Hacker News: orloffm

New comment by orloffm in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

orloffm — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:01:49 +0000

Cosmetics suck. It's all the same rehashed "urban style" characters with the same design again and again. I don't want to buy those. I've bought some video game characters like Geralt, but that's it. They can do historical figures, old movie characters, national costumes and songs, maybe something military etc., but they don't. And I don't want to buy battle passes recently, they are boring and stupid, all those items from them only clutter the inventory that you have to clean manually.

New comment by orloffm in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

orloffm — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:29:29 +0000

It didn't fail in Russia, it's permanent day time there and no one complains at all. The only problem is +1 hour difference with Europe during Winter.

New comment by orloffm in "India and EU announce landmark trade deal"

orloffm — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:07:21 +0000

It's all about German car makers wanting to sell more cars. The recent Mercosur deal was also about it. Of course, no one will buy them anyway since they are too expensive and low quality and Chinese cars are more accessible anyway.

New comment by orloffm in "Bugs Apple loves"

orloffm — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:47:54 +0000

Choosing another user on the current macOS is horrible beyond any corporate standards. Clicking a different user has a 2 second delay without any animation, and any interaction ("wait, have I clicked it?") in that time cancels it. Like no one has multiple users on their computers in the whole management chain? No one cares?

New comment by orloffm in "US freezes visas for 75 nations"

orloffm — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:03:11 +0000

Russia in 2018 just made tickets valid visas, something like that should be done. Also no one is blocking non-immigrant visas, so there is no issue here.

New comment by orloffm in "Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?"

orloffm — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:54:08 +0000

Curated means that everything is manually filtered. X is not manually filtered. Just like I can have anything on my domain on the Internet, I can post anything on my timeline and people can access it there.

New comment by orloffm in "New Lego smart-play system"

orloffm — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:49:09 +0000

The whole Mario figures seem to provide the same level of interactivity. Not something new for the kids.

New comment by orloffm in "Foreign tech workers are avoiding travel to the US"

orloffm — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:07:32 +0000

I've travelled to the US (Boston, and later drove to Washington) in September. Even me being Russian, why would I worry? I have a visa (which I've waited for more than a year), I visit colleagues in the company and have a place to stay. What's going to happen to me? The worst that can happen is some talk at the border, but there wasn't any.

New comment by orloffm in "Staying ahead of censors in 2025"

orloffm — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:39:44 +0000

Russia was already complicated two years ago, most of-the-shelf VPNs blocked, and with Intel/Microsoft websites blocking themselves due to sanctions it was rather difficult to set up a fresh laptop - it couldn't download drivers, and obvious channels were all blocked.

This year they've blocked almost all of the VPNs and additionally calls in all messenger apps and FaceTime. The only thing that works is Outline - but one has to set up the server somehow, and if you're in Russia without a western credit card it might be difficult to do. For some reason the iOS app for Outline is still in the Russian App Store.

New comment by orloffm in "Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results"

orloffm — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:15:01 +0000

You can now select languages to not auto-translate in YouTube settings.

New comment by orloffm in "Devs say Apple still flouting EU's Digital Markets Act six months on"

orloffm — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:23:28 +0000

I have a local transit map as a PWA, and iOS asks me for permission to use my location every time.

New comment by orloffm in "McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash"

orloffm — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:38:38 +0000

It might be comforting in Europe sometimes. Some standalone McDonalds in Poland are very nice and comfortable.

New comment by orloffm in "Bring bathroom doors back to hotels"

orloffm — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:17:32 +0000

I've recently stayed at a new Holiday Inn Express near NYC. It had a proper bathroom, nothing to complain about. But there was no ventilation at all. There was this American-style air conditioner under the window and some small outlet in the bathroom, but I couldn't force the air conditioner to force-intake air. It's either super-noisy with compressor running or completely off. I absolutely don't understand how it is even possible that room has no ventilation.

New comment by orloffm in "Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year"

orloffm — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:54:16 +0000

Yesterday I had my "death by a thousand strikes" moment with the children's iPad.

1. It was showing 4% of battery for a while, but then showed a pop-up that the battery level has dropped below 10% and suggested turning on the battery saver. 2. I entered iMessage via a notification, and it was unresponsive, I couldn't select the thread on the left. And there are in total 3 of them, not hundreds. Had to tap it multiple times. 3. Then I wanted to switch to the previous app, and the drag-the-line-up-slowly-to-show-apps menu was polluted with 8 copies of iMessage.

All of these should've been not only caught by some kind of internal testing, they should've not happened at all due to proper architecture of the system. iOS more and more feels as a collection of hacks that try to mimic the real thing.

New comment by orloffm in "Subverting Telegram's end-to-end encryption (2023)"

orloffm — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:57:22 +0000

That's because Russia/Ukraine/Belarus are heavily on Telegram, everything is there, all blogs, chats, memes, friends etc. since the US sites are almost-blocked and the Russian ones (VK, RuTube etc.) have been managed down to complete unusability. They couldn't afford losing the key blogs because of this law since Russia is heavily pushing Max messenger and there was a chance that it would be the only permitted thing.

New comment by orloffm in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26"

orloffm — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 21:11:21 +0000

No, the way to send a signal is to buy it and return.

New comment by orloffm in "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image"

orloffm — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:14:36 +0000

So it doesn't allow to do anything with photos containing kids, right? Isn't it too much of a filter for such a thing? ChatGPT thankfully created Ghibli versions of everything I gave it.

New comment by orloffm in "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience"

orloffm — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:10:46 +0000

Subarus have chain-based CVTs which are presumably better than usual belt-based ones.

New comment by orloffm in "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience"

orloffm — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:05:42 +0000

Fun fact, you can buy a 500$ immobilizer thing at a Toyota dealership, and it has an option to persist that 6-key press setting.

New comment by orloffm in "PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?"

orloffm — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 12:43:54 +0000

Yes, exactly that, modulation depth. The screen goes completely dark, and our brains don't like it because: 1. It's stressful that something disappears abruptly. 2. It's stressful that it later appears a bit shifted in space.