Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

mastodon.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 318 posts

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#301

Post by mavhc »

epicureanideal wrote: post #299
mavhc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in education, so not highly paid, bought a car and a house by myself, and easily manage to save £500/month. I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.

Can you give more information? Are you in London or another major city in the UK?

Midlands, city suburb.

My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, life is magical.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#302

Post by blackboxlogic »

gruez wrote: post #297
blackboxlogic wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at a place that managed traffic light behavior and they had a system to evaluate traffic efficiency by watching traffic flow through the whole area, tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones.

>tracked using ambient Bluetooth signals from phones. What does this mean? Are they just measuring radio power levels in the 2.4GHz spectrum, and using that to determine whether a car is there or not? Or are they actually somehow capturing bluetooth signals, decoding them, and extracting identifiers (eg. MAC) from them?

It was explained to me as if they track individual cars so I assumed they extract identifiers. I don't know much about BT so I had no reason to question if that was possible. I asked about TPMS as an alternative and they said bluetooth was more reliable since many cars didn't use in-wheel transponders.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#303

Post by Mezzie »

nmstoker wrote: post #30

I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor. It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.

It's technologically possible, but the 'user intent guessing' makes this messy. The Venn diagram of people who understand information seeking behavior and science well enough to design this and people who have a deep enough understanding of development to design it in a way that it doesn't break every 3 seconds is two circles.

So you'd need a team, and as somebody with a tech and a library background, good luck getting those two groups to communicate and work together. Doing it without the information seeking background just recreates the issues with the modern web where your 'robot butler' comes back with a ton of irrelevant information, and doing it without the tech background just gets you a bunch of librarians high-fiving themselves over 'solving' a problem using outdated tech and is used by 20 people because it doesn't scale well.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#304

Post by olyjohn »

pjmlp wrote: post #194
grishka wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".

Easy, install Edge. https://therecord.media/microsoft-silently-enables-super-dup... Although I guess this isn't the answer you're looking for.

lol. This reminds me of IE's "Enhanced Security Mode" where they disabled pretty much everything in the browser. This was pre-configured on Windows Server (probably still is). The browser is pretty much useless in this state, so the only way to get what you needed from a browser was to make it "unsafe." Too unsafe for servers with experienced tech people using them, but just fine for the general public on a desktop.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#305

Post by olyjohn »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #90
jtmarmon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 - duh. This is like asking people if they find the experience of stopping at a toll booth to be a pleasant part of the driving experience

Except it's a toll booth that you don't pay. It's part of some weird scam that depends on annoying you.

You pay with your wasted time and energy, and potential loss of focus as to what you came to the site to actually read.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#306

Post by olyjohn »

hammock wrote: post #73
throwawayboise wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"

They hide ALPR everywhere. All it takes is a camera. I've seen it on the backside of normal green highway signs, where you can't see it and would never suspect it. The idea is to create a dragnet.

They also pay gig workers to literally just drive drive around in vehicles with ALPR in them. Police cars have them, and they trickle down to parking enforcement. And I am sure the parking officer's gear is sending back more than just cars that have been parked over 30 minutes.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#307

Post by howenterprisey »

cblconfederate wrote: post #273
rapnie wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such concept on Mastodon. People add it for fun, just like they do any kind of emoji, but it carries zero extra 'gravitas' as it does on Twitter.

I don't mean the checkmarks, i mean the user's domain. Twitter's Blue Checkmarks were added for a reason, and similarly a mastodon user's home server is an implicit vote of confidence by . Or else i don't understand why this apparently busy mastodon server would have to approve all signups.

Spam.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#308

Post by iamacyborg »

_dain_ wrote: post #294
iamacyborg wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom. Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.

The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically? Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high. Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.

We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about.

The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#309

Post by yellowapple »

severine wrote: post #274
yellowapple wrote: post #22

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load . Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user…

uBlock Origin's element picker works fine for me in Firefox for Android, and always has, try again! Thank you, gorhill and co.

How do you activate it?

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#310

Post by epicureanideal »

mavhc wrote: post #301
epicureanideal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more information? Are you in London or another major city in the UK?

Midlands, city suburb. My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, l…

Thanks for sharing! I'm happy it worked out for you.

At the same time, I wonder if this is a bit of survivorship bias? I'm sure there are many people who do manage to live better than their parents, but is that common or the exception?

I was raised by a single parent who was in the "working poor" class, who managed to own their own home. I am a bit disappointed that it would be far more difficult for me to own a home anywhere within even 1 hour driving (each way) from the job centers, than it was for them to own a home. Despite longer working hours, more education, and so on.

Post reply on HN