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dpfu

80 karma · joined March 24, 2016

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dpfu··on Show HN: Zanagrams
Nice game! I found 20 words.

I was a bit stunned by the concept of "bonus words". I found that every word should count. Also because some words are just plural forms (e.g. stroke+s), so kinda cheep?!

Keep ups the good work!

dpfu··on Attention is your scarcest resource (2020)
Just another data point — anecdata, n=1.

I'm an academic in the humanities with kids, currently in my late 30s. While having children certainly reduces the time and mental bandwidth available for purely intellectual pursuits, I’ve found it forces me to focus more sharply on what truly matters—both in life and in research.

Paradoxically, I feel more intellectually alive now than before. The recent advances in AI are transformative, and they’ve opened up unprecedented possibilities even for resource-constrained researchers like myself. This moment in time feels uniquely energizing and urgent, especially for the humanities.

Of course, having kids is a major responsibility, and in academia—where short-term contracts and financial insecurity are common—it can be daunting. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do both: raise a family and engage deeply with my field. But this is very personal terrain, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

dpfu··on Sycophancy in GPT-4o
It won‘t take long, 2-3 minutes.

——-

To add something to conversation. For me, this mainly shows a strategy to keep users longer in chat conversations: linguistic design as an engagement device.

dpfu··on Show HN: Hot Notes – Fuzzy Search for Apple Notes (macOS)
https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes/blob/main/license.md

Proprietary software

„Hot Notes is a fully functioning, time-unlimited free trial, with the occasional message to buy a license for continued use.

You can purchase a license by clicking the About Hot Notes menu item in the app.“

dpfu··on Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
I find the writer‘s glowing admiration for Spengler disturbing. He was an antidemocratic thinker, whose books are pure speculative fiction. What the author calls „unorthodox“ methods, used to get a „holistic“ picture of historical developments, are (scientifically speaking) plain rubbish. Spengler wanted a dictator. He did not like Hitler, but was a Mussolini fanboy.
dpfu··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I tried with my current MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018). Apple offered 240€. Well.
dpfu··on Svgbob – convert ASCII diagrams to SVG, now with styling support
Also check out Markdeep, which provides this (and a whole lot more) via JS: http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/#features
dpfu··on Flashpoint: a webgame preservation project
For Linux and Mac, there some experimental builds available as well [0, 1]. And they are looking for Mac and Linux testers (and developers).

[0] https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Mac_Support

[1] https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Linux_Support

dpfu··on The Oldschool PC Font Pack
Also check out Fontraption (a VGA Text Mode Font Editor for DOS) and Flexi IBM VGA Font (a Scalable Take on Text Mode).

https://int10h.org/blog/2019/05/fontraption-vga-text-mode-fo...

https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet...

dpfu··on Daimler Reitwagen
The original was destroyed by fire, but Mercedes-Benz made functional replicas. Here is a photo gallery with an engineer riding this thing (without a helmet, of course):

https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/125-jahre-daimler-reitwag...

dpfu··on The Vienna Bank Job
Because the article does not reflect the latest status of this story, here is an update: The bank has now successfully filed a complaint against the withdrawal of the license and is now again a bank, although under supervision:

"In the first instance, the Administrative Court temporarily suspended the immediate effectiveness of the European Central Bank's (ECB's) withdrawal of the former Meinl Bank's licence until a final decision has been reached [...]. The parent company of the bank, Far East, had lodged a complaint, according to the court ruling." Source: https://wien.orf.at/stories/3022615/ (Own translation, article is in German)

dpfu··on Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer
Re existing projects, there is a nice and exhaustive comparisons to other tools in the docs: https://pyoxidizer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/comparisons.html
dpfu··on FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-encryption laws
There is a free plan on their pricing page [0], but this free tier is web access only.

[0] https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

dpfu··on At 18 Stories, Mjøsa Tower Is World’s Tallest Wooden Building
There is also the HoHo building („Holzhochhaus“, lit. wood high house) in Vienna, which is a wooden high-rise with 24 stories and 84 m [0]. They just added an antenna to the Mjøsa Tower to break the record. (Boys and their towers…)

[0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoHo_Wien

dpfu··on Dandelion Seeds Fly Using ‘Impossible’ Method Never Before Seen in Nature
There is, right in the article: Cummins, C. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0604-2 (2018).
dpfu··on CSS single-file stylesheets that you can drop into an HTML5 document
A nice way to compare how various CSS resets and frameworks style HTML elements is [https://kemar.github.io/html-elements/](https://kemar.github....
dpfu··on Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
This is a awesome resource, thanks a lot! Some of these books are of course quite old. For example I would not recommend trying to learning contemporary German using this [1] book. Reading 'fraktur' alone can be rather challenging …

[1] [Worman, J. H.: Erstes Deutsches Buch, nach der Natürlichen Methode, für Schule und Haus, American Book Company, New York 1880](https://vivariumnovum.it/edizioni/libri/dominio-pubblico/Wor...)

dpfu··on Kenneth Arrow Has Died
You have made me curios, so I'm going to read the paper. It lives under this DOI [10.2307/2295952](https://doi.org/10.2307/2295952) (paywalled).
dpfu··on How I use Anki to learn mathematics
I successfully used the example in this StackExchange answer [0]. And you could also take a look at the flashcard package on CTAN [1]. Another easy option would be using some kind of markdown tool [2] or even a Word template to generate a PDF and then printing it 8-up.

[0] http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/89347 [1] http://www.ctan.org/pkg/flashcards [2] e.g. http://pandoc.org

dpfu··on Compulab Airtop – Natural Airflow Desktop
Yes, I noticed that to. I just ended up going for a cheap ~6 Euro USB adapter. On the plus side you get an SD card reader. (And besides Bluethooth it has great connectivity: 2x LAN + WLAN with external antennas.)
dpfu··on Compulab Airtop – Natural Airflow Desktop
I recently got my parents a fanless desktop computer. There a lot of options, but I went with a cheap Shuttle XPC slim barebone [1]: It is tiny, has a really nice industrial design and two front facing COM ports (!).

[1] http://www.shuttle.eu/fileadmin/resources/download/docs/spec...

dpfu··on The foreign words that seem like English, but aren't
Wikipedia has a nice list [0]. In German pseudo-anglicisms are an often used method of word formation, e.g: Beamer (projector), No-Go (faux pas), Handy (mobile phone), Oldtimer (classic car), Streetworker, Barkeeper and (brand new) Shitstorm, etc. There are also pseudo-gallicisms in use (like "Blamage" for disgrace, or "Friseur" for coiffeur). Fun stuff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-anglicism

dpfu··on How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead
Teletext found its niche.

The Austrian broadcaster ORF even released an TELETEXT app (!) this year [1], available for Android [2] and iOS [3].

An then there is also art, as with every "old" tech. Check out the International Teletext Art Festival [4].

[1] http://futurezone.at/apps/orf-teletext-app-fuer-ios-und-andr... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.orf.teletex... [3] https://itunes.apple.com/at/app/orf-teletext/id1063231874

[4] http://www.teletextart.com

dpfu··on StumpWM – Tiling Window Manager in Common Lisp
If you're on OS X there is always Amethyst [1], previous discussion [2]. I use it everyday.

On a tangent: For automation and window management (via Lua), check out the awesome Hammerspoon [3].

[1] http://ianyh.com/amethyst/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768022 [3] http://www.hammerspoon.org

dpfu··on Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking
For a truly truly minimal browser (albeit without support for modern HTML) check out the Dillo browser [1], in active development since 1999 [2]!

If all you need is to render HTML, it's tiny and fast. It supports HTTPS and no JavaScript (so you don't need NoScript for that ;)

[1] http://www.dillo.org [2] http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog

dpfu··on Moleskine Smart Writing Set
Just remember "leucht-turm" as "lighT-Tower".
dpfu··on Moleskine Smart Writing Set
Just a small nitpick, it's called 'Leuchtturm' (lighthouse), 'turm' beeing 'tower' in German. Their solution for digitizing notes is called "whitelines" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXiZgVaRkSM

dpfu··on Show HN: Simple Colorful HEX, RGB and HSL generator.
Nice work! Just a quick suggestion: It would be nice if there was a way to cycle through the last generated colors (e.g. via the arrow keys).