Hacker News Reader

ascomon M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance

Apple is using very high bandwidth LPDDR5 - it can't be cheap.

ascomon A sewing page that never closed its font size HTML tags

FWIW this website appears normal in Internet Explorer compatibility mode (i.e. IE7 mode).

You'll probably have to jump through hoops to actually get it to open in Windows 10 though...

ascomon MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

Re: sample rate: you might be looking for the Audio MIDI Setup application.

ascomon MacType: Better Font Rendering for Windows

Another possibility is that macOS actually does proper color management throughout the entire OS - the Windows shell/desktop is simply not color managed and it's especially irritating when you have a wide color gamut monitor.

ascomon Congress is set to make a down-payment on innovation in America

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/ZpgGQ

ascomon Firefox 89.0 Beta brings a new look

Honestly, I'd rather have consistent and accurate colors across multiple monitors even though it would be limited to sRGB. Most content on the Web is for sRGB anyways, so it's not like much was lost.

It's still much better than Windows though... I clamp my wide gamut monitor to sRGB because Windows is so infuriatingly inconsistent.

ascomon Firefox 89.0 Beta brings a new look

gfx.color_management.mode = 1 only worked vaguely correctly if all of your monitors share the same color space (or you only have a single monitor). Videos also weren't color managed, and there still existed some situations where colors would still be incorrect. (see: https://cameratico.com/tools/web-browser-color-management-te...)

This change effectively sidesteps the issue by making everything render to sRGB, and telling macOS that Firefox's windows are sRGB only.

ascomon Stop Using Icon Fonts

Can confirm - in a large React app, SVG Font Awesome icons constituted a disproportionate amount of time spent rendering. Switching to the icon font dramatically improved performance.

ascomon We Test PCIe 4.0 Storage: The AnandTech 2021 SSD Benchmark Suite

Resizable BAR support was added in the latest BIOS update of my B450 motherboard (that also added Zen 3 compatibility).

ascomon French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs

iOS 14 adds actually random MAC addresses: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211227

ascomon For years, Intel sat on its CPU monopoly and now the tide turns against them

NVIDIA pushed the 3080's stock performance a little too high up the perf/watt curve. If you limit it to the TDP of the 2080 Ti, you lose 4% performance but you get much better efficiency: https://www.computerbase.de/2020-09/geforce-rtx-3080-test/6/

ascomon macOS Catalina 10.15.5

The new XPS 15 allegedly has a battery rated for only 300 cycles: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-Dell-XPS-15-s-battery-...

For comparison, MacBooks' batteries are rated for 1000 cycles.

ascomon Jepsen Disputes MongoDB's Data Consistency Claims

MyRocks is a little bit janky in my experience - it doesn't support some transaction isolation levels, fails to handle some workloads that rely on locking (such as a job queue), has failed to upgrade MariaDB minor versions [0], has very sparse documentation, and overall has given me some amount of unexpected behavior.

Though I'm willing to put up with it due to its incredible compression capabilities...

[0]: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-22609

ascomon Valve drops VR support for macOS

GeForce NOW seemed to handle raw input correctly when I tested it on macOS. Though that's more of a game streaming thing.

Regarding Apple's mice, the Magic Mouse has a rather unusual polling rate of 90 Hz (likely to save energy), which probably explains why it feels awful to use.

ascomon Valve drops VR support for macOS

FPS games typically use raw input, which bypasses any acceleration settings in the OS. This works on both Windows and macOS, assuming the game is properly written. This is why I insist on keeping mouse acceleration enabled since it helps with everyday computing tasks and has no effect on at least the games I normally play.

Regarding the comment above, it is definitely possible there are subtle configuration differences that cause the described behavior (different acceleration curves, polling rate/DPI settings, display refresh rates, etc). FWIW, my “gaming” mouse works fine with my MBP, but it takes a moment to readjust to the different sensitivity and acceleration behavior.

ascomon Starlink Is a Big Deal

That is physically impossible (min RTT is ~40 ms[1]). You are probably hitting a CDN.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco+to+Bosto...

ascomon Inter UI, a typeface designed for user interfaces

It's actually used on GitHub's homepage when you're logged out.

ascomon What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

I still have no idea where this link is going to take me.

a.co links always go to some illegible Amazon URL, so I think it’s fine to use them.

ascomon The iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets

DNSCloak lets you load a blacklist and/or select an ad-blocking DNS server: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-dnscrypt-doh-client...

So it's pretty easy.

ascomon What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

Dell will reduce the price of many of their computers by $101 if you select Ubuntu instead of Windows.

ascomon An extensive ZFS setup on MacOS

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/ZFS_on_Boot

Not quite "it just works," but it's an option...

ascomon YouTube’s Piracy Filter Blocks MIT Courses, Blender Videos, and More

I actually use -f bestvideo+bestaudio, since it downloads and muxes the best combination of DASH video and audio.

ArchiveTeam also has a recommended list of flags for archival: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=YouTube

ascomon Firefox Product Roadmap

There actually is an animated back gesture, but E10s sort of broke it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170032

ascomon The Case for Writing Papers in Economics Using FaKe LaTeX [pdf]

I've found that writing in LyX is faster than writing in Microsoft Word and friends. It forces you to focus on content (hence the WYSIWYM) and greatly accelerates equation entry with keyboard shortcuts and live preview.

ascomon Planet Shadertoy

I'm getting 30-60 FPS (depending on the scene) on my iPhone 5s, so even more impressive.

ascomon I think I found a Mac kernel bug?

Actually, my mid-2014 13" rMBP randomly reboots on High Sierra, even on a clean install. It leaves no trace of anything in any logs. I had to downgrade to Sierra.

ascomon One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

https://foldingcoin.net

ascomon Cryptocurrency Analysis with Python – Buy and Hold

Oh boy... I told my dad to buy at $8, $27, $200, $2000, $3000, $6000, and $12000. None of these times has he actually taken any action. :(

If only I turned 18 a couple years earlier...

ascomon NVIDIA GeForce driver deployment in datacenters is forbidden now

Alternatively, you could simply have your GPUs calculate a few hashes every hour. So technically, you're doing blockchain processing...very slowly...

ascomon Why Bitcoin will fail

The controversy is that it is unclear whether every Tether is backed by real USD. See: Tether's TOS, Bitfinex's banking issues, etc.