Hacker News: thedougd

New comment by thedougd in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

thedougd — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:30:32 +0000

Sure, with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, why not?

New comment by thedougd in "Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights"

thedougd — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:15:08 +0000

You’re an every day hero. Thank you!

New comment by thedougd in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

thedougd — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:53:37 +0000

I had to abandon Apple MacOS container because it has so many issues with networking and DNS. I'm looking forward to try it again if they can get it fixed.

https://github.com/apple/container/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20sta...

New comment by thedougd in "Libre Solar – Open Hardware for Renewable Energy"

thedougd — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:35:47 +0000

This could be because of a floating neutral.

There are certainly cases where harmonic distortion is a problem for a device. It’s just that everyone is left guessing, and there’s an overblown fear of devices being harmed.

New comment by thedougd in "Libre Solar – Open Hardware for Renewable Energy"

thedougd — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:28:25 +0000

Sure. It’s just rarely what lay people associate with “sensitive”. Most customers are worried about small electronics with switching mode power supplies that wouldn’t have a problem with just about any power source.

I wouldn’t run some AC motors, old AC clock, ham radio, or many other things on some generators.

The line is open to interoperation and never defined by the manufacturer. It’s blanket liability avoidance that confuses customers.

New comment by thedougd in "Libre Solar – Open Hardware for Renewable Energy"

thedougd — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:42:25 +0000

The other one that drives me nuts is “sensitive electronics” in generator discussions.

New comment by thedougd in "Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents"

thedougd — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 04:26:17 +0000

Setup automatic forwards. If I was to do this, I’d forward all the emails from my kids activities to its email.

New comment by thedougd in "Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans"

thedougd — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:21:57 +0000

I would guess the FSD numbers get help from drivers taking over during difficult situations and use weighted towards highway miles?

New comment by thedougd in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

thedougd — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:26:52 +0000

It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.

New comment by thedougd in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

thedougd — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:24:45 +0000

What sort of tools did it use? I suppose the path mine took may have been a dead end. The Tuya app (I was also using decompiled APK) downloads the BLE definitions on-demand and weren't embedded in the app. It wanted me to capture traffic on a device with the app. I punted but plan to resume with an emulator setup or real device connected with adb.

New comment by thedougd in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

thedougd — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:15:39 +0000

Agents are excellent for reverse engineering. I was also recently working on a BLE reverse engineering exercise and followed a similar path. I ran into lots of headaches with BLE on my Mac and tabled it.

Author or others who know, did you perform this on Linux? I imagine it lacks the tooling challenges I had with BLE on MacOS.

New comment by thedougd in "FAA institutes nationwide drone no-fly zones around ICE operations"

thedougd — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:26:49 +0000

There’s a checkbox in the app that implies that. I haven’t had a reason or way to test it yet.

I can confirm altitude restrictions can be turned off.

New comment by thedougd in "ChatGPT Health"

thedougd — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:42:07 +0000

Are there any mortgage products for software developers that let them get a jumbo mortgage right out of school with 100 percent LTV?

https://www.pnc.com/insights/personal-finance/borrow/physici...

New comment by thedougd in "Show HN: SMTP Tunnel – A SOCKS5 proxy disguised as email traffic to bypass DPI"

thedougd — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 03:58:54 +0000

Quite a few things use STARTTLS. I imagine the same technique could be applied to those other protocols, giving users some options as they fight hostile networks.

Clever

New comment by thedougd in "Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM"

thedougd — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:01:56 +0000

I'm surprised there's no mention yet of carrier activation fees. Isn't that half the point for carrier's? They can bilk you for another $36 for the privilege of issuing a new eSim for your new phone.

New comment by thedougd in "Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling"

thedougd — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:18:22 +0000

Same! Still have it as a side machine.

My favorite and most painful issue was a bug in USB charging. Sometimes it would fail to charge from my monitor (USB-C) yet it would believe it’s connected. The battery would eventually run to zero and the machine would shutoff without warning. No low battery warning would be shown because it believed it was charging however it was not. Resolved with my M3.

Also fun with that generation is that you can’t plug in a dead laptop and start using it right away. Takes about ten minutes of charging before you can power it on.

Also fun, it would not establish power delivery with my monitor in this state. I’d have to plug it in with a regular charger to bootstrap it. Also resolved with my M3.

Now that it’s aged, the super capacitor for the clock no longer holds charge and the time is usually wrong on cold boot. I wish that was serviceable.

New comment by thedougd in "Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves"

thedougd — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:55:37 +0000

I'll make up another one to pile on. Perhaps the police would have had a visible, deterrent presence if they weren't lazily relying on cameras, and that would have prevented the assault in the first place.

Anyhow, if you read the flock database, they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of public safety or random crime.

New comment by thedougd in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

thedougd — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:39:13 +0000

Of course! It should be included in the math when comparing in-housing Postgres vs using a managed service.

New comment by thedougd in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

thedougd — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:10:42 +0000

It's even worse when you start finding you're staffing specialized skills. You have the Postgres person, and they're not quite busy enough, but nobody else wants to do what they do. But then you have an issue while they're on vacation, and that's a problem. Now I have a critical service but with a bus factor problem. So now I staff two people who are now not very busy at all. One is a bit ambitious and is tired of being bored. So he's decided we need to implement something new in our Postgres to solve a problem we don't really have. Uh oh, it doesn't work so well, the two spend the next six months trying to work out the kinks with mixed success.

New comment by thedougd in "GPT-5.2-Codex"

thedougd — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:48:27 +0000

I'm finding that the newer GPT models are much more willing to leverage tools/skills than Claude, reducing interventions requesting approval. Just an observation.