Hacker News Reader

CollinEMacon Show HN: Logiquiz – Daily Self-Referential Puzzles

Came here to say the same thing. I think the wording could be a little better.

CollinEMacon Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws

I think the idea is that you'd play with a chess engine that randomizes the positions for each player.

CollinEMacon I'm Done with Ubuntu

I'm an Endeavour user too. It's been a really great experience so far.

CollinEMacon Apple squandered the Holy Grail

I think AI tools will have a little less impact than electrification.

CollinEMacon Stanley Kubrick's the Shining Maps of the Overlook

Super interesting to me that each localization has a different phrase.

Does this imply that the phrase itself doesn't matter to the story? I've seen people online try to draw subtextual theories from the (English) phrase.

CollinEMacon Gravity is not a force

> The easiest way to see that gravity is not a force is to note that a force causes acceleration, but gravity does not.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding as it's been a while since physics class but I'm pretty sure gravity does cause acceleration. One of the few numbers I still remember memorizing in college 9.8m/s2 -- the acceleration by gravity on Earth.

CollinEMacon Hacker Typer

I wish there was something like this that could somehow turn off OS keybindings.

I tried letting my niece and nephew play with this once but they kept hitting the Super key, minimizing the window, alt-tabbing, etc.

CollinEMacon 12 Months of Mandarin

I'm always surprised when people mention watching shows in their target language as a study method. For me, I don't understand much and my mind starts to wander pretty quickly.

CollinEMacon Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

Update: it's too late...

> Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening in Missouri after the US Supreme Court denied a stay.

> The 55-year-old was put to death around 6 p.m. CT at the state prison in Bonne Terre.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-schedul...

CollinEMacon There is only one amphibian emoji

What exactly do you mean "real dragons"?

CollinEMacon 'Agua, Agua'

This sounds incredibly dangerous

CollinEMacon If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

This is a real problem that's hard to describe. Walking around the US (excluding large cities) just makes you feel like a jackass.

It shouldn't matter but it does.

CollinEMacon Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

I think I first learned this from my endocrinologist. Anyway, this is a good guide:

https://www.mountsinai.on.ca/care/lscd/sweet-talk-1/what2019...

CollinEMacon Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

I'm a Type 1 diabetic living the United States and my experiences have been a bit different.

> This is called “closed loop” or “artificial pancreas”, and getting one officially is very hard or impossible: not FDA approved yet / you need to be part of an university study to get one / … It’s one of those things that “will be here in 5 years”, they say every year for the past 30 years.

These exist now. I've had one for a few years now. Medtronic 670G.

> My treatment is usually: keep the Freestyle Libre app on my phone open as much as possible and when I see my BG’s getting high, I inject a small amount of insulin. How much? No idea. IT’S ALL VIBES.

Your correction factor is

CF = 100 / (Total Daily Dose).

To make a correction you do

Additional insulin to administer = (current blood glucose - target blood glucose) / CF

Now, even after doing this you'll still have blood sugar spikes and dips but this should get you most of the way there when combined with diet and exercise with very little "vibes" involved.

CollinEMacon I run a software book club

What are your software book recommendations in general?

I often find that the material in the classics (programmatic programmer, mythical man-month, etc.) are so ubiquitous that I don't get much from actually reading them.

CollinEMacon What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud_factory

Scammers aren't always acting on their own free will.

CollinEMacon What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)

You very well may have been talking to victims of a fraud factory.

CollinEMacon How much electricity does AI consume?

From the article: “The tl;dr is we just don’t know.”

CollinEMacon Give Us Something to Look At: Why ornament matters in architecture

Thanks for sharing this.

The picture that's being painted online over the last few years has ultra-modern super-minimalist architects on one side and hyper-traditional maximum-maximalist architects on the other side.

I haven't seen many actual architects giving their take on it (they're probably out building stuff).

CollinEMacon MemoryCache: Augmenting local AI with browser data

I'm confused by the example they gave.

> What is the meaning of a life well-lived?

Is the response to this based on browser data? Based on the description I was expecting queries more like:

> What was the name of that pdf I downloaded yesterday?

> What are my top 3 most visited sites?

> What type of content do I generally interact with?

CollinEMacon The Onyx Programming Language

Yeah but we have a lot of languages that do that now. Some of them are even mentioned on Onyx's homepage.

CollinEMacon Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees in Its Games Division

It's a much larger percentage of their Games Division specifically. This might be a big indicator of where Amazon is headed in regard to video games.

CollinEMacon How to pronounce the trickiest English words

It totally blew my mind when I found out Spanish has different words for these: "se" (1), "tú"/"usted" (2), "ustedes"/"vosotros" (3)

CollinEMacon You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed

There's some irony in the writer recommending books and videos to help with digital hoarding. I now have two more books sitting in my Amazon wishlist.

On another note, I recently started using Obsidian and it really is as good as they say. I also use Remember The Milk for my daily TODOs.

CollinEMacon Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

I can't really imagine a future without Tupperware to be honest.

CollinEMacon Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year

According to Amazon it's been streamed a ton.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/lord-of-the-rings-ratings-r...

The obvious caveat to this being that we don't know how Amazon collect this data or if it's even accurate in any way. Furthermore, even if it has been viewed a lot, that could just be a result of Amazon putting it on the homepage of the app/webpage (which would make it easy to play accidentally) and autoplaying it after finishing other Prime Video content.

CollinEMacon How I stay reasonably anonymous online (2022)

> I usually delete comments, threads, or other content I put up on the internet after it has served its purpose. That means for example deleting my Reddit comments after a month or two, keeping my email inbox near empty (in case it gets hacked), deleting old accounts, and similar things.

This seems a bit extreme to me.

CollinEMacon Where did the QWERTY keyboard come from?

I've never understood the Morse code explanation. How does QWERTY help avoid Morse code errors?

CollinEMacon New study measures grammatical complexity of languages

It would be nice if we could just see the list of languages ordered by complexity. I can't derive a thing from the map in the article.

CollinEMacon Compiler Development: Rust or OCaml?

Why does it seem like I'm hearing about OCaml all the time now? It could just be frequency bias but it wasn't that long ago that I'd never heard of it and now it seems to be getting a lot of attention online.