move your data out of your control. I mean, you trust them today, so here's hoping they don't ever get hacked or hire someone untrustworthy?

It's sad when even to use the basic features of a web browser, you need to agree to send them your data. It's not fundamentally necessary to send your data to Mozilla or their partners in order to load and render a website. It's a dark pattern to obtain consent to collect your data "when it's necessary", and then rewrite your app to make it necessary.

New comment by nerdile in "Outlook classic dropped from Microsoft 365"

nerdile — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 23:48:59 +0000

Agreed. Very disappointed that Thunderbird went the direction they did.

New comment by nerdile in "Gambling on papal conclaves"

nerdile — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:41:30 +0000

He might be seen as presumptuous for already having a pope name and get sunk in the Vatican politics.

New comment by nerdile in "Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act"

nerdile — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:35:20 +0000

Summary: The UK has some Online Safety Act, any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. The law applies to any site that targets UK citizens or has a substantial number of UK users, where "substantial number" is not defined.

I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum seems to have been locked from new users for some time, so it was already in its sunset era.

The admin could just make it read only except to users who manually reach out somehow to verify their age, but at the same time, what an oppressive law for small UK forums. Maybe that's the point.