While the article's a fun exploration, I do wonder if the key point of the XOR cipher was actually to allow the manufacturer to claim that encryption was in use so that the DMCA could be invoked and make reverse engineering illegal.
Readit Newswingman-jr commented on The €10 Mirror: Why Enterprise Security Looks Like a Kid's Toy labs.itresit.es/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/Yippee-Ki-Yay
Oh hi everyone! So funny to see how my quippy little tweet blew up the last few days on all the platforms (much more than when I share actual things I make, to my great dismay - if you're an artist/photographer, check out my apps & tools: https://heliographe.studio).
There's lots of interesting discussions to be had around what makes a great icon (but social media platforms aren't the places to have those deep conversations). For example the original Mac HIG says that an app icon should:
- clearly represent the document the application creates
- use graphics that convey meaning about what your application does
(https://www.threads.com/@heliographe.studio/post/DTehlciE3wY)
The first point might be a little outdated, as we tend to live in a "post-document" world, especially on mobile. The second is broad enough that it holds up, and under that lens it doesn't seem that an image of a pen/stylus is most appropriate for a word processor app.
By that metric, the Mavericks/Catalina (5th and 6th on the linked image) seem like the strongest icons. The Big Sur (4th) one isn't too bad given the "must fit in a squircle constraints" that came with it, but it starts to feel less like a word processor app icon - it could as easily be an icon for TextEdit/Notes.
The most recent 3 are very hard to defend - the main thing they have going for them is that because they are simpler and monochromatic, they fit more easily within a broader design system/icon family. Even then, the simpler shape doesn't make them more legible - a number of people have told me they thought it was a bandaid at first, or maybe something terminal-related for the orange on black one. The "line" under the pencil (or is it a shadow?) on the most recent one is almost as thick as the pencil itself, and blends with it because gestalt theory.
I agree that the 7th one (original ink bottle) has a few issues that don't necessarily make it the best choice for an icon - but dang, the level of craft that goes into it makes it an instant classic for me. And it does retain a fairly distinct, legible shape that still makes it a solid icon even if the detail gets lost at smaller sizes.
Icons need to be quickly recognizable, but at the same time an icon is not a glyph - and illustrational approach do have their place. Especially on devices with larger screens where they are going to appear quite large in most contexts.
The big elephant in the room with all this is that icons 5/6/7 clearly take more craft skill to execute than icons 1/2/3, and Apple used to be the absolute reference - no debate possible - when it came to these matters. As a long time software designer (and former Apple designer myself through the 2010s, although I was on the hardware interaction design side, and not making icons), it is sad that this is no longer true.
I grew up with Hypercard etc. and always loved the classic icons, like these: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/designed-with-kare-in...
Don't suppose you've ever extended the timeline further back? I bet there would be some interesting discussion!
There is likely zero chance the OP's recollection is remotely correct. Pandora went public in 2011 with 80 million users, the chances of a publicly listed company of this size taking payments over HTTP in 2012 are about as close to zero as can be. If nothing else, their payment processor would drop them as a customer.
I found this: https://textslashplain.com/2016/03/06/using-https-properly/ Seems like it at least partially corroborates OP's recollection!
wingman-jr commented on T-Mobile Will Soon Begin LTE Phase-Out tmo.report/2025/10/exclus... · Posted by u/tech234a
I'm curious to see what will happen with LTE-M in this context. Is it going to be phased out as well?
According to Ericsson: > Cat-M1 and NB-IoT are considered future-proof and are viewed as 5G technologies
But AFAIK Cat-M1 falls into the "LTE" umbrella, which means it could be phased out by T-Mobile
Agreed. These technologies are the backbone of a lot (most?) of IoT devices, so unlike the article's description of "devices" in terms of "consumer handheld phones (that are often replaced every 3 years)", the impact here would be much deeper. And these technologies have been and are continuing to be sold as stable. For example, see https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Wireless/Low-power-cellu... . Quote: "Future-proof: LTE-M and NB-IoT are slated for support beyond 2040, ensuring devices' long lifespans. Subscriptions guarantee a reliable network, in contrast to other LPWANs that could shut down preemptively, risking your business." On the other hand, I guess I haven't seen as many IoT devices choose T-Mobile as a carrier either, so maybe it's just that T-Mobile knows their market.
Having worked at various manufacturing companies (telecomms, industrial automation, oil, IoT) over many decades, I'd suggest go work for a company that software is part of a bigger system. There's quite a lot that goes into it. The designing/engineering part is just a part of the overall business. So I'd look at the bigger system/process. There's a number of ideas on how to run a manufacturing process, continuous flow, minimizing stock, contracting out parts, what happens after sales, end of life, etc. Consumer products are very different from industrial / specialist products.
I have worked at such a place as well and would strongly recommend this. If it works out right, you can remain in software and do adjacent jobs to manufacturing. I suspect industrial / specialist products would be the better side to get in on, at least at first.
wingman-jr commented on How to trade software for small money? scattered-thoughts.net/wr... · Posted by u/luu
This is an interesting article, and the subject of alternate paths to payment seems quite relevant. It listed a strategy or two I hadn't seen before. What other strategies have folks from HN seen? Did they work or not?
The features described seem of dubious general value, but don’t seem like things that would work without an LLM, especially the smart text area. (Smart ComboBox sounds like it might be more generally useful than the others.)
But the point of these seems to be more of a solution looking for a problem than attempt to find an efficient solution to an identified problem. Or, rather, they are one of Microsoft’s many efforts as part of looking for a solution to their problem of “how to do we monetize our investment into AI technology” not a solution to customer problems.
Fair point. But putting on my user hat, that Smart Paste sounds pretty handy if it works half decently. I'm thinking CRM entry use cases and the like.
It's a job like any other. And it's not outside of SWE, it's part of it; this is a bit like asking how someone moved from SWE to being a backend developer.
My experience was quite a bit different than SWE. For me, it was as part of a R&D group and was more closely assigned to say, signals processing and my coworker was a physicist. The big change was that the skillset was more in rigorous thinking about the model itself and challenging how it worked. I had other parts to wireup the AI/ML that were more SWE for sure, though. What was your experience like?
wingman-jr commented on 86-DOS Version 0.11 Found virtuallyfun.com/2023/12/... · Posted by u/xeeeeeeeeeeenu
One of my favourite DOS things was the DEBUG.EXE command. As far as I know, it was the only debugger that allows for the creation of debug files where you could do things like debug.exe < script.dbg to do low level things like replacing a disk partition table.
It was a very handy method of passing around binaries in text-oriented chat systems.
Yeah, I went looking for debug.exe on the listing as well. There was something just so visceral and direct about its usage that I enjoyed.
wingman-jr commented on Why Is the Front End Stack So Complicated? matt-rickard.com/why-is-t... · Posted by u/rckrd
Yes update speed, iteration speed and general ease of deployment is a huge part of it. Also the ability to develop on Mac/Linux but deploy to Windows.
One of the popular features of the desktop deployment tool I like to shill here sometimes is web-style "aggressive updates", which basically means synchronous update checks on every launch. If the user starts the app and there's an update available a delta is downloaded, applied and the app then launches all without any prompts or user interactions required. As long as users restart the app from time to time it means they stay fully up to date and so bugfixes can be deployed very quickly. This isn't quite as fast a deployment cycle as a multi-page web app, but is comparable to a SPA as users can leave tabs open for quite long periods.
Weirdly, AFAIK no other deployment tool has a feature like that. It's unique to Conveyor. Desktop update tech is pretty stagnant and is optimized for a world where updates are assumed to be rare and optional, so support for fast delta updates or synchronous updates are often rough/missing. When your frontend has a complex relationship with a rapidly changing backend / protocol though, that isn't good enough.
Also we made it from the start be able to build packages for every OS from your dev laptop whatever you choose to run, no native tooling required. So you've got a deployment process very similar to an HTML static site generator. Hopefully this closes the gap between web and desktop deployment enough for more people to explore non-web dev.
If memory serves correctly, I think that's close to how ClickOnce worked/works? - but Windows only. One of the apps I worked on does it, but it was a homegrown framework. Definitely the sort of thing it's nice to delegate to a specialized system where possible.