Hacker News Reader

fsckboyon Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI

i have 4 email accounts, and I check them maybe once a week. nobody sends me emails any more, everybody uses "messaging"

(actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i need to reset a password associated with them)

fsckboyon SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef

United States was withdrawn from service in a surprise announcement in 1969. All planned cruises were canceled, and the ship changed owners repeatedly for the next several decades. Every owner attempted to make the ship profitable, but she was aging and poorly maintained. In 1984, her interior furnishings were sold at auction, and the rest of her interiors were stripped to the bulkheads in 1994. In 1996, she was towed to Philadelphia, where she remained until February 2025.

(not sure it should have been much of a surprise, jetliners were taking all the high paying traffic)

fsckboyon SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef

The fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger liner was set by the SS United States in July 1952, averaging 35.51 knots (65.76 kmh) earning her the Blue Riband

fsckboyon IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

>Gaming used to be done in arcades for 25c a play.

in the early days, 2 plays for a quarter was not unusual (but you couldn't buy one)

fsckboyon CSS-Tricks has a new owner

>While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately

using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"

It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.

It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.

fsckboyon Oregon lawmakers approve money to buy an iconic waterfall listed on Redfin

it's not a public good, it doesn't have the criteria for a public good. It's rivalrous, and can be used by someone for near perfect tranquility by preventing others from using it as well.

I know what you'd like it to be, and I can agree with you, but it's not a public good.

fsckboyon Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account

my style of discussing things (let's call it "give credit to your interlocuters") doesn't work on this site.

this discussion is filled with people who love high performance computing, and they are mostly saying "I wouldn't buy this" and the reason "too expensive" and they compared it to "business class". my comment was in response to a sharer of that sentiment. (I picked onesuch comment since there is no way to reply to all of them) and pointed out "if you come at this from the other direction, you can see a population of people who will buy it, business class that you consider to be overpriced is full".

>That doesn’t mean the people that buy this laptop fly business class

I didn't say it did.

you should look at the totally of comments and consider "in what way way can this comment be considered correct" rather than looking for ways to say things are incorrect because you didn't anticipate what was going to be said.

fsckboyon Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account

but you're in a position to understand now, that people who do fly business everywhere, can also afford one of these laptops for a fraction of what they spend flying. that's the use case.

fsckboyon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

so, the engineers who built the dams did understand the downstream effects of their decisions? and they did it anyway?

fsckboyon Your C is not standard C

>nice for the C Standard to say that `char` is unsigned

i'm old school. ascii is 7 bits, if you're using the 8th bit you probably want a sign since you've left the realm of ascii chars

fsckboyon Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

the robots are carrying an order, not disorder

fsckboyon Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

what I have heard is that they also summon the human operator input at all intersections / crosswalks / traffic signals.

fsckboyon Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

>What is the charge?

the robot will continue to try to get past her as long as it has a charge. when its charge runs out, it will cease. if these robots are anything like instagram users' phones, typically the charge will be less than 20%.

fsckboyon Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr

for executable files, unix has always been rid of file extensions.

(please don't feel the need to point out how you can use more words to say more, that's always true, our goal here is to use less words, no need for extensions to that)

fsckboyon Redesigning source control at Anthropic

assembly language is a language.

machine code is a language.

they are isomorphic, but different. assembly language (source) converts to machine code (destination).

assembly is... source. code.

machine language is not, unless you consider vliw or microcode, useful to think about but doesn't extend the analogy already in place.

fsckboyon Knuth reward check

that's not what I was asking, I was asking Mr. Fuchs his pronunciation of the color named after the fuchsia flower named after the biologist Dr. Fuchs.

fsckboyon Knuth reward check

his last name is Fuchs, pronounced fooks.

The fuchsia flower (the color comes from it) is named after a biologist named Fuchs.

I personally call the color Fuchs-ia as it should be.

my question of him was more interesting than your answer to me

fsckboyon How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet

i'm guessing he means "and thereby putting a neighbor out of business."

recycling isn't convenient, but people do it with an eye to the greater good.

it's not hard to imagine that an Amazon monopoly is not for the greater good.

fsckboyon Redesigning source control at Anthropic

>Can confirm: After turning it on, we would enter the magic three binary instructions

that's not quite confirmation that assembly is source code

fsckboyon Knuth reward check

curious, how do you pronounce the color fuchsia?

fsckboyon Knuth reward check

people are up in arms about AI/LLMs now, but I'll bet 50 years ago Knuth would have been excited a about the prospect of algorithms being so capable.

fsckboyon I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall

in the case of many economic areas of life, you can increase your income and you can find better prices for things. What's special here is when those same people look at municipal governance and can't see that it's a zero sum game and they can't have both of what they want.

fsckboyon Court throws out killer's sentence after judge said he loved AI video of victim

>The video was created by the sister of the victim based on what she imagined he would say

you don't know this, she could have been working based on advice from their attorney as to "how to get the maximum sentence"

fsckboyon Margaret Hamilton has died

she was a straight up fox too, and I can't imagine she'd be offended by that, I mean call me a fox I promise I won't be offended.

also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall

https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-...

fsckboyon Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages

>Animated ASCII Art...

I deeply, deeply admire the ascii art

>...for Web Pages

No, we got rid of the <blink> tag for a reason

plus, ascii art rendered as images is not really ASCII art any more.

now lets talk about ANSI art: any DECUS heads here who can find the JACK.OFF file for me? I've tried finding it but it's nowhere I've looked. I first saw it at a Vax installation in '85. so good.

fsckboyon Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study

if we're doing analogies to other complex systems, forests which have been patched and patched by different maintainers over the year are likely to have a lot of built up cruft, overlapping APIs, bloat, and of course a rewrite results in cleaned up code.

fsckboyon The evolution of effective altruism

one of the achievements of economics is showing that heartless rapacious capitalists, in a competitive market, will still arrive at the optimum solution for maximizing happiness.

for example, in a town with a lake, and two "rich" employers, a clothing company that pollutes the lake, and a food company that needs non-toxic water from the lake (and workers who work at the two companies and are the consumers of the food and clothing); it does not matter either of which company owns the lake: the two greedy businessmen will arrive at the same answer either way. And BTW, a socialist approach will not yield the optimum, having no basis to decide either way and relying on impulses not corrected by a market.

you very much need to rethink your notions of good and bad.

fsckboyon A third way of using Linux

everybody lately is talking about TUIs. what do these people mean?

(I trace my adult involvement with computers back to (a) terminals and (b) where you didn't know if your terminal and terminal driver would support ANSI cursor positioning (stty raw!) so I feel equipped to understand what people are talking about, I just don't know.)

is emacs a tui? is midnight commander a tui? vi? I assume the cli is not a tui? are we not even talking about terminals?

fsckboyon Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague

there is zero evidence for zoonotic. Contact tracing in Wuhan skipped the stop at the zoo or contacting any zoonauts, which is a necessary link for a zoonotic hypothesis. Human-human contacts, even if they took place at the wet market, something that's not known, equally implicates the Wuhan lab which is a short distance away

there is evidence for a long history of discovery of a bat coronaviruses, and manipulation/splicing of those genes https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/ One of those scientists pieced together this information in the early months after the covid outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Don't tell me "I don't like Bret Weinstein"; your mission is to listen to what Yuri Deigin was saying way before any information had come out. The only way he could be that accurate that early is if he found the information he cites. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe that he had access to the conspiracy plans.

there is evidence dating to before the covid outbreak for proposed laboratory experiments putting the spike protein at the furin cleavage site in a Chinese lab which is exactly what appears to have happened.

fsckboyon Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague

there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".

https://archive.ph/WTsga