filmgirlcw

came here to say this

Correction: his idea was that he could buy international reply coupons (which were different than regular stamps) and arbitrage the rates against whatever currency value was greater. As an academic exercise, it was interesting (if utterly unpractical, especially for 1920).

But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.

And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.

Someone else posted his site to HN, not Simon. He responds with additional context and also responds to links to other HN comments he’s made rather than just linking back to his own site. The only person gaslighting here is you.

Anyone looking at this should recognize that the hardware itself is nearly a decade old (and has performance of a mid-range Android from 11 or 12 years ago), the software is buggy and not fully baked (the version of Debian they JUST moved to has lost normal Debian Security team updates and maintenance has moved to the Debian LTS team) and the company has a history of extreme delays in shipping and customer service.

People can spend their money however they choose, but I wouldn’t spend $1800 on a phone like that if you want to actually use it as a phone. And before buying it as underpowered “portable” Linux computer (the battery life is not good even though I hear suspend mostly works now), this is still outrageously overpriced even by current hardware pricing.

Maybe for your app, it doesn’t make sense. And if it’s a pure enterprise app, fair enough (assuming it’s an enterprise that was started more than 15 years ago and only targets regulated or very specific markets). But a good way to guarantee that your app will never go beyond Windows desktop users is to ignore the most dominant mobile platform by users who actually pay for software.

This is such a cool deep dive into CSS colors and color theory and finding the right way to mess with color values.

Super fun game! My best is 0.0018 but am usually in the ~0.0030 range

That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!

XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.

I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!

Yeah, given all the people with passion/ability for low-level reverse engineering have left the project, I don’t think we should ever expect to get greater than M2 support from Asahi. Maybe one day another project will pick up the ideas, but for anyone not wanting to use years old hardware, the dream of Linux almost natively existing on modern Apple silicon remains just that: a dream.

They do if you want it to be “verified” (at least at bigger places) but I don’t know about smaller places or how people even check that.

And you can get iPhone 14s for $99 on occasion as long as you commit to prepaid service from Total Wireless/Trac Fone for 3 months (so about $180 - so your total price for the phone and 3 months of service is about $300) or you can use carrier trade-in deals to get hundreds of dollars off an iPhone 17, as long as you stay on a postpaid plan and take the credit over 3 years.

Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.

We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.

Did we learn nothing from when ABC fired Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect 24 years ago? Clearly, we did not.

>I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.

I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.

I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.