Hacker News Reader

vorticoon Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

Isn't this website just a frontend for OpenStreetMap data? This returns 120,914 results.

    [out:json];
    node["man_made"="surveillance"]
        [~"^(manufacturer|brand|operator)$"~"flock",i];
    out count;

vorticoon SampleBrainz: Browse music samples, curated by the MusicBrainz community

I built a site to browse which songs include samples of others. It's common in hip hop, electronic, pop, etc to reuse drum breaks, melodies, or vocal snippets of other tracks. SampleBrainz includes 220,000+ of these connections.

All metadata is in the public domain (CC0), and anyone can contribute by adding sample relationships on MusicBrainz.

Source code at https://github.com/AndrewBelt/SampleBrainz

vorticoon My Dream Thermostat

I want to specify heat, cool, or auto. I don't want to cool in the winter under any circumstances. I can simply open a window. Vise versa for the summer.

vorticoon How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

>Scientists claim to have discovered a ‘new color’ no one has seen before.

LOL!

vorticoon Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator

Cool! Some random requests to consider: Could the range x~y be uniform instead of 2 std dev normal (95.4%ile)? Sometimes the range of quantities is known. 95%ile is probably fine as a default though. Also, could a symbolic JS package be used instead of Monte-Carlo? This would improve speed and precision, especially for many variables (high dimensions). Could the result be shown in a line plot instead of ASCII bar chart?

vorticoon Chromium uses web search for .internal TLD instead of opening URL

As a workaround you can type a trailing slash: example.internal/

vorticoon Donating forks to the dining hall

The cafeteria manager likely had no idea they were running out of forks. A simple email or phone call to the cafeteria department would have probably solved the problem, since managers are likely looking for ideas of things to buy, especially if they've been recommended by customers (students).

vorticoon Firefox bug gets fixed after 25 years

Why so many posts about Firefox bugs getting fixed after N years? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=firefox+bug+years

vorticoon VirtualBox 7.0.10 download links have disappeared

Have you tried contacting support? https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/contact-form.html

vorticoon Why [“1”,“2”,“3”].map(parseInt) yields [1, NaN, NaN] in JavaScript (2011)

The reason is surprising but perfectly valid once you remember the spec of map() and parseInt(). Love JS WTFs.

vorticoon http://pn./

Also http://ai./

vorticoon Notepad++ v8.4.3: Unhappy Users' Edition

    Notepad++ refund request form
    Product price: 0 USD
    Name:  _______________________
    Email: _______________________
    Purchase Date: _______________________

vorticoon Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

Mindustry https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry

vorticoon The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

Reminded me of my favorite article. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

I'm willing to pay extra to avoid touch screens in my cars, washing machines, door locks, and personal computers. I can't be the only one!

vorticoon Show HN: Find the 10 highest and 10 lowest correlations to any stock

Very cool, although index funds like S&P 500 and DJI don't seem to work.

https://betagainst.fun/asset/_gspc_spy/

https://betagainst.fun/asset/_dji_dia/

vorticoon Would You Click?

Why did they have to add the super slow scroll lag? That ruined the whole site.

vorticoon It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

How so? I can buy a modified Thinkpad (https://minifree.org/product/libre-t440p/ or http://www.cnmod.cn/x210/) because enough people demand it. If enough people demand dumb TVs but their niche prices far exceed smart TVs, then people will begin selling modified smart TVs without cell chips for mutually fair prices.

vorticoon It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

Wouldn't the free market simply provide modifications with the cell networking removed for an extra $50 or so? The "discount" you get from buying a smart TV verses a dumb TV (which is a niche product so it would cost hundreds more) would still be positive after subtracting the cost of modification.

vorticoon Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?

Was going to say PDF but this is close enough :)

vorticoon hiccupFX.js

Bonus: Can this be a pure CSS library?

vorticoon Show HN: Tact – A simple chat app for iOS, iPadOS and macOS

Agreed, it looks like a really nice product and I wish people would pay for quality software like this, but the market is super saturated, and even free, cross-platform chat platforms struggle to gain users since they require their friends to use it too.

vorticoon Show HN: "crzy64", base64 mod aimed for fastest decoding

Isn't base64 encoding/decoding bound to memory bandwidth? If so, won't all 4/3 memory formats encode/decode at the same speed?

vorticoon Emojimix

Here's a list of hundreds of funny examples. https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/29/gboard-emoji-kitche... Someone could probably make a huge table of all of them on one page.

vorticoon LLVM relicensing update and call for help

Ownership goes to the author's heirs.

vorticoon LLVM relicensing update and call for help

This might be the largest contributor relicensing project of any IP category: 2800 people and companies. 94% progress is impressive.

vorticoon I just want to run this one Python script

I usually put this at the top, so it raises a syntax error if using an old version.

    f"Python 3.6+ is required"

vorticoon Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

If I didn't include that note, someone would say "Is is slow because you're on 56kbps dial-up?"

vorticoon Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

I don't think so. You'd need to run it in a terminal with something like

    from sympy.plotting import plot3d
    x,y=symbols('x y')
    plot3d(x*y, (x, -10,10), (y, -10,10))

vorticoon Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

I doubt the bad performance is due to evaluating expressions itself. If I type N[Log[2]] into Mathematica, it evaluates in less than a millisecond. It's probably because Wolfram Alpha is using natural language process to try to process my query and then finally deciding that by N[Log[2]], I mean N[Log[2]]. And it's probably not because of that, but because their grid scheduler isn't optimized for sub-second latency.

vorticoon Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

1. It's slow, even for simple microsecond computations like log(2). Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection. Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. https://gamma.sympy.org/input/?i=log%282%29

2. Every time I use it, a box saying

    NEW: Use textbook math notation to enter your math. TRY IT

pops up over the result, and clicking the X doesn't hide it the next time I search. This adds ~3 seconds to the result time.

3. I'm a long-term Mathematica user, but typing literal Mathematica syntax usually never works, except for simple expressions.

4. Results are PNGs, and copy-pasting a numerical result takes a few unnecessary clicks. "Plain Text" > Copy.