Hacker News: relium

New comment by relium in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

relium — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:34:22 +0000

They are pushing business-to-business service too, like ships, airlines, and retail/office backup. Plus smartphones can talk directly to their satellites. A lot of countries will use them for military use. Whether it adds up to a reasonable IPO I can't tell - market irrationality is hard to measure.

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

relium — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:30:41 +0000

My MacBook Pro M1 keyboard broke too and Apple wanted $900 to replace it. I bought a $30 replacement on Amazon and started replacing it myself. Unfortunately the repair was a bit too complicated for me, but luckily one of my co-workers had more patience and replaced it for some beer.

This video is a good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGmMpEEP5ls

New comment by relium in "Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]"

relium — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:15:18 +0000

The best book I've ever read on the topic was the classic Mac OS Human Interface Guidelines. I still recommend them even though some of the specifics are out-of-date.

https://dev.os9.ca/techpubs/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf

New comment by relium in "Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]"

relium — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:40:41 +0000

The ones I remember most affecting performance were zeroing allocated memory and the Spectre/Meltdown fix. Also, the first launch of a new app is slow in order to check the signature. Whole disk encryption is pretty fast today, but probably is a bit slower than unencrypted. The original FileVault using disk images was even slower.

New comment by relium in "Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC"

relium — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:09:46 +0000

Very cool. Street names with an on/off toggle would be nice.

New comment by relium in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

relium — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:33:22 +0000

>Note, you have to click on the providers to see absolute magnitude

I noticed that a little while ago too. Very bad UI. Tempted to post in r/dataisugly.

New comment by relium in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

relium — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:30:16 +0000

We had edge delivery issues when I didn't use my ISP's DNS, especially from Apple. Not exactly sure of the mechanism, but downloading Xcode would take 2 hours instead of 10 minutes.

New comment by relium in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

relium — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:46:18 +0000

Jobs brokered a $150M deal with Apple's arch enemy Microsoft in 1997.

New comment by relium in "QuickDrawViewer: A Mac OS X utility to visualise QuickDraw (PICT) files"

relium — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 01:21:38 +0000

PICT supported vector commands like FrameRect and FillOval, bitmap commands like BitsRect, and even embedded PostScript via PicComments.

Version 1 PICTs: https://show.docjava.com/posterous/file/2012/07/9614411-DOC0...

I have the Version 2 documentation around here somewhere. I don't think I've looked at it in 20 years, though.

New comment by relium in "Testosterone Administration Induces a Red Shift in Democrats"

relium — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:46:34 +0000

Note this quote from the article:

“Weakly affiliated Democrats had basal Testosterone levels 19% higher than strong Democrats and all Republicans.”

So it's not as simple as "more testosterone means more Republican".

New comment by relium in "When Bruce Lee trained with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar"

relium — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:37:59 +0000

That's Roger Murdock. He's the co-pilot.

New comment by relium in "SQLite's File Format"

relium — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 23:11:10 +0000

The one issue I have with SQLite's file format is that if part of the file gets corrupted, you can't easily recover the rest of the file. I asked Richard Hipp about this many years ago and he said that fixing the problem would unfortunately break binary compatibility.

New comment by relium in "Build Log: Macintosh Classic"

relium — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:06:15 +0000

His aunt obviously had good taste. -Eric "The Grouch" Shapiro

New comment by relium in "Apple unveils new Mac Studio"

relium — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 20:33:23 +0000

It'll likely be very workload dependent. The M4 Max will probably do a little better in single threaded tasks like browser benchmarks and the M3 Ultra will do better in things like video transcoding and 3D rendering.

New comment by relium in "Ball: A ball that lives in your dock"

relium — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 17:44:24 +0000

I still wish Sesame Street would let me write a modern version of The Grouch. -Eric Shapiro

New comment by relium in "Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds"

relium — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 02:58:07 +0000

Have you tried Tamsulosin (Flomax)? It seems to help a lot of the symptoms.

New comment by relium in "Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds"

relium — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 02:56:12 +0000

About 40 years ago my father, an oncologist, told me there were two common types of prostate cancer, the fast growing type that kills you and the slow growing type that doesn't. We've learned a lot about it since then, but that description is still essentially true.

It causes 30,000 deaths a year in the US, which is not insignificant - in comparison breast cancer kills 40,000.

New comment by relium in "Insomnia REST client now requires an account"

relium — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:49:31 +0000

This sucks beyond belief. The whole reason I moved to Insomnia from Postman was because Postman uploaded all of our APIs and credentials to their server without asking. I have clients that demand privacy - we can't even discuss the existence of their APIs outside the company.

New comment by relium in "My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer"

relium — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 04:45:38 +0000

Thanks for this. I had more fun writing The Grouch and another goofy app named VideoBeep than I did with 35 years of more serious software. -Eric Shapiro