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sloucher

83 karma · joined December 31, 2019

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sloucher··on OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
The bow doors?

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

sloucher··on Take the pedals off the bike
https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/
sloucher··on Jaguar Land Rover electric car whistleblower sacked
Nice self-own by Tata. Guy blows whistle while working at their obscure VinFast brand, but they sack him once he's moved to work for Jaguar - so all the headlines are about JLR rather than VinFast...
sloucher··on Programming a computer for playing chess (1950) [pdf]
Not even 1024 bytes. There were 1024 bytes available to the computer, but some of that was required to store what was displayed on the screen. Exactly how much depended on how much of the screen was used(!).

Different times...

sloucher··on WonderWorld: Interactive 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image
Or, you could confuse the heck out of GeoGuessr players :)
sloucher··on Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
When I first tried it, I was like "oh, so the left-most column is the ads". It was only after trying a different query that produced fewer ads that I realised the left-most column is Google :-)
sloucher··on British pound hits record low against the dollar
I still take issue with the idea that a rise of 3% is unprecedented. I speak as someone who purchased my first property right before the ERM crisis and saw my mortgage payment almost double.

Also, for a long time, 100% and even 105% mortgages were common. I remember that when property prices nose-dived, we had people on TV being interviewed and complaining that they were "now in negative equity" as though that were something that had been done to them. These people started in negative equity by taking out a loan for more than the value of the property at the time of purchase.

With all that said, you're 100% correct that higher rates are going to cause real pain now, just as it did then. I don't accept that it's going to cause unprecedented pain, because to do so is to dismiss the very real problems that many many people had back then.

PS. Your strongest "unprecedented" argument would have been that the percentage increase in rates is bigger than ever before. 5% is 250% of 2%, whereas 15% is "only" 200% of 7.5%. But then it's easy to grow hugely when starting from a very small baseline.

sloucher··on British pound hits record low against the dollar
> I believe this is actually the fastest rise in rates ever.

Why do you believe that?

https://www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk/property-statist...

sloucher··on Neutralisation of cockroaches with laser automated by machine vision
I'm more concerned about how possible it is that one of these systems is used to harm humans deliberately.
sloucher··on 20×10%
Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...
sloucher··on Italy, Intel close to $5B deal for chip factory
> You need stable government

So yes, Italy is the obvious choice :-).

sloucher··on Mechanics invent an axle that can achieve steering angles of up to 80 degrees
One of the things that make this possible is the sudden increase in space in [what was] the engine compartment, now that electric cars are more common.

Most small cars with petrol engines have nowhere near enough space for the wheel to turn like that.

sloucher··on Number of pubs in England and Wales falls to record low
Not as sad as it is for Ukraine.
sloucher··on Ask HN: Blog post about high-voltage electricity transmission / sub-station?
Sadly not - it was a longer post than that, but that's an interesting one nonetheless - thanks!

BUT, it's linked from the page you linked (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/) - success! Thanks so much.

sloucher··on The whistleblowing bankers who were sent to jail
See also: FX rates that affect billions of transactions daily.

Where there's money to be made or lost on the value of anything that's determined subjectively, pressure will always be brought to bear to move the needle one way or the other.

sloucher··on Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
> no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y

Yep, I sometimes follow up with MANIC or PANIC if I've got too few letters, to test for C/P/M/N

sloucher··on Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

sloucher··on OWL Guide, early hypertext, and “replacing” the Web
The browser was called Guide. OWL is the company name (or nickname, since the formal name was Office Workstations Ltd).
sloucher··on Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
My wife visited Torness (the plant in the article) for a meeting with one of the managers. She went through reception, got her badge, and was on her way up the stairs to the meeting room when the receptionist shouted at her. "Maam! MAAAM!... please hold the handrail".

They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.

sloucher··on _Application.Run(Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object
This is simply describing a method in the Excel object library, which is not implemented in C#. The method pre-dates C# by many years.

FWIW the place to look for documentation of Application.Run is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.applic...

sloucher··on The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]
Graphics look great, but gameplay looks dull. Same tired old stuff, shooting at prettier targets (none of which can shoot straight other than when the plot calls for it).
sloucher··on The British have a gas shortage, so they’re Googling electric cars like crazy
We absolutely do not have a shortage of gas (petrol, as we like to call it). It's just not in the right place because we have a lorry driver shortage - and the media has created a toilet-paper style panic that's caused everyone to try to buy as much as they can, all at the same time.

They could equally have said "we're running out of milk!" and we'd have a milk "shortage".

sloucher··on The four noisy horsemen of Perl hate
So if it's an array, why isn't it @addresses?
sloucher··on Git undo: We can do better
Last time I checked, 5 of the top 10 questions on StackOverflow were about Git...
sloucher··on “Miss Shilling's Orifice” helped win the war (2020)
I'm sure there are challenges in a wall of death / globe of death situation, but I'd think that negative-g would not be one of them? Quite the reverse, I'd have thought...
sloucher··on The “Granny Knot”
>The fact that there's a whole site dedicated to tying your shoes properly tells you everything you need to know

Similarly: half of the top 10 most-voted questions on StackOverflow are about Git.

sloucher··on All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
The great thing about Windows is that there's so much bloatware you'll always find something to delete when you need space.
sloucher··on BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video]
>inadequacies of the keyboard

cough ZX-Spectrum cough

sloucher··on Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
I very much agree. And the annoying thing for me is that I spend much of my (work) life sitting in front of a full-size keyboard, yet when I want to respond to a personal email on my phone it's actually quicker to type it on the PC keyboard, mail it to myself, and then copy-paste it into my personal email on my phone. It's horrific.

What I've longed for is a bluetooth dongle (or something) that I can just plug into the PC or piggyback on the keyboard's USB connector, and which will let me use the keyboard I already have to type on my phone.

sloucher··on This happened to me while I was scrolling through Twitter
For people like me looking at the linked tweet via a desktop browser: the picture in the tweet isn't shown in full - you need to click on it to see the issue.

And... it's horrifying.

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