Hacker News: saithir

New comment by saithir in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

saithir — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:05:20 +0000

Extending one organization's results to saying "completely unenforced" is definitely something, considering the ~billion of fines per year.

New comment by saithir in "“This is not the computer for you”"

saithir — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:03:00 +0000

> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader

Is that gonna be before or after the iphone with no usb port?

New comment by saithir in "1B identity records exposed in ID verification data leak"

saithir — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:21:54 +0000

It's really a wonder how every time gdpr is even remotely related, there's always gotta be someone complaining about how gdpr is at fault for the cookie/data prompts, and never that sites and advertising companies (and their 2137 partners) are at fault for actually making those prompts as annoying as possible in hopes that you just agree.

New comment by saithir in "Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick (2025)"

saithir — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:42:44 +0000

The brick itself? Probably not gonna happen anytime fast, cause that's a custom chip in there and it doesn't have easy connections to the outside world.

But the interesting part will be in scanning multiple tiles/minifigures (they have NFC iso15693 tags inside which are easily read) to come up with how they encode the sounds inside - they have about 100-ish bytes of data stored on them.

New comment by saithir in "The Perils of ISBN"

saithir — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:34:07 +0000

I just don't find remembering an exact list of all of them a worthy information to keep in my brain. Maybe if I had a dozen, but between me and my wife we do read much more than that. I also don't remember all of the contents of my steam games list, because what's the point? I can always look it up quickly.

I did eventually solve my duplicate book problem by making ourselves a searchable list I can access remotely, so now I can just look it up when I'm at the store.

Being deliberate about obtaining them isn't even remotely related to any of that.

I'd imagine this is also more specific to them being physical items, since it's much easier and obvious to look up an ebook if you just look at a list of files wherever you keep them.

New comment by saithir in "The Perils of ISBN"

saithir — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:22:33 +0000

Sometimes we definitely want 'items' though, so for example I am in a physical bookstore and see a book I might be interested in, so I buy it, to find out later back home that I already have the very same book - and edition - already. It's a scenario that anyone with some amount of books definitely encountered multiple times, I know I did it myself a few times. :)

Ability of an ISBN search of my collection would have helped me in this case - scanning a barcode is easy enough task to accomplish.

And even if I had a different edition, the resulting title from searching for a different edition would be enough to help me figure out that I should not buy a book I already own.

New comment by saithir in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

saithir — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:18:09 +0000

But that would require directing the anger at specific companies (and their 2137 ad partners) rather than at an easy target of the banana-regulating evil authority.

Sadly whenever this kind of discussion pops up it's usually a very unpopular take.

New comment by saithir in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

saithir — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:02:30 +0000

> Available offers > Get offers for top games with Play Pass > 50% zniżki na zakup w aplikacji > Do 37 zł zniżki co tydzień > Candy Crush Soda Saga

Yeah, I would say a big ad for a game that is literally THE textbook example of gambling mechanics and dark patterns, followed by 10 other ads for games of the similar genre, is exactly what the previous poster does NOT want from a service like that.

Oh and also from that page there's no telling at all what actual _games_ are included. The only slider on this page that lists anything is for different gambling slop "offers".

That's not even in the same category as Apple Arcade.

New comment by saithir in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

saithir — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:19:13 +0000

It's also super easy not to use hard drugs, yet that's not a reason to stop restricting them.

If something's harmful it should be controlled.

New comment by saithir in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

saithir — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:43:12 +0000

I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better.

Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.

New comment by saithir in "Facebook ban on discussing Linux?"

saithir — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 23:10:36 +0000

That sounds like the buyer's problem though.

New comment by saithir in "Bluesky Social Dataset (235M posts from 4M users)"

saithir — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 10:46:35 +0000

Because unlike the authors of this set - who went and stripped the posts out of usernames and permalinks to anonymize it - that set you mention just grabbed data out of the API as-is (at least based on its huggingface description that's left over).

That's the difference.

New comment by saithir in "Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever"

saithir — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:06:25 +0000

Or, "How To Get Some Public Appreciation With Minimal Effort: An Attempt".

If they actually cared they'd host (and more importantly, supported since they probably don't run on modern systems without some fiddling) those games themselves.

Not like they don't have a store with games or anything.

New comment by saithir in "Apple Forces the Signing of Applications in macOS Sequoia 15.1"

saithir — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 16:08:04 +0000

Because the article from August 2024 is still correct.

In 15.1 you can still go to the system settings/privacy and click the "open anyway" button for the application there and it will still launch.

Source: I am on 15.1 and just downloaded a completely new unsigned app and opened it successfully.

New comment by saithir in "Company named ">