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hackingonempty

1,353 karma · joined August 11, 2023

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hackingonempty··on Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
Each camera has a different optical system with a different focal length range. This lets the camera cover everything from ultra wide angle to telescopic magnification while remaining thin enough to fit in a phone.
hackingonempty··on Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices
Added to the books in 2016, the law directs the CHP to develop "educational guidelines" for the practice.

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-21658-1/

hackingonempty··on This Mine Predicts Major Wars. It's Opening Again
Maybe there are other major uses in war, but the casings and jackets of firearms cartridges are mainly copper. A sibling comment mentions nickel which is the major component of the bullet jacket after copper.
hackingonempty··on Atomic Clocks
CSACs are small and efficient enough to put in a 1U box and that is all that is required by the markets that the manufacturers are chasing.
hackingonempty··on Atomic Clocks
Symmetricom (now owned by Microchip) released the first Chip Scale Atomic Clocks in 2011. It probably took some time for them to become available to watch designers and for them to be integrated into watch designs.

https://www.nist.gov/noac/success-story-chip-scale-atomic-cl...

I'm guessing the watches sold poorly and the chip packages are still large compared to a watch movement, so no new designs.

hackingonempty··on YC founder asks desperate job seekers to tattoo themselves for an interview
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kontigo/jobs/xAo6tMt-f...
hackingonempty··on Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly
Sadly I think you're right.
hackingonempty··on Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly
This is cool because we need more open competition for the app/identity locked ecosystems of sports related electronics like gps watches, bike computers, and action cams. I hate how none of the major brand ones will work without at least signing up for an account and most wont work at all without the manufacturers app.
hackingonempty··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...

hackingonempty··on The case for MUDs in modern times
> It will work in many cases, but it'll break down if you try to make the MUD easily programmable by users. It can still be done, but at some point, it might be easier to start from scratch rather than trying to make a stock Lua or Python interpreter work in that environment.

I am curious as to why not Lua or JavaScript? Lua is what Roblox uses and JS needs no introducton.

hackingonempty··on N+1
> n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published in print three times annually with regular articles being published online. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B1

** unless you are into cycling/guitars/keyboards/hotrods/whatever then "N+1" is the ideal number of bikes/guitars/keyboards/cars/whatever to own where N is the number you currently have.

hackingonempty··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
Is it not a conflict of interest for a model provider to supply the harness? They are not motivated to minimize your costs.
hackingonempty··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
The usage stats on GitHub are declining, for example. Devs are choosing Kotlin, Rust, and Go over Scala.

IMHO there are a bunch of reasons

* Scala 3 was a Python 3-esque disruptive event

* Perception as an overly-complex kitchen-sink inclusive language

* Kotlin took up the "better Java" mantle

* Rust became attractive to devs not committed to the JVM

* Go became less sucky

* SBT is disliked and Metals was buggy and unstable (and still slow)

* Suffers from the "we won't be able to find devs" problem where Kotlin, Rust and Go don't

* A bunch of community drama drove some devs away to Rust

I say this as someone using Scala 3 with ZIO effects system and Mill build tool and thinks it is fantastic.

hackingonempty··on How working memory could give rise to consciousness
> ie. The brain is not necessarily a pre-requisite for consciousness.

I'm not saying brains are the only way to produce consciousness, just that the evidence shows that they are the way animals do here on Earth.

It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.

> There is certainly much of physics remaining to be discovered, but in the specific regime covering the particles and forces that make up human beings and their environments, we have good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their dynamics are understood to extremely high precision (Carroll 2021a). Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33.pdf

(author is now Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins)

hackingonempty··on How working memory could give rise to consciousness
Consciousness is what the brain is doing.

I look forward to more precise definitions.

hackingonempty··on Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+
TLA+ = formal language for modeling software above the code level and hardware above the circuit level by Leslie Lamport (of vector clock and Paxos fame, among other things.)

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

hackingonempty··on Lunatic: An Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly
Sadly, this project is dead. It appears the startup that was working on it couldn't raise money and folded.

I built half of a MUD-like thing with it but later rewrote it in Scala 3 with the ZIO effects library.

hackingonempty··on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
The point of this article and video is there is no problem with 16-bit 44-kHZ PCM. It thoroughly covers the audible range and is there is absolutely no need for more when distributing music for humans to listen to.

The problem is the people spreading myths and disinformation out of ignorance or to promote their enterprise.

The weak links are producers/mastering-engineers, speakers/headphones and the room when using speakers.

hackingonempty··on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
@xiphmont also made an amazing video response to the many responses he received to this article. Using analog equipment he busts a bunch of myths and demonstrates what really happens with digital audio.

https://video.xiph.org/vid2.shtml

or on YT if you can't play it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

hackingonempty··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
> The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.

The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.

This is just one review.

[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...

hackingonempty··on Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it
ha ha brilliant name!
hackingonempty··on Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it
You might be lucky enough that a local museum regularly hosts a telescope making workshop. In the SF Bay Area you can go to the Chabot Space & Science Center on Fridays 7-10pm.
hackingonempty··on Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base
There was another article about cheating at Brown that said Princeton hasn't proctored tests since the 19th century so maybe you are right and Hegseth is an idiot but still managed to cheat his way through school.
hackingonempty··on Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it
Very nice!!

What are you using for interferometry?

hackingonempty··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
The GOP. This is part of Project 2025. They want to outlaw porn.

> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...

hackingonempty··on What is the mechanical world picture?
thank you for taking the time to respond, i have to read it carefully
hackingonempty··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
> You can’t really exercise enough to offset the food you can eat in a day, even if you somehow were able to dedicate all your time to exercising you would still have to limit your food intake.

People racing the Tour Divide, a 2700 mile solo unsupported bikepacking race through the Rocky Mountains, lose weight when riding their bikes 18 hours a day for 2-3+ weeks straight. They describe being unable to choke down enough food even though what they are eating is very calorie dense. Hotdogs, burritos, burgers, pizza, a pound of gummies every day, chocolate milk and ice cream when resupplying, McDonalds where they fill their hydration bladders with PowerAde, anything they can get their hands on quickly when they arrive at a small mountain town which frequently has nothing more than a gas station.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/tourdivide/posts/24754803527...

Obviously not a practical solution as you say but they do exercise enough to offset the food when eating as much as they can.

hackingonempty··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
It is of course true that caloric input is a thermodynamic limit and restricting it sufficiently relative to caloric expenditure will cause you to lose weight. (Lisa, in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamics...)

However, not all calories are the same, metabolism is dynamic, and the brain is complex and exerts a powerful influence over behavior.

Increasing exercise will make you hungrier and most people are simply unable to resist this and end up not losing weight. It is why there is a common saying that "you cannot outrun your fork." Restricting calories generally is difficult in today's environment with plentiful calorie dense food everywhere. People don't cook as much as they used to and restaurant meals have more calories than ever.

AFAIK GLP-1 drugs work because they calm the minds desire to eat which is baked in deeply from millions of years of our ancestors struggling to get sufficient food.

hackingonempty··on Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base
But you didn't just say Hegseths actions are idiotic (fwiw I think they are), you said Hegseth is an idiot. The evidence suggests he is not.
hackingonempty··on The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections
We aren't even getting a kiss.
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