Hacker News Reader

jonititanon Making my bookshelves clickable

Very nice project. Seems like it would be the ideal kind of thing for AR/XR.

jonititanon Making my bookshelves clickable

What's the benefit of image maps vs SVG here?

jonititanon ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

A parliament that cannot initiate legislation and not even completely refuse legislation introduced to the session. Very weird. In UK analogies it's more like the house of lords except it has less revision power on the legislation before it.

jonititanon The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

Are we talking the cool crystal selection spirals like RR et al use to make monocrystaline turbine blades? https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...

jonititanon Align Your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

That's probably what they were trained on. Gotta be a lot of them that have been posted online.

jonititanon Comparing Hobby PCB Vendors

There's also https://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs

jonititanon Musk’s takeover turbocharged VC Twitter usage

It's really more like a distributed version of Reddit that a distributed version of twitter. Server being equivalent to subreddits

jonititanon IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

The fact is not everything was the EU's fault. There was a lot Westminster could have done to make things better. They choose not to and indeed actually gold plated many EU directives due to virtue signaling which made them much more difficult to follow.

That said not all the good stuff actually was caused by the EU either. I'd recommend watching Yes Minister but apparently that will get you put on a watchlist these days... https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1153smh/yes_min...

The fact is politicians at all levels including EU take credit for things they didn't do and try to ignore the fallout from things they did. All the while blaming the voters. Mainly because changing public perception of policy choices takes time and effort and they have limited of both and tend to want to focus on things they actually care about.

jonititanon Show HN: Self-host Whisper As a Service with GUI and queueing

That's very interesting. I've been using whisper via pip also but I'm surprised you haven't sought to optimize whisper at all?

I've been looking at using compilation in torch but not successful yet as otherwise it can take awhile to run. https://pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/torch_compile_tut...

jonititanon Tell HN: Travis CI is seemingly compromised (once again)

Didn't that already happen to Twitter? https://youtu.be/p3ZuYttJkL4

jonititanon Bugout: Browser-to-browser networking built on WebTorrent

In this instance the server is the browser of whoever started the session and the others are clients?

I was imagining a browser based Maptool. https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

jonititanon Bugout: Browser-to-browser networking built on WebTorrent

Very interesting.

As well as other usages it seems this would be one way to host online games. The app itself being the only thing served centrally and then instances of the app get served by website visitor's to host their own private workspace/gamespace. So all data created in that instance would remain private to that instance and the clients that connect to it. Is that a reasonable use case or am I misunderstanding?

jonititanon Show HN: Python library for embedding large graphs (Written in Rust)

Is it compatible with graphviz? https://graphviz.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

The graphviz python library works great I've found with the sole exception of not having straightforward ways to edit the graph after creation. It's really more intended for packaging it up to pass to the command line application.

Will you have file import/export for .dot and similar?

jonititanon Centuries-old whaling logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge

Apparently there's also records of the Romans growing grapes for wine in Britain.

jonititanon Wargame: LaTeX package to prepare hex'n'counter wargames

TikzEdt does but it hasn't been updated in ages.

tikzedt.org/

jonititanon Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto (2009)

Probably because you need sufficient oxygen for combustion. The propane would only ignite where it comes out and mixes. Once the flame travels into the purged pipe it will probably die out for lack of oxygen.

Ticklish though I'm sure to do it properly and safely.

jonititanon Attempts to power planes with hydrogen

I haven't looked at the various sponge or chemical binding concepts personally. To be used in an aircraft to be delivered say in 10 years time they would already need to have been approved by EASA or FAA or have a clear and straightforward approval pathway. Otherwise they represent a large schedule risk and new airliner types cost several billion to launch so they are pretty risk averse.

That's not to say those concepts won't work. Regarding long thin tanks wings don't actually have that much suitable internal volume for that. Lots of ribs, stringers, etc. That's why most hydrogen aircraft concepts use under wing pods or fuselage tanks to store the hydrogen even though it reduces safety margin. Civil aircraft regulators are allergic to storing fuel in the fuselage near the passengers for good reason.

jonititanon Attempts to power planes with hydrogen

I'm actually on a project looking at this and it's not so rosy. My area is trying to predict maintenance costs for the hydrogen PEM fuel cells. The cells get contaminated pretty fast.

Regarding hydrogen suitability while it has excellent gravimetric efficiency it has terrible volumetric efficiency. You either need huge tanks and high pressure or cryogenic tanks to store it in its liquid phase.

Like anything else its doable we just need to accept higher airliner prices and slower speeds/shorter ranges.

jonititanon FAA, do your damn job

Most car engines? Yes with the exception of those with ethanol mixed into them. For aircraft engines it's a definite no. Several accidents caused by putting pump gas in aircraft.

jonititanon FAA, do your damn job

That has more to do with problems of carb icing and similar on legacy engines. It's very expensive to get regulatory approval for new engines and even more so to then get approvals to retrofit them to legacy or historical aircraft. Unfortunately if you put regular pump gasoline in an aircraft you are going to have serious problems. Not least because of the bioethanol mixed in which will degrade the pipes.

jonititanon Markov Chains for programmers

Pymc3 is pretty good. https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/

jonititanon Python 3.11 in the Web Browser

Does the talk do a comparison to Pyodide? Seems very similar and I'd be very interested to hear what the advantages and disadvantages are.

jonititanon Mealie – a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI back end

That's quite an interesting system. Is it a specific markup language being used to generate or store them?

jonititanon BP quits Russia in up to $25B hit after Ukraine invasion

Gripens are designed to be able to operate from roads and Sweden often does practice operations doing just that.

jonititanon Intel energizes decades-old real-time Linux kernel project

Nuttx is an RTOS that sees a lot of use for drones and other control systems. https://nuttx.apache.org/ Posix compliant and similar feel to Linux.

jonititanon Lasershark: Fast, bidirectional communication into air-gapped systems

It's neat but the characterisation of the sensing potential of LEDs as relatively unknown is laughable. It's been known as far back as Forest Mims seminal books on circuits.

jonititanon /tap – Powerful and customizable note-taking system

Were you inspired by Zim?

https://zim-wiki.org/

jonititanon Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1471191916838633481?...

This would be nice if it happens. I have fond memories of pidgin and similar and being able to use multiple messenger accounts from one program.

This would be a key enabler here as well for alternative front ends or interfaces to platforms. Reducing platforms to their API and a "platform preferred" front end.

I mean obviously the EU is strongly motivated by wanting their companies to have a stronger chance at competing with US FANG companies but it's still a good move for the users.

jonititanon Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms

Yeah and seeing it from the other side as a cafe owner you have so many different sites to manage to try and help people find out where you are, when you are open, and the events you have running. Would really love some sort of framework for managing all those competing offering for location services. An open source framework in particular would be ace although it would mean the vast majority of small businesses wouldn't use it. Too little time.