Hacker News Reader

looks like a great book, but the cover is hard to look at after having a few painful soldering burns

10 base 2 is 2 base 10. i gave four unique hard problems. and now typing this out i see that I was off by 1 (or two)

there are actually 10 problems: naming things, cache invalidation, base conversions, off by one errors, and cache invalidation

spraykon Eat Real Food

gp is likely referring to a specific diet called The Mediterranean Diet, "inspired by the eating habits and traditional foods of Greece, Italy, and the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain, as observed in the late 1950s to early 1960s."

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

spraykon The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

all CRTs televisions were either 60Hz or 50Hz depending on where you are in the world

spraykon Microsoft is starting to open Windows Update up to any third-party app

scoop, Choco, and winget are all very different. winget is closest to Choco in that it prefers to just run regular installers. It keeps its own state of installed packages, though, while winget uses the same sources of truth as "Add/Remove programs" (msstore/appx and the "uninstall" group in the registry). Scoop is its own thing that installs everything under its own prefix and manages its own state.

spraykon The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

It would be interesting to put an Alexa (or another voice assistant device) in a space with only an audio playback device around to keep it company, with that audio playback device playing sounds associated with various crimes (but never saying the trigger word obviously). I wonder if there are any crimes it thinks it would hear that would result in a police visit. If police were called as a result of this setup, would this constitute a false police report on Amazon's behalf?

In the US, because I'm at least reasonably confident that such a setup comes nowhere near any exceptions to free speech protections here.

spraykon Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

cat, pizza, dog, red car, Tokyo, dolphins, garden

The usual context is "oh I saw some dolphins forever ago. let me see if I can find the photos..."

spraykon ISPs say their "excellent customer service" is why users don't switch providers

In my case, Comcast has a city government-granted monopoly to provide broadband, so they are my only choice (without going to a WISP/Starlink)

spraykon Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS

> I had no idea Linux just added anything found on a network before the user can even accept or be notified. The more you know!

Windows does this too, I believe. At least it did it with a Xerox laser printer I bought and the Brother printer at my friend's place.

spraykon Orion, our first true augmented reality glasses

the only Zenfone they make now is the Zenfone 11 Ultra, which is a big phone :(

spraykon i3wm inspired wm for Windows

Are there any scrolling WMs you can recommend? I have always been interested but never found one that I could get working (on Linux).

spraykon Meta has run hundreds of ads for cocaine, opioids and other drugs

I never ged ads for "real" drugs, just the normal OTC/prescription stuff and occasionally some legal analogues (non-psilocybin mushroom gummies come to mind). Very curious what they look like as well and what their sites say about the purchase process (what forms of payment do they accept, how do they ship, etc).

spraykon Ask HN: What's Prolog like in 2024?

The most recent prolog news I've come across in recent years is some updates to SWIprolog (can't find a good link) and some talk of Scryer-prolog[0] which is a more recent implementation of Prolog in Rust.

One interesting development recently is a load of research into, reverse engineering of and emulation of the 1986 Sega AI Computer[1], which used prolog under the hood for mostly educational software. Unfortunately it does not seem there is a way to actually write some prolog for the thing today :(

[0] https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog

[1] https://www.smspower.org/SegaAI/Index

spraykon WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses

Can anyone recommend some business that would make harnesses from such a specification?

spraykon David Mills' Fuzzball

in files/DCN1.TXT there is essentially a hosts file, and in it are a bunch of udel hostnames that still existed when I was in undergrad and working for the EE/CIS lab. The PDPs were all replaced by sun systems at that point, but still served central roles in the infra and likely had the same IPs. I remember having a few 128.4 and 128.175 addresses memorized for various networking configs. those two networks were supposedly originally David's, but he had gifted 128.175 to UD and as a result the computer in my dorm (or I guess my wrt54g) had a full blown public IP in that range.

spraykon Iowa man files lawsuit after being arrested twice for criticizing the police

Menlo Park, green blazers, I believe. I recall a 99% Invisible episode about them.

spraykon Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

Hm, interesting. I guess they both could be true, like I could totally see myself sitting around trying to come up with a fun name for my software project and being influenced by a film I saw the previous weekend. But given that the documentary where the quote originated smells more like marketing than anything else, I would not be surprised at all if this were indeed a retcon. I wish the docu was still up.

spraykon Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.

Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.

spraykon Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

> Co-founder Brian Behlendorf states how the name 'Apache' was chosen: "I suggested the name Apache partly because the web technologies at the time that were launching were being called cyber this or spider that or something on those themes and I was like we need something a little more interesting, a little more romantic, not to be a cultural appropriator or anything like that, I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo and the last days of a Native American tribe called the Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were the last tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost romantically represented what I felt we were doing with this web-server project..."

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

spraykon Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

I was under the impression that striking actors concerns with AI were over AI reproducing their likenesses, but this article is claiming that the fears would also consider non-specific (non-imitation, non-likeness, ?) generated voices a threat. The former is at least what I've read as far as union demands go.

Actors demanding a cut of revenue generated with their likeness I can understand, but trying to stop all AI-gen content, even that which does not imitate a real person and was trained on ethically sourced, non-SAG data, smells like business-model protectionism or even luddism.

spraykon The Tragedy of Google Search

I know there are other search engines out there, but I haven't really given any a shot. Do any of them feel like the Google Search of the past?

spraykon A brief history of APFS (2022)

in system settings somewhere you should be able to disable smart quotes (or something like that).

spraykon BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

neither video/audio decoders nor demuxers nor subtitle format parsing/rendering have OS APIs. hell, there's at least a few ways you can draw a rendered frame to the screen on any OS that will take different paths through either the OS's drawing APIs (if you're not on Linux) or graphics drivers. Even _if_ the OS supported taking video file data and playing it, it wouldn't support all of the codecs/containers/subs you'd want to play.

spraykon The Samsung Galaxy S23’s bloated Android build somehow uses 60GB of storage

uninstalling should not work at all on at least some of those apps, as they will exist on the read-only system partition (that only gets touched when the phone updates).

spraykon Colorado ski town fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from iPhones

  “We are absolutely diverting essential resources away from people who need it toward a feature on a phone,” Dummer said.

spraykon IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

Indeed. They are pretty big into cutting edge CPU design. I've seen some pretty cool system architecture coming from them as well. e.g. their cache setups on z mainframes[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s

spraykon IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI model.

spraykon IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

Curious: what is the version control story like for stored procs? The two that naively come to mind would be

1. Organized in some regular repo with some tooling to deploy/sync 2. Some way of tracking versions _in a DB_ and some magic set of queries that can deploy from said DB.

spraykon Effect of Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet versus High-Carb, Low-Fat Diet

what is the difference between a processed food and an unprocessed food? what degree of processing makes a food ultra-processed? what ingredients should I be looking for and why? what is so nutritious about potatoes, and why does frying change anything? what is special about seed oil?