Hacker News Reader

zgluckon Fossil shows mammal sinking teeth into dinosaur

"There have been doctored fossils from this part of the world before" - so, he obviously means "from China". This kind of etiquette is weird.

(And of course I pretty immediately felt the voting feedback on why. So much pride in a dictatorship; that is also weird.)

zgluckon I found an IT job thanks to this blog

I went down that rabbit hole a few years ago. Many cards don't tolerate sudden power loss while writes are happening.

The solution I found was these ATP micro SD cards (looks like the prices have increased like 3x though...) where the firmware is specifically designed to tolerate abuse:

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/industria...

Perhaps there are other cheaper but still robust alternatives now?

zgluckon IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release

Did you you ever attempt programming anything under PalmOs back then? It was quite fragile because of the extremely low amount of memory on board, which forced the use of relocatable memory handles, a bit like classic mac OS.

https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~michalj/palmos/Memory.html

PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.

There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.

zgluckon Death Valley Just Had the Hottest Midnight on Record

Sure, if you support genocide I suppose that could seem to be an appealing investment strategy.

In my experience the Chinese hardware is noisy and inefficient. It may make sense for keeping a garage above frost levels, in case it lasts, but it does not make sense for heating/cooling a human abode.

zgluckon Death Valley Just Had the Hottest Midnight on Record

Within EU markets heating is still the main thing in terms of the amount of energy consumed, but the same air-to-air heat exchanger hardware also does cooling during the summer.

I'd suggest you invest in e.g. Mitsubishi Electric and Daikin. They are the market leaders in that sweetspot of a) efficiency, b) quality/durability, c) demonstrated long term local support, d) price, IMO.

They are not European-based. They have product design in Japan, manufacturing in e.g. Thailand and sales/support offices in Europe.

Unlike other manufacturers, these companies actually listen to their sales orgs and adapt their products to suit the vastly varying climates of the EU.

Especially Mitsubishi Electric has a great reputation in the cold northern parts over the past 2 decades. Daikin is the challenger.

zgluckon Death Valley Just Had the Hottest Midnight on Record

I'll bet you $10 that the hottest 10 PM will happen after the hottest 5 AM on record.

zgluckon How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.

Ehh... no, not really, no.

zgluckon SF biotech company FibroGen laying off a third of its workers

> Founded in 1993

And they say investors are impatient...

(The company is still losing money, 30 years later.)

zgluckon In 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of Americans in favor of moon landing

I've ultimately become disappointed with For All Mankind. It has its moments of greatness but literally two thirds of it is anti-exploratory, anti-science angst bullshit. I guess it's a a lot cheaper to film that stuff.

zgluckon Cold restart whole system after total outage

So not one mention of terraform/pulumi?

zgluckon Cool Retro Terminal

Is it abandoned? Last commit was Mar 31, 2022 and there are 24 open PRs - most without any discussion happening.

zgluckon Sweden Sans

Being an early adopter sucks.

In the early 16th century, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and sighted the great "Southern Sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). Afterwards, the ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian means 'peaceful sea'.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#Etymology)

zgluckon Blockbusters are failing but how that changes Hollywood is anyone's guess

Anything that moves talented production staff away from the lazy super hero movies is good in my book. Maybe they'll have to focus on the writing again, gasp.

zgluckon ChatGPT use declines as users complain about ‘dumber’ answers

Some interesting stuff in here:

Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately? (757 comments, May 31)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36134249

(indications that making it "safe" dumbed it down even for non-controversial prompts)

zgluckon ChatGPT use declines as users complain about ‘dumber’ answers

You read that comment incorrectly, at least as it is right now.

zgluckon Ways LLMs could be used in existing products to add a tiny bit of convenience

I had a strong "no thanks" reaction to the first example because of the potential for hard to debug hallucinations that Look Good. Sometimes being forced to think is a good thing.

For my DNS (e.g. Cloudflare) - Allow me to copy in a poorly formatted block of text containing the DNS records I need, and then extract all the records and say “here are the records, ready to be added, click this one button to add them all at once”

(But some of the other ones make more sense.)

zgluckon Guam: The America that Americans forget

Went digging for what might be the origin of the joke.

SAHL BACK IN U.S. WITH MORE BITE (1986)

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-10-09-860316...

And what is a liberal, according to [Mort] Sahl? Well, he offered a nice definition at one point, saying that if the Reagan-Gorbachev summit broke down and the worst eventually took place, the headline in the Washington Post the next day would read: 'Nuclear Holocaust; World Ends; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.'

...

His real quarrel is with what he sees as the cynical manner in which the American political landscape has been divided up in our time--so that a 'liberal Left' that doesn't deserve the label can engage in self-serving mock combat with a bogyman 'Right.' Or as Sahl puts it, 'The liberals always settle for singing; the Republicans just want to run the banks.'

zgluckon ChatGPT Now Losing Users

Some interesting stuff in here:

Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately? (757 comments, May 31)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36134249

zgluckon She Steals Surfboards by the Seashore. She’s a Sea Otter

I'm sure it was cute the first couple of times...

Some animals have this way of doing things over and over for a very long time, for many days.

It's not cute at day 155.

zgluckon Tell HN: LinkedIn banned me because of my avatar, in the middle of my fundraise

> they cite that "profile photos can get flagged for: (...) Not being an image of you or an actual photograph".

That actually seems fair to me, considering what LinkedIn is.

zgluckon Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage

Yeah, but like J2EE, Kubernetes will become synonymous with waste [in the public sector] in about 5-10 years from now.

I mean, you've got to admit, it's a repeat of history?

zgluckon Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage

I know and understand both technologies in enough detail, thank you. They were/are abused as instruments of complexity by consulting firms. They are both fantastic at this purpose.

Of course it's also possible to use this tech to actually get stuff done. But that's not what it's widely used for in this consulting environment.

The typical end-customer is you (the tax payer.) You have no influence over what you paid for, though. Also: it's a recurring cost, like Netflix. It doesn't really stop...

zgluckon June Inflation Drops to 3%

I mean, these economies are both approximately the size of UK's economy - meaning, no, they shouldn't be in that list.

zgluckon Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage

It's about the modern day J2EE - Kubernetes. Approximately the same cost per "getting something done" ratio. Exactly the same kind of orgs (both on the seller and buyer sides). I hear the money is good though, if you're into that kind of slow work.

zgluckon Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II

https://archive.is/D2ecH

zgluckon June Inflation Drops to 3%

> Europe+UK is not [growing] for the past 10 years.

That's not correct. Also UK is actually still in Europe. Mortal Engines is fiction, not a documentary.

zgluckon Gene linked to long Covid found in analysis of thousands of patients

A bit like getting a dashcam installed in your car...

(I wonder if there any recorded instances of people swallowing microSD cards from their dashcams after car crashes...)

zgluckon June Inflation Drops to 3%

India's GDP in 2022 was 3.4T USD. They did beat the UK (at 3.1T USD) - but of course with a much larger population.

(https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...)

(And since someone mentioned California: 3.6T.)