HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

RachelF

6,354 karma · joined February 9, 2012

submissionscomments
RachelF··on Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs
AI has provided a great excuse for your manager to fire you and replace you with someone much cheaper.
RachelF··on Leaked Apple M5 9 core Geekbench scores
Yes. AMD is a little better.

But bear in mind that Geekbench runs very short benchmarks for single core especially, so that the CPU never starts thermal throttling.

The Apple chips are fast and efficient, and "feel" even faster because of the their single core burst performance and on chip very fast RAM.

RachelF··on Nvidia buys $5B in Intel
Microsoft also invested $100M in Borland at the same time.

Investing in Apple and Borland were an counter-anti-trust legal move, keeping the competitors alive, but on life support. This way they could say to the government "yes there is competition".

Google does the same these days by keeping Firefox alive.

RachelF··on GNU Midnight Commander
I think the best tool for Windows is Total Commander or TCUP if you want the kitchen sink included:

https://tcup.pl/

RachelF··on The race to build a distributed GPU runtime
I find it odd that given the billions of dollars involved, no competitor has managed to replicate the functions of CUDA.

Is it that hard to do, or is the software lock-in so great?

RachelF··on What Is the Fourier Transform?
I wonder what happened to Wavelet transforms? The were very popular years ago, and now one never hears about them.
RachelF··on Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company
Given Atlassian's terrible product quality, I give it two years until anything they buy becomes borderline unusable frustration.
RachelF··on Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
Software standards are already falling, sadly. I look at the recent problems with Microsoft Windows, Teams and Outlook and despair.

How much of it is to be blamed on AI, and how much on a culture of making users test their products, I do not know.

RachelF··on Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
How corrupt are judges in the USA?

Are their any measures that audit their finances or stop them or their relations from taking work with companies they have issued judgements on?

I'm not saying this is the case here, it is a general question.

RachelF··on “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”
The repeating of the message is how the Allies initially broke the Geheimskreiber a much more secure encryption machine to Enigma that used XOR and rotors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_and_Halske_T52

RachelF··on GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs?
AMD has failed to be reliable with its Zen 4 and Zen 5 consumer CPUs, just at the same time Intel did the same with their 13k and 14k higher end CPUs.

AMD is somewhat worse than Intel as their DDR5 memory bus is very "twitchy" making it hard to get the highest DDR5 timings, especially with multiple DIMMs per channel.

RachelF··on GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs?
Yes, this is the point - software should never be able to physically damage the hardware it is on.

If it can, then the hardware is to blame.

RachelF··on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
A small reason for less power consumption with on die RAM is that you don't need active termination, which does use a few watts of power. It isn't the main reason that the Macs use less power, though.
RachelF··on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers
Lots of things aren't clear.

Copilot is accessing the indexed contents of the file, not the file itself, when you tell it not to access the file.

The blog writer/marketer needs to look at the index access logs.

RachelF··on Review of Anti-Aging Drugs
This, and the fact that Ascorbic acid leads to hardening of the arteries also makes it suspect.

Many of the studies he refers to are old. There was a widely held belief in the early 1980's promoted by Linus Pauling that Vit C cured cancer.

RachelF··on Office on HP-UX and Unix
Yeah, it was a great word processor. Better than MS Word, and it had features Word still lacks like mixing styles on a single line.

What I find curious is how, as the market expanded, all these other Vendors died.

One would expect the opposite - a bigger market means more diversity. An odd thing I still don't understand.

RachelF··on Electrically controlled heat transport in graphite films
Thermal diodes would open up a huge range of applications.
RachelF··on Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security
This is why keyless "start button" functions on cars is a bad idea.

The old approach of keyfob to unlock the car and a real key for the ignition is safer.

Having multiple levels of security is good.

However, having worked in the car security industry many years ago, I discovered that car manufacturers actually like it when their customer's cars are stolen - Insurance payouts often result in another sale.

RachelF··on Raspberry Pi 5 Gets a MicroSD Express Hat
Mini-PCs are quite a bit better dollar for dollar.

Pi's were great when they were cheap, but now the Raspberry Pi has IPO'd those days are over.

RachelF··on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK
X-Plane is a good alternative.

https://www.x-plane.com/

RachelF··on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK
I wonder how much slower it is than C/C++ compiled dlls?
RachelF··on Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.

Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.

RachelF··on CBA hiring Indian ICT workers after firing Australians
Sadly Western IT workers are too expensive for the MBAs running modern corporations.

Just before their last big US layoffs, Microsoft announced: "Microsoft is expanding our presence in India with a $3 billion investment"

RachelF··on Australia Wants to See Your Papers Before You Press Play
Australia is slowly copying China. They will move on banning VPNs in a year of two.

It may be government incompetence, but it might also be a plan to identify everyone online.

RachelF··on LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats
Yes, it's bad, but the users _do_ care. Most don't have a choice, business machines have MS Office/Outlook/Teams as default and they can't change.
RachelF··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
The Samsung S10e was probably peak Android. Small, high-end, SD card and 3.5mm jack.

There are some decent small Android phones, if you're willing to buy non-mainstream brands. Take a look at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/smallphones/

RachelF··on Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google
The "online safety" of kids is just an excuse, I suspect.

Australia really wants to be able to identify and track the ID of all their citizens online. No more Internet anonymity for them.

RachelF··on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
It still leaks GPU memory on Windows.

It's still a great browser, though. A bigger problem is that the web is now a mono-culture of Chrome/Chromium. Many sites don't work 100% on Firefox.

RachelF··on Google can now read your WhatsApp messages
WhatsApp by default backs up messages to Google Drive. It has done so for many years. Google likely already has all your chat data.
RachelF··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
In the 1970's George Carlin had "7 Words You Can't Say On TV" and got into legal trouble for saying them during his live skits.

Seems like Apple now has a list of 7,000 words you can't use on an iPhone now.

← PreviousPage 5 of 34Next →