Hacker News Reader

swamp40on Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers

Not true at all. In fact the poorer you are, the better health care you get - all free. It's the middle class who get crushed in America. $2000/mo insurance with $5K deductibles for a family of 4.

swamp40on New Philips Monitor Features an E-Paper Side Panel

Please tell me it is easily detachable. How did they get 95% there and not do that?

Slide it in, slide it out. Auto recognize when it is in range so you can shove stuff into it. Use BLE built into the monitor to communicate. Charge when necessary.

swamp40on Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage

Don't you just have to move the VPN offshore? China could even spin up their own VPN companies.

swamp40on MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

The pdf hijacking drives me crazy daily.

They must have put an entire team on ways to re-enable Edge as default. And I'll bet they have some crazy logic to justify their hijacking. "Oh, you opened Outlook, that must mean you want all your pdfs opened in Edge again!"

swamp40on Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

> deprive them of their subsidized agriculture

Yeah, that's not going to work out the way the "cities" think.

swamp40on Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see

> dangerously dictatorial tactics in turning Twitter from a free service into a paid service

Don't you see that's the way to eliminate the power of the bots, which influence you by legitimizing tweets by the thousands.

It's still free to join, but only paid users get influence.

swamp40on Intel Foundry Services and Arm announce collaboration on SoC design

Future US made IOT devices will mostly be ARM Cortex M33 and M0+ microcontrollers. They have the latest cryptography and safety features built-in and nice libraries. It's surprisingly difficult to find out what fabs build them. Maybe someone here can chime in?

swamp40on I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days

New Mechanic: Low battery is causing your low battery

Ok, thanks.

swamp40on Europe drastically cut its energy consumption this winter

Title should be "Mother Nature drastically cuts Europe's energy consumption this winter."

Warmest winter in a long time. Very lucky.

swamp40on “Inside-out Wankel” rotary engine delivers 5X the power of a diesel

> As electrification takes off, it's a difficult time to be working on new combustion engine concepts

Turn it into a portable battery charger...

swamp40on Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

There is more going on here than literacy. Even if you are illiterate, if you tell someone to pay 10 rupees you could see if 10 rupees made it to your account.

Do those vendors not have smartphones? That's what I am suspecting. If they did, an app could announce it and you wouldn't need the external speaker.

The speakers seem to be directly connected to the cellular network. And rented for ridiculously small fees.

swamp40on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2023)

You don't farm out your core business. Google didn't use a rebranded Yahoo search engine in 1998, did they? They need to be a leader in AI or they will die quickly.

swamp40on Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

> If I catch anyone "innovating"

swamp40on Club-Wielding Ancestors: Myth or Reality?

Look at this tomahawk made from a bison jaw. Simple but brutal.

https://twitter.com/Arting_2D/status/1499311367060594689/pho...

swamp40on How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

> A Typographical Mystery

I suspect many people here just haven't used typewriters extensively. You can adjust how the paper is put in before you start typing. You can move it up a little, over a little, etc.

You can type the whole thing without subscripts, then put the paper in a second time, adjust it a bit and get all your subscripts.

All you need is a repeatable spacing template. And that is easy to do with transparent paper. With three different pieces of parchment paper, you can get three different repeatable levels (regular, subscript, superscript) fairly easily - you just run the paper thru 3 times. Align it, then pull the parchment paper out.

You can do the same thing vertically so you get nice repeatable grids.

It's a lot of work, but not a "mystery".

swamp40on America and China are preparing for a war over Taiwan

It would be a proxy war, not direct US troop involvement. But China says any response from Taiwan will be taken as a direct response from the US. So, that could go south in a hurry.

I think Ukraine showed China exactly what the world response would be to such an invasion - i.e. shunning, so I doubt this would happen except as a way to goad the US into a war. And China certainly isn't ready for that yet.

From the US POV, we are only posturing economically so China can't jump ahead of us technologically. I think we are growing concerned their AI vision systems might soon allow suicide drones that can target US politicians. But that's coming anyway. In general, we have finally decided it doesn't make a lot of sense to hand them technology that they then turn around and put into military hardware that will be used against us.

swamp40on $22B project to provide 8% of UK energy via undersea cable from North Africa

> if you were to build 50.000 local arrays, each of those arrays would have to be 210 kW - that's close to 600 panels per array

Why is that a problem?

I also don't see why just because your power output is half, why it is a "no brainer" to boost the voltage way up, run 2,300 miles of underwater cable, reduce the voltage again and then distribute it to the exact same places the local arrays would put it.

swamp40on $22B project to provide 8% of UK energy via undersea cable from North Africa

> 2,300 miles

Why would you put a solar cell 2,300 miles away from the energy usage point? Who even thinks that way?

Since solar can be easily distributed, why not break it up into 50,000 local arrays?

swamp40on Reliability: It’s not great

"CEO finds novel way to fix Capacity problems..."

They just lost about 40% of their paying users with that blog post.

swamp40on Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve

I had always thought the Garden of Eden was mapped to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.

swamp40on Apple rumored to subvert EU Rules by nerfing USB-C on iPhone15

Even if Apple requires MFi certification on their USB C cables, China will just crack the cryptography and clone them.

They cracked the Lightning chip in like a week.

Then they will share the private key amongst all Chinese cable companies.

It's hard to keep a private key safe inside a small chip when there are billions of dollars in cable sales on the line.

swamp40on Amazon officially becomes a health care provider after purchase of One Medical

ER's have separate deductibles. $500-$2K is pretty typical just to walk in the door.

HMO's usually require referrals. PPO's usually need no referrals and you can go many more places.

swamp40on Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Tracking for Its Watch

I'll bet you could heat up the skin to get it to sweat.

swamp40on Ask HN: YC co-founder matching is bad

Incredible. Looks like he finally found his co-founder on Reddit[0] though. Both billionaires now.

[0] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-coinbases-founder-turne...

swamp40on HVDC transmission line to connect three ISO regions

Both your examples are reasons for the consolidation of existing infrastructure. My point was that you couldn't break up a coal plant, but with renewables they are already broken up into small pieces. Putting the pieces together at one location instead of distributing them as they exist naturally seems like a poor design choice to me. And I wonder if it is motivated by the fear of loss of control and money more than just a poor decision?

swamp40on HVDC transmission line to connect three ISO regions

It seems pretty clear to me that neighborhood level power grids are the way to go here. Large grids, long distance transmission and massive infrastructures are all a waste. Imagine if you could cut up a coal plant into small pieces and distribute it? Maybe a simple local neighbor grid sharing to cover a single failure.

I don't think power companies can (or want to) shift their thinking to local. Are their profits lost? Government subsidies lost?

swamp40on Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing

They are already connected to the IRS. I forgot to add in an Economic Impact Payment when I filed with TurboTax last year. 5 minutes later, the corrected 1040 came back to me. They already know everything, I don't know why they make us do all the work. Maybe in case THEY miss something?

swamp40on AMD Grabs over 30% CPU Market Share as Intel Continues to Decline

AMD also has chipsets that are making their way onto motherboards. Video, PCI, USB, etc. We had a problem with an HID device of ours that would work fine with the ubiquitous Intel USB chipsets for the last 10 years, but didn't work properly with the AMD USB chipset on a new laptop.

So Intel is losing chipset share, too.