Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jaffa2's commentslogin

Reminds me of UDG graphics on the sinclair spectrum. I like the example of the image in the article very cool art.

Good article i enjoyed it.

Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.

It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.

If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.

I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.

It doesn’t do it for me im too free spirited.


theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.

Maybe a photocopier?

Its just how long you are meant to let the coffee brew. Try if you make tea you need to let bag steep for a minute or 2. But actually timing it???? Useful if you are a goldfish may be but otherwise i dont understand who can’t remember to do something in 30 seconds.

Fwiw i oftrn let me aeropress brew for a few minutes. 30 secs is hella short.


30 seconds works fine for other semi-pressurized brewing methods like turboshots or soup.

That’s indeed quite short for a brew time. 30s is your typical plunging time

your statement suggest they might not make sense after social media (otherwise it's redundant) Why do you imply they don't make sense now?


I this related to when you are scrolling and selecting within a document, and you wiggle the mouse, it scrolls faster ? I always thought it was just a nice UI optimisation, but I could believe it's actually some accidental side-effect at play.

(like make a 20 page word doc, and start selecting from the first page and drag through - it wil go faster if you jiggle. same in excel and nearly every windows app, even windows explorer)


No, it has to do with every time you move the mouse over a window, a hover event is sent to the application, which runs its main event loop. Either the installer only updated its progress bar when an event happened (in which case it would only appear to be going faster, because the progress bar would move more smoothly) or there was some really terribly written code that literally only made progress when an (unrelated) event happened. My guess is the former.


No, that's not quite correct.

It was not giving the impression of being faster, it was faster.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...


Being a bored kid in the 90s with nothing better to do, I had timed it. It was actually faster.


IRQ's. It was faster.



Aha! Thanks for the link. So it is a kind of side effect thing.


There must be so many subtle features like these that people use subconsciously, and when they try to move to another operating system, they try it, nothing happens and they get frustrated.


this just sounds absolutely horrendous. I could not operate like this. Is this a general linux on laptop thing or just a specific to your situation thing?


It's... not great. It's a dual-boot laptop that I take out into the field so I'd like to encrypt the Windows and Linux volumes with BitLocker and LUKS respectively, and ideally I would leave Secure Boot enabled for that extra bit of security. Ultimately I'll need to decide whether to disable Secure Boot or patch the kernel to let me override lockdown mode. I know SuSE has implemented it but I don't know if their patch series will apply cleanly to a mainline Ubuntu kernel.


It's a Linux thing.

> The Linux kernel disables the possibility of hibernation when Secure Boot is in use because it cannot guarantee that the swap file is unchanged. "Unencrypted hibernation/suspend to swap are disallowed as the kernel image is saved to a medium that can then be accessed."

https://wiki.debian.org/Hibernation


I think it's specific to their machine? I've got an old Skylake (6600u) machine with Secure Boot disabled that will last a weekend with the lid closed.


This is a general Linux issue. Over the years patches have floated around to address it (like letting people force it to be allowed if their swap is encrypted).

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/kernel_lockdown.7.html


> with Secure Boot disabled

That's why it works for you. Enable secure boot and you lose hibernate.


All this app stuff is so annoying. I reverted back a while ago. Now when i want the radio on i just switch it on. With an actual switch. Same with my lights— an actual real switch! Theres no benefit to chaining all your behind someapp the needs updated installed, logged in passwords, managed, ooo you haven’t logged in for 90 days lets send you an email to update your password- bro i just want to increase my heating. Its all nonsense. Sooner people realise the better.


TODAY I got an email saying my $600 robot vacuum cleaner -- which only works via an app -- would no longer work with said app.

It has no physical buttons to manage schedules, just a "spot clean now" button.

I hand-wrung when I bought it -- knowing it was a risk requiring I trust them -- aand I was bitten.

Awesome.

Welcome to the future.


Nobody on HN wants to hear this, but REG-U-LA-TION. The glorious free market is consistently failing to solve the growing problem of cloud-tethered and app-tethered products being nerfed by their manufacturers after the point of sale.


But that's why the EU is so "behind" on cultivating parasitic FAANG-style tech megacorps! If they'd just do away with regulations, the EU could have some of their own, such joy!

Move fast and screw society for tasty RSUs!


I think those who believe regulation is universally the devil forget the era where products were received DOA and customers had no recourse while companies simply called it profit.


I can't take anyone that views regulation as universally evil seriously when history is full of stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor


Evidently HN doesn't like this particular history...


<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176267>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44508062>

The Radithor reference is of course quite apropos, and I'm a fan of effective and principled regulation to avoid that and numerous other market failures.


Sorry, but it's CUS-TO-MERS. They buy stuff that can only be controlled via an app talking to the cloud. They buy stuff that cannot be repaired. They buy stuff that openly lies about its specs, for an "unbelievably good price". The customers go for the cheapest, all else be damned.

Education in general, and about critical thinking in particular, could help.


Your argument is in alignment with

    * "There's a sucker born every minute" and
    * "caveat emptor" and
    * "If I can trick you into giving me your money, that's your fault" 
With a sufficiently large pool of people, scammers live and thrive on busy people.

Regulation helps discourage that.

In this case, "REG-U-LATION" actually "caused" the issue. Up-to-date LIDAR of every home in America was deemed to be invasive breach of privacy so was regulated out. This product didn't successfully account for future non-technical issues.

I "foolishly" tried to reward a previously known-good vendor by buying a product from the company that had sold me a vacuum that worked for ten years... which brings up the next truism:

    * "Past performance is not an indicator of future success"
Cue the tiny violin.


Customers would buy contaminated food if it was cheaper, too. There's value in having a floor on quality and design for products to avoid races to the bottom?


Not just would, DID!

And they got so fed up with eating food that make them sick that we passed the Food and Drug Act!

You can vote with both your wallet and _you actual vote_.


The entire snake oil industry was thriving and customers loved buying stuff that did nothing at all.

It took a hundred people, including young children, dying in sheer agony from a 100% preventable poisoning by a "medicine company" who's business was essentially dissolving off the shelf medicine powders in liquid and selling the result to really regulate chemicals meant for human ingestion. It took a president with a sympathetic ear and immense popular support for government in general to be a force for reigning in powerful corporations.

That company not only did not test that concoction on any living thing before bottling it up and selling to thousands of unwitting people, but the chemist in charge didn't even check the literature to see that the diethylene glycol he used was already thought to be lethal and had known kidney toxicity.

The company DID test its flavor and color and fragrance.

Why would they test anything else before selling it? You could be a hugely profitable company selling products that did nothing to the people who took it. Testing your products was a waste of effort and would not get you more business!

Your average consumer CANNOT judge accurately whether a medicine works. Your average doctor fails at the task, which is why we have to do blind studies in the first place.

What was true of consumers in the early 1900s is just as true today, and applies to all sorts of things that aren't medicine. Consumers will never be experts. Consumers will never be as equipped to evaluate something as the capital rich industry that produces it. There are inherent information asymmetries that make even idealized market theory fail.


Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup is another example. It was made around the mid 1800's and killed thousands of children. I'm sure there were others. This one just stands out.


How's changing the behavior of every person on Earth to create the market pressures you wanna see working out for you?

Over here in the EEA, governments using regulations to create the market pressures I want to see has a fair amount of success, FWIW


> They buy stuff that openly lies about its specs

That one is very specifically failure or regulators and absolutely should subject to regulation. We can bicker about whether repairability should be regulated ... but false claims by the manufacturers absolutely should.

It is absurd to blame the user for this one.


Sorry, it's not. Latest example, Canon's phone app for its cameras, for GPS tagging, remote shutter, transfer to phone, didn't require any Internet access, but now they changed it to require an online login for no reason. Oh and that login only works with chrome installed.

So miss me with this caveat emptor libertarian fantasy land ("openly lies about its specs" is the buyer's fault?!)


You'll know not to buy anything from Canon next time, right?


Will that keep me from getting bait-and-switched again?


You may want to check if your robot is supported by Valetudo: https://valetudo.cloud/


Reading through that site, it seems like instead of locking yourself into a corporations app, you're locking it into his instead. He doesn't seem to want to run an open source community, he's building an app for himself and publishing it for people who have exactly the same use case as him.


True, but you don't need to install updates once you have the software installed, and it's probably better not to. The software on the robot doesn't need the app to control, either - it exposes an API that either the app or custom software can talk to, sans cloud servers.


ooo thanks for the link, buuut it appears NEATO Robotics vacuums aren't supported ... yet.

I had hoped Home Assistant might be able to handle it but it appears their integration just sends the data to NEATO, which no no longer works.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/neato/

Blarg.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: