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abcd_f

2,617 karma · joined February 7, 2011

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abcd_f··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
> can't impact your driving privilege

Unlike improper parking, running red lights should impact said privilege as potential consequences are way more serious.

abcd_f··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
But they didn't say anything about refunding them and you can bet Trump will oppose that and ask the SCOTUS to decide on it. They of course have an option to take their time to render the decision and then just dismiss the case without a comment.

That's what the GP likely meant.

The circus must go on.

abcd_f··on How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?
What local options are on par with ChatGPT?
abcd_f··on Show HN: Steerling-8B, a language model that can explain any token it generates
TC still exists, huh?
abcd_f··on Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music
My wife just said she wasn't getting any chills, but definitely some yawns :)
abcd_f··on Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
> when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.

As endearing as it sounds, that's pure selection bias on Walter's end rather than something even remotely common.

Clearly there are cases of this sort, like arts and other creative tangents, but on average it's a result of a discovery process much later in life.

abcd_f··on Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
It's a tough problem.

Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way.

The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually.

  ---
Another approach might be to ask random users (above certain karma threshold) rank new submissions. Once in a while stick a showhn post into their front page with up and down arrows, and mark it as a community service. Given HN volume it should be easy to get an average opinion in a matter of minutes.
abcd_f··on Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
The solution to this is to allow aliases ... or account groups if you will and then allow/disallow things based on combined karma.
abcd_f··on D Programming Language
This very post is probably his too, under an alt :)
abcd_f··on C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)
I read through the RFC and I think it's fair it was rejected, because this was ultimately a half-measure, with severe usability restrictions.

Fat pointers are clearly a way to deal with arrays (and also get "slices" and non-zero terminated strings for free!), but it's just not possible to retrofit them into the language without breaking existing code.

abcd_f··on C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)
Arrays decaying to pointers is probably the biggest non-platform specific design oversight.

As you said, it's easy to see where it came from, but it should've been fixed long ago.

abcd_f··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
> the PNW winter

It rains only once ... but for six months :)

abcd_f··on Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?
Yeah, to intimidate kids when they don't deliver academically :)
abcd_f··on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction
> US incompetency

US corruption.

Incompetence would've been a good news here.

abcd_f··on Netbird – Open Source Zero Trust Networking
Port knocking should open up the port for the IP that sent the knock. Not for everyone.
abcd_f··on Netbird – Open Source Zero Trust Networking
You can conceal that open port with some form of port knocking. Though this does reinforce your "easy" point.

Also, if it's an UDP port, then using a protocol that expects first client packet to be pre-authenticated and not emitting any response otherwise gets you pretty damn close to having this port closed.

abcd_f··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
I witnessed something recently that points unambiguously at Whatsapp chats being not private.

Not two months ago I sent a single photo to a friend of some random MacGyver kitchen contraption I made. Never described it, just a photo with the lol. He replied lol. He never reshared nor discussed it with anyone else. We never spoke about this before or after. Two days later he starts seeing ads on Facebook for a proper version of the same. There's virtually no other explanation except for Meta vacuuming and analyzing the photo. None.

abcd_f··on Delta single handle ball faucets (1963)
... or two separate taps even. Though it's quite a bit more exotic and ancient.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/AF32/production...

abcd_f··on The Olivetti Company
Daaamn... Olivetti.

  ,d88b.d88b,
  88888888888
  `Y8888888Y'
    `Y888Y'   
      `Y'
An Olivetti PC was an ultimate dream to have in the late 80s and the early 90s for me, in impressionable age of adolescence, prone to the call of tinkering, hacking and programming. They were the brand, at least in Europe.

Such a nice memory :)

abcd_f··on US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says
> Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan

They forgor Tajikistan. Or may be it was just too hard to spell.

abcd_f··on Postal Arbitrage
> ultra cheap shipping prices

It’s either "ultra cheap shipping" or "ultra low shipping prices". Prices can't be cheap. /nitpick

abcd_f··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Having read just the name I assumed it was a brewing project dealing with mate (drink) aging.
abcd_f··on Why is there a tiny hole in the airplane window? (2023)
The article on the trio of de Havilland passenger jet crashes from 1950s (linked from the post) is very interesting -

https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...

abcd_f··on Is the golden age of Indie software over?
It's basically a blog post to plug links to author's (presumably) struggling projects.

The majority of established ISVs are perfectly fine and have long adapted to new realities, be that the existence of AI coding tools, subscription licensing or what have you.

The fundamental - making something to solve users' pain points - is still there and it's now easier than ever to go from identifying a niche to shipping a solution. If anything, the golden age is now.

abcd_f··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.
abcd_f··on Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
IPsec to be precise, not IPSec.
abcd_f··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
How many came from AWS, Azure and GCP IPs? ;)

Seriously though, a per-country breakdown would've been very interesting to see.

abcd_f··on Robert Louis Stevenson's Art of Living (and Dying)
Use the uBlock, Luke...
abcd_f··on Weighting an average to minimize variance
If A and B have different volatilities, it's rather counter-intuitive to allocate proportionally rather than just all to the one with the lower volatility... :-/
abcd_f··on Show HN: Pegma, an open-source version of the classic Peg solitaire
There's also smegma, which is not a whole lot better.
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