Hacker News Reader

tobinfrickeon google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

This seems good. I'm not sure why I should be upset that Google is preventing abuse of its service.

tobinfrickeon Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

Apparently this text is part of the "International Property Management Code", which is incorporated into the municipal code of many cities?

https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IPMC2024P1/chapter-3-gener...

tobinfrickeon There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

> There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

Of course there are. The article simply defines "transformation" such that it excludes the lossless ones. :-)

tobinfrickeon Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

Based on what? Each image individually? Or does it try to cross-reference images within the collection and with events in your life, etc?

tobinfrickeon Why Can't Walnut Creek Build 3 Bedroom Apartments with a Playground?

This seems like a specious argument:

"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."

I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.

tobinfrickeon The desperation of NYTimes

Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours, is a toxic place.

Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.

(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)

tobinfrickeon It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

Is it feasible to run Linux on the Apple hardware? Seems like that could meet your requirements, except possibly "align with my values." I saw https://asahilinux.org/ but don't know how usable it is, or whether the long battery life and hardware support is preserved.

tobinfrickeon 2-D Mathematical Curves

Reminds me of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences https://oeis.org/

But I was somewhat surprised when my first click in this encyclopedia of 2d curves landed me on a 3d sponge https://www.2dcurves.com/3d/3dm.html

tobinfrickeon New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

How about 10 GbE switches/routers? I have 10 GbE fiber-to-the-home via Sonic, but so far just have it plugged into a Google Wifi router with gigabit ethernet. Would love to have 10 GbE wired to my desk.

tobinfrickeon What is jj and why should I care?

Here are some notes on Jujutsu from Evan Martin that I found interesting/useful:

https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2025/08/jj-bookmarks.htm...

tobinfrickeon VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

I ran OS/2 Warp and was a fan of it... But to say that it was simply "better" than Windows 95 is a bridge too far. It had its strengths (rock solid multitasking) but also plenty of rough edges.

tobinfrickeon The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph

Seems like a game-theoretic problem

Taking their foot off the gas for a second only hurts them

tobinfrickeon California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years

This is practically all that need be said on the topic

tobinfrickeon Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Yeah so does CostCo

tobinfrickeon Do Users Verify SSH Keys? (2011) [pdf]

Also in compliance with Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

tobinfrickeon Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome

NIPT is non-invasive compared to amniocentesis

tobinfrickeon Driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes

Unlike "the way oversized cargo/load moves today," the chase vehicle is just another Peterbilt truck pulling cargo, but with a safety driver. It's not a flag car or something like that.

tobinfrickeon Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

What cargo would justify a supersonic flight?

tobinfrickeon Noise Filtering Using €1 Filter (2020)

This has the same vibes as "Tan's method", wherein someone managed to rediscover and publish the well-known trapezoidal rule for integration from Calculus in a medical journal

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

tobinfrickeon How do you juggle WFH with a baby?

I'm sure that some people are able to make it work, but in general the answer is: you don't. Taking care of a baby is a full time job in and of itself, associated with frequent interruptions and sleep deprivation.

tobinfrickeon FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Nasal Decongestant

Well, it doesn't work.

tobinfrickeon The Visualization of Differential Forms (2021)

The same could be said when they are written using Gibbs notation with div and curl. Surprisingly, when Einstein wrote his paper on special relativity, Gibbs vector notation had not yet been widely adopted, and Einstein himself wrote out Maxwell's equations in component form.

tobinfrickeon Why does the chromaticity diagram look like that?

Wavelength (or frequency) is linear but light, in general, is made up of many wavelengths -- an entire spectrum.

tobinfrickeon Tokens are a big reason today's generative AI falls short

The output of ChatGPT almost always sounds good. That's the point.

But I would wager that its answer was at least wrong, and perhaps total nonsense.

That's the real hazard of using ChatGPT as a learning tool. You are in no position to evaluate whether the output makes any sense.

tobinfrickeon I Received an AI Email

Actually this is kinda a great idea. Honeypot the bots by engaging them with other bots. Would love to deploy this on telemarketers / spam calls.

tobinfrickeon Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015)

``In almost all textbooks, even the best, this principle is presented so that it is impossible to understand.'' (K. Jacobi, Lectures on Dynamics, 1842-1843). I have not chosen to break with tradition. V. I. Arnold, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics [5], footnote, p. 246

It's funny that this quote is not ironic at all, and in fact the authors of SICM include it because they agree with the assessment (by Arnold of his own textbook and its predecessors).

The SICM authors do indeed break with that tradition.

tobinfrickeon IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

Apparently they are literally incorporated as a charity.

tobinfrickeon AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life

If you do a second edition, I would love a chapter on Life implementations, particularly how to implement a Life simulator that can execute these enormous patterns efficiently.

tobinfrickeon Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

The "Ivy League" consists of precisely these eight schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.

Honestly I feel like some of these are negative indicators when it comes to engineering cred.

Meanwhile, stellar engineering schools like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT are in a league of their own.

This comment is mostly to complain that using "Ivy League" as a shorthand for prestigious engineering schools is inaccurate.

tobinfrickeon Building GCC 1.27 (first GCC with x86 support) (2019)

The Wikipedia article suggests that Stallman understood it as "Free (University (Compiler Kit))" only to find out that it was "(Free University) Compiler Kit":

> When Tanenbaum advised him that the compiler was not free, and that only the university was free, Stallman decided to work on a different compiler.