Hacker News Reader

rectangleboyon Crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test

Something like this came up in Robert R. McCammon's 1987 book Swan Song[1], one of the first novels to win the Bram Stoker award[2] for Best Novel (alongside Stephen King's Misery that year).

One of the survivors finds a glass ring (something like trinitite) among the post-nuclear-blast rubble of Saks Fifth Avenue[3] in New York and sees visions of the future (or something) through it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Song_(McCammon_novel) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker_Award#External_lin... [3] my memories of this book may be embellishing this a bit....

rectangleboyon AI is killing B2B SaaS

I was complaining about SQLAlchemy's insane quirks to a group from my alma mater and one of the grad students said, "Well, the solution to your problem is clear: Write your own ORM." and I had to explain that this startup does not want to get into the ORM-writing business.

rectangleboyon iPhone Pocket

Us iPhone 13 Mini holdouts need to get a little louder. It feels like I find more and more on the internet every month -- I'm pretty sure there're far more than just "dozens of us" who want a reasonably-sized phone.

rectangleboyon LibriVox

> Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely . . . I tried LibriVox in college to listen to difficult-to-understand poems (at the professor's recommendation) on my iPod and my ears couldn't take the harsh plosives that nearly every recording I tried had.

rectangleboyon One in four 2020 Tesla Model 3 failed the Danish periodic inspection in 2024

Yes

rectangleboyon The rich history of ham radio culture

Just looking up his callsign, I found this: https://www.cardcow.com/215722/k9bcj-ill-seeing-you-farther-...

rectangleboyon Ask HN: How do you handle tech use with your kids?

My friends have managed to avoid introducing their 5 year old to the iPad. They do allow her to use it on airplanes, but they rope the flight attendants into it and have the attendant present it as "the airplane's iPad."

rectangleboyon A look inside the SNES, PS5, and Xbox controllers with CT scans

Interesting. I get this controller headphone port feature when using the PS5, it's too bad it doesn't carry over to PC.

rectangleboyon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2023)

  Location: South Bay Area of SF, CA
  Remote: Yes, prefer hybrid.
  Willing to relocate: No.
  Technologies: Java, C++, Python, Bash, C, Objective-C, SQL, Unix/Linux, BigQuery, Google Cloud Platform, Xcode
  Résumé/CV: https://www.overleaf.com/project/56a406b7dfccdf3f2efc3a4e
  Email: jeffreydmcgovern@gmail.com

rectangleboyon The D.E.N.N.I.S. system: Résumé tips for Senior Devs

I have the \LaTeX command in my skills line, which is really hard to typeset in anything other than LaTeX. Other engineers notice it unprompted.

rectangleboyon Black widows are losing to brown widows in the fight for attics and garages

ugh me too lol

rectangleboyon Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

The Tile existed before the AirTags.

rectangleboyon Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

Flying toasters!

rectangleboyon A surprisingly common error users make when installing Brew

The most common error is installing Brew in the first place.

rectangleboyon Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

I just went to Central Computer for the first time a couple weeks ago! I got my PSU, AIO, and a smattering of other cables and cable wraps. The Microcenter near where I grew up was just too far away to drive and Fry’s never really had the stuff I want anyway. I hope CC sticks around; even though they feel like a relic of the 90’s and 00’s (much like Fry’s) they have a lot of nice components.

rectangleboyon Show HN: Live map of “good morning/night” tweets

Some kind of local time zone vertical line overlay option might be a nice addition.

Why I thought about this: I'm using a ~12 year old monitor that occasionally has a broken column of pixels about 2/3 of the whole monitor width away from the left edge and thought it was trying to align with the ever-moving map on the site. It confused me why the actual location wasn't lining up until I realized it was my monitor's fault.

rectangleboyon Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs

It was behind the exorbitant number of spatulas the whole time!

rectangleboyon The Three Bay Areas (2017)

just put some cardboard down and you're fine

rectangleboyon Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

Substantial?

rectangleboyon Microsimulation of Traffic Flow

Watching this frustrates me tremendously.

rectangleboyon Neuroscientists Say They've Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication

I think this is what you're looking for: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

"Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling.

The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops.

Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones.

Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type."

rectangleboyon Ask HN: Is There a Hacker News Equivalent for Politics?

> Most people come by their politics by assimilating their family or communities, especially in college . . .

I, without a doubt, formed my opinions largely because of my family (against my moderately-strong conservative family), not that much because of my community (my high school friends had very neutral political leanings), and definitely prior to college (high school).

I feel that many opinions are formed by high school friend groups and rarely questioned beyond that and that community is only important in generally shaping that high school exposure and experience.

rectangleboyon How to Learn Piano with Technology

A tweet thread [1] from @realscientists (a Twitter account authored by a different active scientist each week) supports this point:

"People think math and coding are skills u r born with. ok there r prodigies out there. but most talented folks just work rly hard at it." -@realscientists

Replying to @realscientists "@realscientists Being good at math/coding usually coincides with it being fun." -@JesperEs

Replying to @JesperEs "@jesperes yep. Or useful... I hated coding in undergrad. Then forced to solve problems using code during my masters. Ended up loving it." -@realscientists

Finding a piece that you love or badly want to learn will allow you to put in the hard work needed to learn it and you'll progress in skill at the piano in the process.

[1] https://twitter.com/realscientists/status/369468586365968385

rectangleboyon How to Learn Piano with Technology

To me, [Syn,Lin]thesia are very useful when YouTubers don't have time to transcribe the thing into proper sheet music. Hari Sivan[1] and Kyle Landry[2] do this and often times fans may work together to make a proper sheet[2].

Music theory helps piano players understand musical pieces better, simplifying the complexity of piano pieces and reducing the time needed to learn new pieces. It turns "put finger here, then this one here" into "play this major chord progression in the left while the right hand plays a melody starting on the first note of the major scale..." and so on. Even just understanding how to make different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented, dominant, etc.) helps tremendously. It won't be learned from either [Syn,Lin]thesia or sheet music alone.

[1] Hari Sivan Rito Village Normal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdNUX6Z8rb0 => Synthesia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdq_NJvbUD0

[2] Kyle Landry Normal: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0UErv9b4Hn5ucNNjqD1UQ Synthesia: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdkSsVttkG60X5nC0CJ2Xjg Sheets: https://musescore.com/brycepoindexter

rectangleboyon How to Learn Piano with Technology

Community college classes are a great way to satisfy that need to learn. Usually, community colleges have group keyboard classes, which are a great, cheap, and not-intense introduction to piano playing.

rectangleboyon Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

Usually I'm not making the switch visually. On arch, I know what spaces each application is one and just switch to it instinctively. The visual search and movement to the trackpad ends up being slower and more annoying than a quick Super+3 or whatever it needs to be.

rectangleboyon Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

Where's the commentary on FreeBSD? It certainly seems like the right idea (to replace OS X), but I want to know their experience.

rectangleboyon Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

Similarly, I've been using AwesomeWM for a few years. Going back to OS X is frustrating to me because it's so languorous and lacking control. On Arch/AwesomeWM, I can instantly flip to the space I want, but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.

rectangleboyon Learning to Learn in TensorFlow

Can someone explain to me the benefits of using TensorFlow over Theano?