HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

UpstandingUser

112 karma · joined August 4, 2022

submissionscomments
UpstandingUser··on uBlock Origin Lite
Pretty sure he just passed the torch off to someone else (without selling it) because he was tired of it, then continued development shortly aftwards as "ublock origin". uBlock itself (not origin) got sold off the Adblocker Plus and allows some ads.
UpstandingUser··on Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?
Sorry VSCoders. You just aren't griTTY enough.
UpstandingUser··on Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
> Pig

...was terrible, I wanted more screentime with that adorable pig...sorry Nic, you're in the shadow of a real star...

UpstandingUser··on YouTube ads appear to be ramping up, with as many as 10 unskippable ads
Or I could rip my legally purchased* CDs and give the finger to the leeches and rent seekers that fuck us almost as hard as they do the artists. Yes I support corporate genocide.

* lol

UpstandingUser··on How a QR code works
> they eventually just gave me a beer and put a tally mark on a notepad

oof

UpstandingUser··on The Hardest Natural Languages (1979) [pdf]
The second claim comes from something I heard mentioned the other day in relation to a New Yorker article about parents finding out during covid lockdowns that their elementary school kids couldn't read hardly at all. I guess they've changed the teaching styles so kids don't really learn like most millenials did.

FWIW, here's what I was found on Google:

> According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 21 percent of adults in the United States (about 43 million) fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category.

UpstandingUser··on The Hardest Natural Languages (1979) [pdf]
While I'm inclined to agree with your point and I do think that some languages really are just more difficult, I think it should be pointed out that something like 54% of adults in the USA read below a sixth grade level. Many of them (about half) are functionally illiterate.

source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State...

UpstandingUser··on Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else
> SUV shaming is a lot like drink driver shaming.

Are you drink?

UpstandingUser··on Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
This...was very informative. Thanks.
UpstandingUser··on Ramanujan Factorial Approximation (2012)
This is one of the big tragedies of Ramanujan. We have all these miraculous mathematics from him but we don't really know how he got there. A lot of this stuff we already knew, but he seems to have found it all out independently. No idea how though, all because he was too poor to buy paper. Jeez.
UpstandingUser··on Flat-to-curved screens have an identity crisis
I'm trying to think of where I've seen this in TV and movies. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (IIRC) and there was a TV show where some Asian man had a plasma gun embedded in his wrist or something. Aliens were involved, and their cell phones all had roll up screens.
UpstandingUser··on Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
Can somebody explain the back story? What is Kiwi Farms?
UpstandingUser··on Using saltpetre for cooling drinks (2013)
You can get it at the hardware store, it'll break down tree stumps pretty quickly (and very inexpensively).
UpstandingUser··on Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More or Less (2013)
This is it, and holy hell it's worse than I remembered.
UpstandingUser··on Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More or Less (2013)
I can't find it now, but my favorite of TIWWW was this chemical that just smelled terrible and did so in exceedingly small quantities. Like, a stray drop of this gets the building evacuated kind of bad, and people are asking what that smell is a mile or more downwind.
UpstandingUser··on Cast iron leet
Cast iron's real strength is the huge amount thermal mass and the relatively low rate of heat transmission. You preheat it, throw whatever you're cooking in it and the residual heat alone will brown it perfectly, even a huge slab of meat. It holds tons of energy and releases it relatively slowly. Steel pans will sometimes have all the heat sucked out of them before you're done searing (lower thermal mass, higher transmission) and it doesn't come out right, especially if you have a low output stovetop because it can't keep up with the cooking and maintain proper temperature.

Cast iron is kind of the opposite of a wok, which is made so you get about as close as you can to cooking with the flame and no residual heat from the cooking vessel. Note that woks are designed to be cooked on crazy output stoves that you don't really see in Western homes. This allows you to sear with much more control of the thermal transmission at the cost of a blazing hot kitchen and a hefty gas bill.

UpstandingUser··on Local simulation feature to be removed from all Autodesk Fusion 360 versions
Say funding is a given, how do you attract the talent?
UpstandingUser··on Local simulation feature to be removed from all Autodesk Fusion 360 versions
That wasn't clear to me
UpstandingUser··on Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeting meme
This comment causes me anxiety, I'll be reporting it to the authorities.
UpstandingUser··on NetBSD 9.3
I'm a big fan of NetBSD. Great docs, clean design, it's just about ideal for "set it and forget it" projects. I hadn't used a BSD in over a decade but got it up and running in no time for an odd project a few years back that had some unusual display requirements. I imagine it would have taken a lot longer to do with Linux because it's always changing how it does things and I just don't have the time or inclination to keep up with it anymore and the docs are often less than ideal.

Bonus points for their build system. It's about the only time I've ever felt like building from source was a pleasant experience.

UpstandingUser··on Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior
Sounds like the Iron Law of Bureaucracy is at it again.
UpstandingUser··on NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
I've heard rumors that this was going on for a long time before it's been publicly acknowledged to have -- before OCR should have been able to handle that sort of variety of handwriting (reliably), let alone at scale. Like a snail-mail version of the NSA metadata collection program.
UpstandingUser··on Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
> as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense.

We need something like public (book) libraries for code. Or a Library of Congress. FOSS has become critical infrastructure and we need to act like it. Done well, this could also help foster people learning to code. Sure there will be some political issues with it around funding and what code we should or shouldn't host, but the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks I think. I've seen tax money go to worse things, at least.

UpstandingUser··on A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
The explanation as I've heard it is that ICE's deliver pulsed power. At peak power in the engine cycle it cuts chaps easy but when the output dips it chokes on the fibers.

Electric saws deliver uniform power and don't have this quirk.

UpstandingUser··on A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
California banned gas chainsaw sales last year IIRC. It was such a poorly worded law that firefighters and loggers have to go out of state to buy them, instead of it being a prohibition on suburban homeowners using them. The electric saws aren't practical in the woods at all because the battery and spares are so big and heavy. It's hard to beat the energy density of gasoline.

Also electric saws are a damn hazard compared to gas saws. They cut right through safety chaps, no problem.

UpstandingUser··on A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
In some places they're a hazard. They get wet, people slip. Especially cyclists when the leaves get into the bike lane.