Hacker News Reader

CottonMcKnighton World Magnetic Model 2025 Technical Report [pdf]

1. First release of the new High Resolution (WMMHR) model, 2. The South Atlantic Anomaly is expected to intensify during the period 2025-2030.

CottonMcKnighton Compression Dictionary Transport

If this interests you, I highly recommend watching this talk by Pat Meenan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt0H2DxdAPY

CottonMcKnighton After 16 years, we're renewing the StackOverflow Brand

Ironicry

CottonMcKnighton Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error

People forget that he already tried during Covid, when he tweeted that the election should be postponed.

CottonMcKnighton You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

CSS is a language, but it is 0.1% syntax and 99.9% memorizing the standard library, which expands monthly.

CottonMcKnighton Tesla gets more than 20% of parts from Mexico, it will be affected by tariffs

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States..."

If the Line Item Veto was unconstitutional, then Congress surrendering its power to the President to not only impose tariffs unilaterally but then to _exempt_ favored parties from them, is not only blatantly corrupt, but clearly also unconstitutional.

But I'm not holding my breath for sanity from the Originalist Court.

CottonMcKnighton Should JavaScript be split into two languages?

Example: Sindre Sorhus' FNV library uses BigInt to support hashes up to 1024 bits. It's quite popular (for a hashing algorithm) on NPM, with 80k+ downloads / week.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sindresorhus/fnv1a

CottonMcKnighton Ask HN: Where do you keep your 401k investments?

VT and chill. Add BND / BNDW if you wish.

CottonMcKnighton California Senate Passes Bill Requiring Passive Speed Limiters

I have a bumper sticker that says "Vehicle speed monitored by GPS / Speed limiter in use", like some commercial trucks have. It dramatically cuts down on the road rage.

CottonMcKnighton How to style React applications while the world burns around us (2020)

I remember JSSS, but a more vivid memory for me is LiveConnect: another Netscape-only project that was incredibly powerful and groundbreaking: it allowed Java and JavaScript code to communicate directly, e.g. plain JS could invoke the JDK and instantiate Java objects. In retrospect, also a truly terrible idea, but at the time, it was amazing.

CottonMcKnighton YouTube moves to AV1 by default to the dismay of some Android users

It is a certainty that, some time in the future, the bandwidth cost of not re-encoding will exceed the one-time cost of re-encoding.

How far in the future probably informed this decision.

CottonMcKnighton U.S. podcast listening reach new high: 47% listened one last month, +12% YoY

Meanwhile, at Google: "Let's add our podcast app to the long list of Google Graveyard apps and further erode user trust!"

CottonMcKnighton A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters

What do you use to create the graphs?

CottonMcKnighton The Heart Shape

I thought it came from the shape of two mated swans with their heads together.

CottonMcKnighton Portal (2021)

A big part of my childhood was playing black & white games on the Mac: the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate); the World Builder and action games from Silicon Beach (Enchanted Scepters, Dark Castle, etc.); and the early Sierra adventure games (Space Quest I-III, Kings Quest I-III).

CottonMcKnighton Client did not pay? Add opacity and decrease it until their site fades away

get-sued.js

CottonMcKnighton Toyota cashes in on booming hybrid sales

MSRP for LE Prius is not "premium" at all. If the premium you refer to is from dealerships, there are plenty of dealerships that sell for MSRP.

CottonMcKnighton Huge proportion of internet is AI-generated slime, researchers find

enshittification intensifies

American Dialect Society nailed it.

CottonMcKnighton Jake Archibald on the web browser event loop, setTimeout, micro tasks [video]

They're both at Shopify now, and they have a new podcast, with a coincidentally relevant (to this post) title: Off The Main Thread.

https://open.spotify.com/show/5clRioNPZJY8ORMhJZZOYA

CottonMcKnighton Ousted OpenAI CEO Makes Plans for New Artificial Intelligence Company

MariaAI

CottonMcKnighton Volute Shaped Blower [video]

I can't wait to see what he is going to make with all those prills.

CottonMcKnighton REI is Laying Off 275 Employees

5.87 lbs: https://lighterpack.com/r/89huvt

CottonMcKnighton WASM: Big deal or little deal?

It has been deprecated for a long time but still available in Chromium. It is being removed in Chromium 119 at the end of next month.

See the aside about SQLite WASM on this blog post.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql/

CottonMcKnighton WASM: Big deal or little deal?

It's pretty objectively a big deal.

(Feature-limited) Photoshop was ported to WASM in 2021.

https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/

With the deprecation and imminent removal of WebSQL, the official (Google) recommendation for SQL-in-browser is WASM SQLite.

https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/index.md

CottonMcKnighton I worked in federal prison sweatshops for 23 cents an hour

Prison-for-profit, either privately-run, with slave labor, or both, creates perverse incentives to convict more people of crimes and to keep them incarcerated longer.

This is not just hypothetical. The notorious Pennsylvania 'kids-for-cash' case was particularly egregious.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...

CottonMcKnighton Corrupted Blood incident

Another notable WoW Classic incident: Biny of <Afterlife> discovers that the "Living Bomb" effect used by a raid boss, that targets both players and their pets/minions, remains applied to pets and minions even after they have been dismissed and re-summoned.

So logically, the appropriate thing to do is deliberately get his minion afflicted with Living Bomb, dismiss it, and re-summon it in the middle of the auction house, killing everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGYOt3hETYE

IIRC, he got a week-long suspension.

They fixed that one pretty quickly.

I am also personally guilty of kiting Lord Kazzak from the Blasted Lands all the way to Stormwind, and watching him wreak havoc.

Fun times.

CottonMcKnighton Maui residents who disobeyed barricades survived fires

Oh god, I was just reminded of a story that came out of the Station Nightclub fire, claiming a bouncer blocked people from using an exit that was "for the band only".

https://www.wcvb.com/article/station-nightclub-fire-20th-ann...

CottonMcKnighton Chatgpt.js: An open-source, powerful client-side JavaScript library for ChatGPT

CottonMcKnighton Baseball-sized hail destroys Scottsbluff solar farm

While this article is reasonably fact-based, just so everyone is aware of this paper's agenda, check the titles of other articles at the bottom:

* Wyoming Oil And Gas Held Back More By Taxes Than Regulation, Says Industry Group

* John Kerry's Claim Climate Change Kills 15 Million a Year Draws Ethics Complaint

* US House Stands Against Biden's War On Gas Stoves: Will The Senate Do The Same?

CottonMcKnighton Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]

That WAS true, until Scalia et al eviscerated the protections of the 5th Amendment if you invoke it after you start talking. Then (according to the majority opinion of the Court), your subsequent invocation of the 5th Amendment CAN be used as evidence against you.