Hacker News: utucuro

New comment by utucuro in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

utucuro — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 12:36:21 +0000

It is not a lie though. WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is. I for one, welcome access to stuff that WB has been sitting on without letting me pay them for it.

New comment by utucuro in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

utucuro — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 12:34:28 +0000

I guess you are in the US. For you, WB content was already available. But you see, they never bothered to make that content available for most of the rest of the world. Netflix, on the other hand, is available most anywhere. This is exactly what it says on the can - more choice and greater value for me.

New comment by utucuro in "Calypso: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants [pdf]"

utucuro — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:44:02 +0000

This is one of the good potential use cases for current gen AI; simulating a scenario again and again and seeing what effect various changes will have on the average outcome... Probably needs an API for having LLMs play with online table top simulating websites or so, I have no idea about any of the sites for online TTRPGs though and their terms of use...

New comment by utucuro in "Ask HN: Is it just me or is mobile web browsing awful?"

utucuro — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 09:25:40 +0000

Late is better than never, right? I'm someone who only uses only these google service: maps, the play store and sometimes, rarely, google books I don't use google search, mail, drive or any other services, I have every single kind of history off and I use Firefox exclusively, on desktop as on Android. I must say, I do encounter badly designed mobile sites with this setup, but it is trivial to toggle desktop mode and then the problem is gone. It helps that I have a folding device, so I can always use a larger screen when needed.

New comment by utucuro in "Australia to give cats a curfew because they are murdering so many other animals"

utucuro — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 07:51:11 +0000

Somehow, considering the bad job humans do with maintaining a population of humans healthy and happy, I find the idea of entrusting control of animal populations to humans bewildering, but then, I was born in Istanbul, and I think our attitude towards street cats is probably well known by this point. After all, Turkish does not have a word to reflect the concept of a stray cat, they're street cats to us. Currently living in Germany, I miss seeing cats in the streets, though the occasional duck and goose sort of make up for it in a weird way, though the Geese can get far more aggressive than any street cat.

New comment by utucuro in "Why are our keyboard not wireless?"

utucuro — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:02:05 +0000

Careful; there's the MX Keys keyboard, which is not a mechanical keyboard, and the MX keys mechanical keyboard, which IS a mechanical keyboard... I have the latter, and as far as I know, it only works wirelessly via receiver or BT.

New comment by utucuro in "Why are our keyboard not wireless?"

utucuro — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:58:45 +0000

I have the mx 3s along with the mechanic keyboard, one set each for work and one for home... Extremely stable connection with the bolt receiver, also works with well if I take the laptop home or with my phone if I connect it to my monitor (Dex) I already have USB-C charging cables due to the phone on either desk, so I just connect it to whichever runs low every few weeks (or months) and keep on using them.

New comment by utucuro in "It's My Monitor"

utucuro — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:37:39 +0000

What an ingenious solution, meanwhile here we are, paying vendors to get to disable USB ports on company machines! /s

New comment by utucuro in "It's My Monitor"

utucuro — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:30:46 +0000

It is not necessarily age itself. My father is approaching 80, computer literate since '86, and keeps adapting to whatever new thing comes out, even adapting to fluke versions of windows like 8 or 11...

Small note to all frontend people: he'd be happier if you stopped using low-contrast anything and small fonts, thank you very much.

New comment by utucuro in "Calibre replacement considerations (2019)"

utucuro — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 10:15:25 +0000

Ten years ago, the largest bookstores in Germany formed an alliance together with Deutsche Telekom and created exactly that. The name is Tolino, there are e-ink ebook readers, designed principally to be the anti-kindle, there is a web reader, there are iOS and Android apps and everything is synced by a cloud account you can upload your own books to or download any books you purchase from any of the bookstores. You can link your bookstore accounts to your tolino account and you get to read anything you buy from them however you want. Apart from the German ones, Belgian, Italian and Dutch bookstores joined in a few years later.

So what happened afterwards?

Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.

New comment by utucuro in "Toml-bench – Which toml package to use in Python?"

utucuro — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 08:06:40 +0000

That's a weird one for sure. I've seen config files which were valid TCL, I've seen JSON, I've seen bad old INI files... TOML is relatively new after all, but that too...

What I never understood are those who looked at all these options and said "No, I'll write my own parser!" instead...

New comment by utucuro in "*@gmail.com"

utucuro — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:29:42 +0000

500 is still generous... If I recall right, the company I work at uses 30 as a threshold.

New comment by utucuro in "Today I learned that random people can send you money on PayPal and disputed it"

utucuro — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 23:10:23 +0000

Deutsche Bank - just about the only real use it has for me is to build a credit history here. If you consider using this bank in Germany and you're not a big business, avoid them like the plague.

New comment by utucuro in "Today I learned that random people can send you money on PayPal and disputed it"

utucuro — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 09:39:18 +0000

My reason for getting a credit card as soon as possible when I moved to Germany, was being able to switch the country of residence of some of my services to Germany, because they only accepted a local credit card as proof of residence here. Google was the main culprit in this regard. Mind you, the credit card itself is a serious joke - it's designed to be useless as far as I'm concerned. You cannot change the billing date, the app doesn't even show you the cutoff date. You cannot change the pin at all - if you request a new pin, they send you a new card.

The only good way I've found to use the card is through Paypal, ironically. At least this way I can see, down to the minute, what I spent and where, which the bank is unable or unwilling to show me.

New comment by utucuro in "A video game where you are an operating system"

utucuro — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:23:10 +0000

So, as someone with considerable Python knowledge but no gamedev knowledge, what would your suggestion be for me?

Specifically, I want to have some fun developing a few game ideas into at least prototypes. I never really had time to do a proper analysis of Pygame, Godot, Unity etc.

New comment by utucuro in "YouTube gets more aggressive in pushing adblock warnings with countdown timer"

utucuro — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 08:49:37 +0000

AS far as I'm concerned, the best thing since email was invented is Fastmail. The non-monetary costs of using gmail over a longer period are far higher than paying money for Fastmail. Most importantly, I know I can rely on my email.

New comment by utucuro in "The Sad Bastard Cookbook"

utucuro — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 08:24:28 +0000

My personal favorite: chopped leftover fries into roughly equal sized chunks, reheat in the pan until they're back in shape, then use them to make a lazy spanish omelette. Mind you, keep tossing and stirring them to avoid burning and add a small amount of oil if the fries are particularly dry.

New comment by utucuro in "A sci-fi short story exploring themes of equality, written by me"

utucuro — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 07:50:06 +0000

The trick to getting better at putting things into words, is to read more. Particularly, read those whose writing style you would seek to emulate. For this particular case, both the structure of the story and the writing style have room for improvement. I would suggest taking a look at Isaac Asimov, specifically his short stories, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King and Oscar Wilde.

New comment by utucuro in "Gandi.net updates pricing, increases rates by up to 1000%"

utucuro — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 12:25:53 +0000

Tasks can also be synced over Fastmail servers, though they do not provide a UI for it.

New comment by utucuro in "Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?"

utucuro — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 08:26:22 +0000

In the US perhaps. Practically no information for most of Germany at all.