Hacker News: stby

New comment by stby in "Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown"

stby — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:22:58 +0000

I think the Microsoft Store actually did not require the account, which is quite a unique feature across app stores. Whether that is actually relevant on an OS that now forces online accounts in other ways is questionable.

New comment by stby in "Germany Forces Lexus to Remotely Kill Car Heating in Dead of Winter"

stby — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:42:49 +0000

It is an article that doesn't care about facts, just feelings. It should have no place in any serious discussion.

New comment by stby in "Windows 8 Desktop Environment for Linux"

stby — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:38:45 +0000

Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.

New comment by stby in "Collabora Online Desktop Released with Improved UI from LibreOffice"

stby — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:27:20 +0000

I actually quite like the UI of MS Office, but nevertheless I don't understand why so many competitors try to make clones. Say what you want, but MS has a huge head start here and everyone else is just making worse looking copies of the way MS Office looked years ago.

And of course, is this really the final form of office applications? Is it maybe time to just go back to the drawing board, think about workflows, the current state of technology, future trends, and build a UI that works maybe even better, looks cleaner, fits on more screens?

New comment by stby in ".NET 10"

stby — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:27:04 +0000

Somehow, .NET jobs seem be tied to waterfall processes ("but we are still agile, because we release two times a year"), requirements in OneNote, and a 5 kg Windows laptop.

New comment by stby in "AI Weiwei: What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier"

stby — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:43:48 +0000

His text contains hardly any new insights about Germany, and I suspect that this was the real reason for the rejection.

New comment by stby in "You too can run malware from NPM (I mean without consequences)"

stby — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:38:05 +0000

I am also out of the loop here, how would namespaces have helped?

New comment by stby in "Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers"

stby — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:15:32 +0000

Newer Coworking places generally seem to have some Starbucks-vibes, but AFAIK they are not doing to well.

Maybe the price of a coffee is exactly what people are willing to pay for a seat, a small table, and wifi for some hours.

New comment by stby in "How to Firefox"

stby — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:49:08 +0000

The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.

New comment by stby in "I'm switching to Python and actually liking it"

stby — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:04:51 +0000

I much prefer installing it myself, with the required version for my project and at a known and common location.

New comment by stby in "Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one"

stby — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:57:19 +0000

Is this even true? I am strongly opposed to ads and tracking in my OS for other reasons, but surely the performance impact is barely measurable.

New comment by stby in "US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas"

stby — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:28:45 +0000

HN is social media. Messenger apps are almost certainly social media. GitHub or similar platforms might be social media. There might be some people out there without any social media accounts, but they wouldn't be able to post about it on the internet.

Other than that, your example of using temporary accounts for some secondary platform functionality is yet another reason why this policy is terrible.

New comment by stby in "US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas"

stby — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:23:19 +0000

> Omitting social media information could lead to “visa denial and ineligibility” for future visas, the embassy added.

Honest question, how would they detect missing info? If they already knew all my social media profiles, they wouldn't need to ask for it. If I wrote some credible threads on any platform, I assume those would have been detected by someone anyway. Also, I surely wouldn't voluntarily disclose the account I used to publish those.

New comment by stby in "Microsoft blocks emails that contain 'Palestine' after employee protests"

stby — Thu, 22 May 2025 11:39:34 +0000

Internally. I feel like this word does belong into the headline. Other than that, I will never understand how employees don't move all of their communication far outside of their employers infrastructure in cases like that.

New comment by stby in "Don't make it "like Google""

stby — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:08:30 +0000

Every article that criticizes some general UI thing, like the general state of current user interfaces, how everything was better 10/20/100 years ago, how the start menu or settings in some operating systems are bad, ... really should be forced to provide some actual examples and analyze them in some detail. All we get in this article is a screenshot of Gmail, resized to a small size so that we don't even have a chance to decipher anything on it, and the repeated assurance of the author that this does in fact represent an unusable UI.

But even I, as someone who doesn't use Gmail, can quickly understand that interface on the screenshot after zooming in a bit. Maybe it looks a bit chaotic, but there seem to be some menus opened just for the sake of argument. Maybe this UI is incredibly powerful? Maybe they didn't dumb down the interface, which is something that is also criticized here a lot. It's hard to tell from a screenshot alone.

New comment by stby in "DELETE, DELETE, DELETE [pdf]"

stby — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 10:04:47 +0000

> Through a series of Executive Orders, President Trump has called on administrative agencies to unleash prosperity through deregulation and ensure that they are efficiently delivering great results for the American people.

It's hard not to read this in Borat's voice.

New comment by stby in "The Origins of Wokeness"

stby — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:54:33 +0000

This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.

New comment by stby in "Making Beautiful API Keys"

stby — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 15:23:42 +0000

Base 32 does that for them, it excludes the lower case letters and I L O U.

New comment by stby in "Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers"

stby — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:18:41 +0000

Lego specifically lasts pretty long, I've got some of them at home that survived three generations of kids. But apart from that I do feel like there's way to much plastic in toys, so I'm curios - do you have any good recommendations for alternatives? There seems to be plenty of wooden toys for toddlers, but not so much for kids older than 4.

New comment by stby in "Implementing the “one or more” UI component"

stby — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:21:18 +0000

In fairness, the article comes to the same conclusion.