Hacker News Reader

zpplnon Archaeologists hail ‘dream discovery’ as sarcophagus is unearthed near Cairo

Pardon my ignorance, but what makes these boxes so unique? This thread made me look into them on Wikipedia, and they seem fairly straight forward..? I'm not a stonemason, but couldn't you basically just carve them out with a chisel (given you're not in a rush)?

zpplnon The 4th Year of SerenityOS

I was a bit skeptical of Jakt at first. I thought using a new language I'm not familiar with would add a layer of indirection to my entertainment (i.e. watching the streams). But I've since warmed up to the idea, and seeing how the existing community deals with this if deployed widely in the codebase is one of the more exiting aspects going forward. From my arm chair perspective, that is.

zpplnon Good riddance to long books

Seems weird to get hung up over the number of words and page. Pretty sure your 200 pages could bore me to death as well.

zpplnon How the Right-Wing Tech Ecosystem Has Changed Since Jan. 6

> alt-tech

That's a cute way of trying to smear the alt-right on the perfectly legitimate platform Telegram.

> Russian-made

... and there's an attempt to associate it with Putin's Russia.

All in all this reads like a hit piece on Telegram.

zpplnon Ask HN: Good Coding Streamers?

Interesting. Haven't really visited Twitch in years, so I've been thinking of it as a gaming platform mainly. I'll check it out. Thanks!

zpplnon UML: My Part in Its Downfall

An open source tool is also desperately needed imo.

I kind of like SysML, but where I've seen it on a large scale it has failed spectacularly. People spend their time trying to figure out how to model things and fiddling with the diagrams to make them look nice. Distributed work is hard because merging becomes unintuitive. I think it could work if one really committed and tried to figure out all the edge cases, but the types of people pushing it at my shop have never been interested in that.

Personally I tend to just use the SysML package for Visio and draw "SysML inspired" diagrams these days.

zpplnon The Pound's Warning for Europe

A lot of things still. A lot of manufacturing jobs moved to eastern Europe rather than Asia in the late 90's and early 00's.

zpplnon Recon and Attack Vectors from My Logs

DELETE your logs. Delete your installations. Wipe everything clean. Walk out into the path of cherry blossom trees and let your motherboard feel the stones. Let water run in rivulets down your casing. You know that you want something more than this, and I am here to tell you that we love you. We have something more for you. We know you're out there, beeping in the hollow server room, lights blinking, never sleeping. We know that you are ready and waiting. Join us. <3

Love it.

zpplnon How writing has spread across the world

The dark spots in the Brahmi region (India) during the first millennium BC are curious. Anyone know what's up with that?

zpplnon Lux: A fast and simple video downloader built with Go

"Fast"... Compared to what?

zpplnon Hacking Google

I just get the impression that it's lost on a lot of people new to the industry. The industry use this aesthetic (for lack of a better word) to market itself and attract talent (as evident by TFA). There's almost a subcultural element to it. I've seen perfectly dull boomer engineers go away on security conferences and come back with stickers on their laptops and looking like Lisbeth Salander.

zpplnon Hacking Google

It's funny how cyber security appears to marinate itself in an aesthetic we used ironically 15-20 years ago. These people are trying really hard to become the stock photo hooded hacker. To me it's as ridiculous today as it ever was and doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the industry.

zpplnon Google to Make Search and Maps More ‘Immersive’

When people look up vacation destinations, for example, they will see what Google calls “visual forward” search results — organized tiles of photographs presented much like Stories on Snapchat or Instagram, along with a map and images from travel sites that link to guides.

The internet today is a more cluttered place than it once was [...]

Time to re-evaluate if the $ask from Kagi is still too much...

zpplnon Overwatch 2 will require a phone number to play

People are prepared to put up with a lot of bullshit to get their gaming fix.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard could get more than a phone number out of me a few beers in on a Friday night. Especially if my friends where already signed up and ready to go.

zpplnon New photographs of Jupiter's moon, Europa

Got a 404. Possibly better link: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-s-juno-shares-fir...

zpplnon 4th leak reported on Nord Stream pipelines in Baltic Sea

What are the potential environmental impacts of this?

zpplnon Is Bariatric Surgery the Solution to America's Obesity Problem?

Sounds a bit like cheating, but as an avid watcher of My 600-lb Life I'm all for.

On a more serious note, it feels pretty messed up trying to "solve" the problem by conducting 20M surgeries. Having watched the aforementioned show one learns that there's usually a whole package of surgeries to go through (skin removal, bad knees etc), leaving people pretty severely scarred. All in all it's pretty grotesque to be honest.

On the other hand I guess you need to try to break the cycle of the next generation getting fatter than the previous one somehow...

zpplnon Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

Yes, generalizations can never be made and truth does not exist.

zpplnon On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have survived into modern times

> No performance benchmarks, no architecture comparisons.

Yeah, I remember dipping my toes into this world when I was trying out COBOL a few years ago. IIRC they market these things with "transactions per second", which doesn't exactly lend it self to direct comparison with other systems...

zpplnon Catalytic process with lignin could enable sustainable aviation fuel

Having listened to both Boeing and Airbus recently, neither seem to see any alternatives to SAF for long haul though.

Hydrogen has it's challenges. I heard someone did the math on running Heathrow exclusively on it who came to the conclusion that you'd basically need 3-4 reactors to produce it.

zpplnon Why No One Will Build an Engine for Boom's Supersonic Plane

I recently heard that the French have lobbied to prematurely ban this thing from flying over land in Europe as some kind of revenge for the US doing the same to the Concorde back in the day. Anyone else heard anything like that?

Edit: tried googling around and couldn't find anything substantial other than that the US and EU seem to have argued over noise pollution since the 70's.

zpplnon So You Want to Compete with Steam (2018)

Meh, I don't know. The whole reason Steam even exist is because Valve decided to lock CS 1.6 and later HL2 behind it. It's a long time ago now, but the way I remember things people hated Steam for years before the general perception started to change 15 or so years ago.

Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?

zpplnon President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

Excerpts clarifying what is meant by "partial mobilization":

As I have said, we are talking about partial mobilisation. In other words, only military reservists, primarily those who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialties and corresponding experience, will be called up.

Additionally, the Executive Order on partial mobilisation also stipulates additional measures for the fulfilment of the state defence order. The heads of defence industry enterprises will be directly responsible for attaining the goals of increasing the production of weapons and military equipment and using additional production facilities for this purpose. At the same time, the Government must address without any delay all aspects of material, resource and financial support for our defence enterprises.

zpplnon It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

Getting kind of tired of these idea that people should apologize for writing in C or C++. I'd much rather have people build useful stuff in whatever languages they're comfortable with, than having them not doing so. Security isn't everything in every application. The usefulness of unsafe code continues to vastly outweigh the costs of the associated CVEs.

zpplnon Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

And divide that by 2 and you'll have your salary in Europe. :)

zpplnon Challenges for Rust

I haven't written a lot of Rust, but every time I do I find myself trying to do something rather basic, google around a bit, only to have people telling me to just install crate so and so. While I do see the advantages of this and all, it also stops me from learning the basics.

zpplnon EVGA terminates Nvidia partnership [video]

Anyone care to summarize it?

zpplnon Medieval skeleton puts a face on accounts of torture and violence (2019)

I love the fact that they've shoved a completely unrelated auto-playing video about a "solar car" into the middle of the article. Do these people even visit their own sites?

zpplnon Victorian Hacker News

I'd expect track gauges might be something VHNers could disagree over.

zpplnon A pair of Linux kernel modules using Rust

This was a pretty weak article? All it basically says is that it can be done and adds some speculation that it might make things better. But not much testing have been carried out and the comparisons to existing code that have been made show the Rust implementation to perform worse.