Hacker News: syntheticnature

New comment by syntheticnature in "Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US"

syntheticnature — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:20:22 +0000

The person I mentioned in my story upthread had the one-year suspension followed by the interlock requirement for another year

New comment by syntheticnature in "Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US"

syntheticnature — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:17:19 +0000

If it's as flaky as my experience upthread suggests, maybe it was just that. At least, that's what I hope, for the sake of those on the bus

New comment by syntheticnature in "Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US"

syntheticnature — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:32:43 +0000

I once helped someone get their car home after one of these was installed. Their license would not be returned until it was installed, but they weren't allowed to leave it on the lot. Someone else drove it there, and then I got to experience the breathalyzer to drive it home.

The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed

New comment by syntheticnature in "The MacBook Neo"

syntheticnature — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:14:05 +0000

Or, in actuality, the Dell business model will be designed for repairability. I tend to always advise friends who want Windows/Linux laptops to buy from the business lines, especially if a 1- or 2- year refurb will work.

New comment by syntheticnature in "The MacBook Neo"

syntheticnature — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:01:22 +0000

The Macbook Neo is $599. Looking at my local Best Buy and dividing by 3, the laptops below $200 are all HP Chromebooks:

Chromebook/N4500 (2021!)/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC, $149 white $179 in grey Windows/N150/4GB RAM/128GB, $219 (first Windows machine)

The first Lenovo is a Chromebook that's $299, and it's got a MediaTek processor from 2022 and is supposedly on a $100 sale.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices"

syntheticnature — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:03:58 +0000

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

New comment by syntheticnature in "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash"

syntheticnature — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:18:12 +0000

If there was an IP setting users could change, all the self-hosting etc. forums would be talking about how to change it instead of explaining other options. I'd expect not just fixed hosts and an ecosystem dependent on their proprietary protocols, but also pinned certificates and secure boot so you can't change any of it.

N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Upcoming changes to Let's Encrypt and how they affect XMPP server operators"

syntheticnature — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:16:35 +0000

A minor quibble: I'd describe Snikket as more a batteries-included distribution of the Prosody config plus validated client apps for mobile devices.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Scott Adams has died"

syntheticnature — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:01:25 +0000

While he definitely went off the rails, I first caught a hint, back in the 90s, when his fanclub/e-list was named "Dogbert's New Ruling Class"... and he seemed to take it a bit too seriously.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak"

syntheticnature — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:05:39 +0000

You've missed all the posts where people complain about a terminal emulator taking 1ms longer to respond to a keystroke than their preferred one, haven't you?

New comment by syntheticnature in "Deprecate like you mean it"

syntheticnature — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:32:15 +0000

Wow, tell me you've never shipped anything important / heavily used without telling me that.

I expected this to suggest a tick-tock deprecation cycle, where one version deprecated and the next removed, but this is definitely an idea that belongs on the domain "entropicthoughts.com"

New comment by syntheticnature in "Free static site generator for small restaurants and cafes"

syntheticnature — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:10:21 +0000

Google Sites exists. Buy a domain, point it at a free Google site. So easy a religion major can make a site that looks pretty decent (ha ha, only serious; I thought he'd used Wordpress at first) for just the cost of domain registration.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory"

syntheticnature — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:16:16 +0000

It is not; I know we don't read articles here, but...

New comment by syntheticnature in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

syntheticnature — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:29:56 +0000

No, it's illegal in many, looks like most states:

https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2019/07/retail...

New comment by syntheticnature in "Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What""

syntheticnature — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 02:07:54 +0000

Where I am, you need an admin to make a public channel; you cannot do it yourself.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update"

syntheticnature — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:56:06 +0000

This is HN. We don't read posts here.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?"

syntheticnature — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:21:41 +0000

> I have a video that goes through everything in this post, embedded below:

> If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue:

More sites like this, please

New comment by syntheticnature in "Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens"

syntheticnature — Sat, 31 May 2025 00:41:29 +0000

Not quite the same as storefront surplus, but: https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/

New comment by syntheticnature in "The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died"

syntheticnature — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:21:38 +0000

I didn't downvote, but the question was answerable by simply visiting the domains typed into the comment.

New comment by syntheticnature in "The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025"

syntheticnature — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:04:47 +0000

I had a Google Play app whose dev died. It was just a simple local app -- no network server usage. When I last upgraded my phone (due to imminent failure of the previous one) it refused to copy the app over -- and the app was no longer in the Play store.