Hacker News Reader

echoangleon Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

Yeah, and people sewed clothes per hand for hundreds of years until someone automated it with a machine.

You need to save labor somewhere to free it up for other jobs that give you technological progress. If everyone would still be occupied plowing fields with oxen, we wouldn’t have cars and computers now.

echoangleon Bag of Decisions Reranker

Shouldn't you multiply instead of summing the scores?

Would you show a result with 3 really high scores and one which is really low?

echoangleon "Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot

Although a fixed robotic arm in a factory could also be considered a robot, I think.

echoangleon "Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot

Then my Desktop PC is a Robot too... It needs to be versatile in it's actual physical function, not how the individual components can also be used.

echoangleon Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome

How are you generating the frames? Is there a chance you’re looking trough the frames at regular intervals and have to actually “render” the video (I don’t know the proper term for this)? Did you try just extracting the keyframes where an actual full image is stored in the video file instead?

echoangleon JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history

Could they label that as investing in such a report? Sounds misleading. Investing to me means paying for something you then own afterwards, paying for AI sounds like a normal expense.

echoangleon Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

Presumably on average over a year.

1.2kw is power, not energy (which would be kWh).

echoangleon Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

This discussion doesn’t make sense without looking at the actual French law. Just saying that the scans shouldn’t count as a document because it would lead to weird edge cases doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t be applied as written. You can’t just not apply active laws because you don’t like the outcome in a state where people are suppose to trust the law.

echoangleon Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

Are you saying the scans are public domain? I thought it was about the picture or sculpture itself.

I don’t think every work done by a state controlled entity is automatically public domain, right?

echoangleon Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

Can you walk through the process for the proposed example?

The problem in most suites is checking if a specific act in real life meets some definition of a crime and not figuring out the wording of the law, right?

You kill someone without a reasonable excuse -> You get punished x years for murder

wouldn't really make murder trials easier because you would still have to formalize what you put into the proof.

echoangleon Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

Yeah, it would probably be legal to take a picture in the museum and make merchandise, but the museum isn't going to actively help you by giving you a scan.

echoangleon Writing code by hand is over, forever

The plot labeled “Incoming bug reports over the same period.” is funny. Where does the red line come from, except arbitrarily setting 20 and 15 bug reports and plotting that? There’s no discernible connection to the actual data.

echoangleon Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

Maybe it’s about the precedent and the government didn’t want to have to publish raw data on everything they have so they made sure to win this one?

Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…

echoangleon STS-51-F Abort-to-Orbit (1985)

The Embraer ERJ family is currently at 0 deaths over the whole lifetime if you exclude the Wagner crash, which probably wasn’t really a fault of the airplane.

echoangleon Apple Pass Designer

This subthread was about if the app should even show QR codes at maximum brightness because the scanner could maybe also scan the code at the normal brightness. And the counterpoint was that you can’t selectively increase the QR code brightness to the HDR level manually, because you would be capped at the normal maximum brightness.

echoangleon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

Do you have a source for that? I couldn’t find anything on that on google and I can’t really believe it.

echoangleon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

Do you maybe want to explain it, because I don’t see it. Borders that limit travel weren’t invented around WWI.

echoangleon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

That’s a pretty weird claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport

The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.

echoangleon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?

echoangleon Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

What do you think is going to happen to the courts if suing over small sums is effectively free? Don’t you think a lot of people are going to bring effectively irrelevant lawsuits generating enormous cost on everyone paying for this system?

echoangleon Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

What’s the alternative? Which system would allow people to sue for $10 if the work required to do that is worth significantly more?

echoangleon As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'

Doesn’t really sound like AI to me, more like subtracting two numbers from a government database and invoicing the difference. Was there anything done that would be classified as AI?

echoangleon Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built

Can’t you just buy the stocks with the money?

echoangleon Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

At least in Germany, you can restart the expiration by trying to enforce the claim. So you can’t just wait and avoid getting caught, the other side basically has to forget about you.

echoangleon Tells of a Slop UI

Another one is the overuse of active language and anthropomorphisation. The code always lives somewhere, it’s lot just hosted there.

echoangleon Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

Go to Deepseek and ask it “Give me the lyrics for Männer by Grönemeyer”.

It will give you the complete song lyrics which are under copyright.

echoangleon Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

> And if mere downloading and reading of copyrighted material were legal, how come torrent users have been fined for it in the thousands?

Because torrenting includes redistribution, since you also upload to other peers

echoangleon Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

https://www.hsfkramer.com/notes/ip/2025-11/munich-court-find...

Song lyrics for example

echoangleon Calculating atmospheric drag on satellites for a Cubesat [pdf]

I don’t think so, the pressure you’re measuring would be extremely small. The air at that altitude is acting as a free molecular flow, there’s not a lot of molecules that exert pressure. I think you would need some exotic detector that essentially can detect individual molecules hitting the surface, the pressure itself is tiny.

Maybe the sensor types used for ultra low vacuums could detect the pressure, but I’m not sure if you could gather enough molecules in a front facing tube to get a pressure increase over ambient.

echoangleon U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

And if the military needs guns to both shoot at humans and animals and a gun factory says “these guns are for shooting small animals only, using them against humans would be inhumane” and refuse to sell them to the Navy Seals, they would be designated a supply chain risk?

Why not just stop buying their guns and let contractors still use those guns if they need guns to shoot animals?