Hacker News Reader

curiousObjecton Ask HN: Verifying a wallet before sending Funds in DeFi

Use a hardware wallet to protect you from malware on your own devices

Split your money into smaller amounts in separate addresses to protect yourself from a malevolent smart contract that drains all the funds in an address

Check the receiving address in a blockchain explorer. Does its past activity align with the purposes of the receiving address?

Send a smaller transaction first, and wait a a few minutes to see the results, if the fee is small enough to make that acceptable

curiousObjecton Grand Theft Auto VI Is Now Coming May 26, 2026

Thanks, I didn’t know that, but it will still affect console sales, and therefore the chip fab manufacturing load and the sales of the chips in the console.

That’s why a console manufacturer pays Rockstar for an exclusive.

curiousObjecton Grand Theft Auto VI Is Now Coming May 26, 2026

This would have some impact on hardware sales, particularly graphics-related chips

curiousObjecton Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with Є530M fine over data transfers to China

>Ireland's business is whatever Ireland wants it to be

Ireland offers a favorable tax and regulatory environment, within the EU, so this punishment is not only Ireland’s business. It represents the EU.

curiousObjecton 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

If someone is so skillful that they can restore the painting to its original state, then I think they would be skillful enough to make a perfect copy, so there’s no need to tamper with the original work.

Their expert copy of the work would be valuable and educational in itself, and avoid damaging the original

curiousObjecton Reverse geocoding is hard

You’re the author?

The final step in the process “Wait for complaints” seems like a smart acceptance of the “perfect is the enemy of good” challenge

Publish and be damned, or as we say now: Move fast and break things

curiousObjecton Viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos

Edit the location metadata to be obviously false (Alaska coordinates for a tropical beach photo) then see what it says?

curiousObjecton The Atari 1200XL fiasco

The 6502-based Atari computers had the CPU clock held at 80% higher than the C64. That must have been a very significant impact at a time when the CPU had to do most of the work.

curiousObjecton Every picture from Venus' surface, ever (2021)

I assume because they knew they’d literally get only one shot. So imaging more of the nearby surface was the best use of that opportunity, for doing science.

The Soviets had already landed a probe on Mars, which sent back the top few lines of a picture of the sky and then stopped scanning down, and died. So they must have not wanted a repeat of that disappointment!

Probably, on Venus, the bandwidth and sensor tech just weren’t enough for it to be possible to get more pixels in the time available? So they concentrated the effort on the nearest rocks

Sadly that does make the photos visually sort of unimpressive, unlike all the splendid panoramic views America’s Viking probes took of Mars. (Where the lander wasn’t being pressure cooked and acid-etched in 20 minutes)

curiousObjecton What if we made advertising illegal?

I don’t agree. I think the Reischtag stunt is very much related to advertising methods

The atrocities subsequently committed are on a whole different level though. I think we might agree on this

curiousObjecton Obituary for Cyc

A sad epitaph

I’m very glad he tried, even if he only proved that it was impossible

curiousObjecton Ask HN: Which, if any, AIs can code a correct solution to this puzzle?

Thanks. I asked this to help you make your question clearer if you resubmit it.

It’s an interesting question for HN, so you should try resubmitting it

Perhaps there are some useful ideas in this code: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles

curiousObjecton What if we made advertising illegal?

>Is there any concrete evidence that anything bad has ever happened as a result of advertising? … What is the steel man for "advertising bad"?

Electoral politics[0], alcohol, tobacco[1], drugs, gambling, unbridled consumerism … for example

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

[1] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/throwback-thursday-wh...

curiousObjecton Ask HN: Which, if any, AIs can code a correct solution to this puzzle?

What operation or transformation does rotate mean?

curiousObjecton Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

I think so. With 13 circles, I can’t figure out how you could represent more than 26 legs (and other features would be lost).

curiousObjecton Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

Interesting.

What animals cannot be accurately depicted with 13 circles?

curiousObjecton Why a plane turned around when a passenger lost a phone midflight

> I wonder if they actually were following "Aviate, Navigate." end of checklist.

“Communicate” means communication with air traffic control

They did that.

Communication with the passengers is good, of course, but optional, if they have time

curiousObjecton I asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car

But we don’t know the capabilities of the machine systems watching the cameras, although we should assume they are getting more capable.

So the results are unpredictable, just as they would be if humans randomly checked the cameras recordings.

curiousObjecton Delta Airlines 4819 TSB Preliminary Report (Toronto Crash) [pdf]

It sounds like a strange combination of difficult conditions and small mistakes that unfortunately were just enough to tip the scales into disaster, but then, miraculously, everything went right and nobody died, although a few were seriously hurt.

Such a contrast to the recent crash in Korea, where a combination of difficult conditions and small errors meant things ended up very tragically.

curiousObjecton How I got 100% off my train travel

I don’t understand. Wouldn’t most fare dodgers buy no tickets, not just buy a single ticket for part of a return journey?

What’s the reason that people try to dodge fares by buying a single ticket? Is it because they know when and where tickets are likely to be checked?

curiousObjecton Microsoft paywalling features in Notepad and Paint

The problem is that such a simple tool doesn’t need a product manager.

If it has a product manager then they will inevitably need to justify their role by finding things to do.

It “just” needs some minimal maintenance to ensure the same simple functionality and UI is maintained as the OS develops.

curiousObjecton Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

> Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?"

Yes, in the same sense that the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Parthenon are rubbish

curiousObjecton Why do AI chatbots have such a hard time admitting 'I don't know'?

The RLHF sessions should incentivize responses like “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure”.

But they do not, because that will not attract investment.

curiousObjecton TSMC 2nm Process Disclosure – How Does It Measure Up?

It’s marketing, but everyone is doing it. So you have got to live with it.

It’s exaggerated, but it still represents some degree of progress.

curiousObjecton Hard disk fraud: long runtimes on new Seagate hard disks

Frustratingly bad article about an interesting story. Has no one moved on the obvious step of checking the drives for deleted data to track down where they’ve come from?

curiousObjecton USPS lifts suspension of parcels from Hong Kong and China, reversing decision

>The USPS did not give a reason for the ban…

>It also gave no reason for its decision… (to lift the ban today)

Can’t we do better than this?

curiousObjecton Taking a $15 Casio F91W 5km underwater

Not sure if the buttons function, but the watch is displaying time in the photos, for 50 minutes of the descent at least.

curiousObjecton Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

But what alternative can you suggest which doesn’t break grammar or usage precedents like “physically based”?

Physics-based? Reality-based? Physically-derived?

curiousObjecton USB On-The-Go

> extremely bright flashlights (think car headlight bright, and also usable as a self-defense weapon in the spirit of the old D-cell Maglites)

Using a device which is mostly lithium ion batteries as a weapon? Even scarier than you expect, if you puncture a battery

curiousObjecton Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb

That mistake ‘an’ is in the original blog title. I assume this was posted by the blog author

A simple spellcheck won’t detect it but grammar check might.

Edit: the reason is probably that the writer is saying “eleven hundred”. It sounds OK but looks strange in writing