Hacker News: rconti

New comment by rconti in "In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real"

rconti — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 02:39:59 +0000

I'm sure they can help individual cases. It's less clear to me that surveillance societies have less crime. Criminals adjust.

Maybe if you can point to the crime-free paradises that have been enabled by pervasive surveillance, you'd have more people on your side. If you're just selectively pointing out individual cases where they helped, you're not really proving the overall point.

New comment by rconti in "In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:40:51 +0000

Have you tried zooming out on the stats at all, or analyzing any other variables? You realize there was a crazy spike in crime in the wake of the pandemic, right? Certainly a reversion to the mean might happen alongside the implementation of cameras.

My own city's police (Redwood City, CA) credited Flock cameras with an increase in the clearance rate from 12% to 13%. Pardon me if I don't go out and celebrate.

New comment by rconti in "In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:38:17 +0000

> Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”

So every other law enforcement tool has also been subjected to russian troll farms and eventually the fake furor dies down?

Or is he admitting that those of us who don't stand to make billions off of a private surveillance network are actually the real humans here?

New comment by rconti in "Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:56:48 +0000

Even working in tech it would have been relatively easy to miss the rise and fall of NeXT. It was, after all, in a relatively small niche.

New comment by rconti in "Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:53:19 +0000

What's funny, is my assigned office is open plan with desks packed in, but the floor space is absolutely massive. The walkways are easily 20 feet wide, all the way around the place. There is such an incredible amount of open space that it would be trivial to give employees large workspaces.

New comment by rconti in "New iPad mini"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:04:55 +0000

Apple: Just fix the software. I have an iPad Mini (6?) and it's clearly just such an orphaned product. They're not even TRYING to make it usable. The on-screen keyboard takes up the majority of the screen when in landscape mode. In portrait mode, the "drawer" on the left side of the screen takes up so much space in apps like Maps/Flighty that it covers the location you're currently at.

They've clearly given almost no thought into how the (already marginal) iPadOS renders on a smaller screen.

New comment by rconti in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

rconti — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:00:07 +0000

No, the cash prices are insane too. I paid cash for my system.

New comment by rconti in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

rconti — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:14:06 +0000

Pretty cool! Here in Menlo Park, they call out Kepler's Books, which most people would know about, but also the first Round Table Pizza which I think few people know about.

New comment by rconti in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

rconti — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:09:29 +0000

Except AFAIK electricity isn't significantly more expensive in SF than on the Peninsula or anywhere else in the Bay Area that PG&E serves...

New comment by rconti in "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier"

rconti — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:05:31 +0000

Kinda funny, I went the opposite way. I've always had their top tier 4k thing but cancelled a year or so ago when it got to $27 or whatever; we never watch it anyway.

Recently my partner was once again interested in watching something on netflix so instead i signed up for the cheapest 1080p ad-supported tier for $8 or thereabouts. I don't really watch it, and she won't miss the quality. If the ads don't bother her, so be it. If they do, we'll just stop watching paying for netflix again!

New comment by rconti in "My Friend Bob Cringely"

rconti — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:47:11 +0000

Thanks for the links -- I was traveling in early October and somehow missed Cringely's passing.

New comment by rconti in "Gdynia and the Dream of a Maritime Poland"

rconti — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:17:15 +0000

It really is. I didn't much like history as a kid, but I like it a lot more as an adult. Last summer we toured through the Baltics as I've wanted to go for decades, and then this summer we toured Poland as my partner had never been. Every place I go to, museum I visit, plaque I read, is another puzzle piece in the migration of people across the whole region. By comparison migration in western europe seems like it was far less fluid.

New comment by rconti in "California is building a $400M shield for Yosemite's most dangerous highway"

rconti — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 05:38:10 +0000

Man, I'm so confused. Has it really been that long since I drove the coast? I'm sure I did this in 2014 or 2015 but have no memory of this structure.

I guess I couldn't drive the whole coast in 2023, the last time I bought a car in SoCal.

I planned to do it this summer but was rerouted due to fires.

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

rconti — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:59:37 +0000

$129 was dirt cheap for what it did, but $300 is definitely surprisingly expensive.

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

rconti — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:58:32 +0000

I tend to have at least one of the latest AppleTVs around, but I find myself without access to my best AppleTV 4k and am stuck using a 1st gen in my current home.

I was surprised to learn my 1st gen doesn't have a thread radio which caused some minor homekit compatability issues. I actually bought a new AppleTV 4k a couple months ago but it didn't really solve my problem, so I returned it with the reasoning that it was long in the tooth and a new model was coming out soon.

I just preordered this one but I sort of wonder if I should just go buy the last gen one for half the money or whatever. Seems like the actual buy. At the old price point, they were impulse buys. At this price point, well, it's enough to get me to stop and think about it.

New comment by rconti in "Apple HomeView"

rconti — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:52:38 +0000

Yep. I'm afraid they're going to "require" that you use Apple Music and HomePods to be useful. I'm pretty interested in trying the product, but that depends on Sonos and Spotify support at minimum.

New comment by rconti in "Second Circuit allows government to search electronic devices at the border"

rconti — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:29:12 +0000

I don't dispute the beneficial OPSEC here but it does nothing to reduce the burden.

New comment by rconti in "Second Circuit allows government to search electronic devices at the border"

rconti — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:28:11 +0000

How does this relate to travel? Are you saying that the modern smartphone drops logins so often that the burner is less of a burden? Or that you should just travel with a laptop? (which I do quite often, since a thin laptop takes so little space and weight)

New comment by rconti in "Second Circuit allows government to search electronic devices at the border"

rconti — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:37:26 +0000

The resources you link to are helpful; however, this is not really practical advice for most people most of the time. To the extent that our smartphones are a very helpful device to have in our day-to-day lives at home, they're even more useful in a foreign country where they become our only available computing device; indispensable for keeping in touch back home, navigation on unfamiliar transit systems, translation of unfamiliar languages, and so on.

Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.

I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.

New comment by rconti in "US Treasuries Have Become Unappetizing for Foreign Central Banks and Governments"

rconti — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:32:35 +0000

No single alternative has to be better in all cases. Any diversification will end up reducing demand for treasuries.

It's not a black and white issue.