Hacker News Reader

Eelongateon NASA returns Hubble to full science operations

Making 'science' a fungible unit allows scientists in one domain to leach off the reputation earned by scientists in another domain. Accomplishments in physics lend credibility to accomplishments in social science, due to the commonality of both using the scientific method, even though the scientific method is not uniformly effective across all domains of inquiry.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

I've used GPS navigation extensively on my phone with no internet service; I drove clear across Canada with my simcard pulled, it works fine.

If I had to guess, these conflations of cell service with GPS are a product of misleading UX created by Google. OSMAnd makes the nature of GPS clear, displaying a count of satellites it's managed to hear. Enough satellites to get a location good enough for car navigation almost always takes less than a minute.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

> You might be misunderstanding. They parent may be saying that they download the maps and just search for a road and use it like a paper map.

Maybe? When hiking it makes some sense to forego GPS to save battery power. I didn't consider that possibility when I commented earlier, but in my defense the context of the comment is using maps without an internet connection.

> Also, "GPS" in the United States colloquially refers what people in the UK would call "sat-nav"

Sure, but sat-nav doesn't require internet service...

Eelongateon NASA returns Hubble to full science operations

>nobody seems to notice/care as they have their minds blown

Some people do, and erroneously conclude that "space is fake". This would be laughable, if not for the part where they then persuade their friends and family to feel deceived. Artificially coloring images without disclosing it clearly upfront in a highly visible manner, ideally with some sort of watermark on the image, is the sort of white lie that contributes to the public's growing distrust of authority.

Yes, I know the caption below the image usually disclaims it. But as you say, most people don't notice or know it until somebody points it out to them, and too often the somebody who points it out is somebody who's peddling nonsense of their own.

Eelongateon Firefox 95 Released

Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

> The other aspect is that these torpedoes can still be wired to the ship so you can continue to use the host sub's arguably better passive sonar systems and let the attacking torpedo get VERY close.

I don't know if there is any public data about how long the guidance wires are, but tens of kilometers seems like a pretty safe bet. Classic wire-guided TOW missiles have 3+ km of wire and are much smaller than a Mk-48 (about 6" diameter, vs 21")

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

> > There are many criticisms you can make of the PRC, but “they are incapable of assuring that their official position is heard clearly and loudly” is...not among them.

> What an incredible claim. Americans think China is literally committing a Holocaust right now.

You have conflated "heard" with "believed". The CCP is heard, not believed. Everybody knows the CCP denies those claims; the CCP has been heard.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

The submarines in question, Seawolf class SSNs, have nuclear reactors but not nuclear weapons.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

> Not as good as GPS obviously

It is GPS.

Eelongateon A submarine's weakness: its software?

It certainly does. Pure inertial guidance with smartphone sensors is garbage. I must say I'm a bit startled by how many people evidently think that GPS is an internet service...

Eelongateon ADSL works over wet string (2017)

Sure, but it's still not AC. It's VDC or PDC, not AC. It's not AC if the Current isn't Alternating.

Eelongateon Numerics applied to Casimir geometry generates intersection with Alcubierre warp

> There were times when physics PhDs would chuckle and say absurd about going faster than sound.

Oh come on now, that's obvious bullshit. The term "sound barrier" doesn't predate the 20th century and was only popularized during WWII. Any physicist claiming it was a fundamental limitation would've needed to be completely ignorant to the existence of artillery. Who were these supposed physicists and what specifically did they claim?

Eelongateon “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

I'm no physicist, but doesn't the Standard Model fit on a few pieces of paper? That the universe has rules that are a lot simpler than the behavior that emerges from those rules doesn't seem like novel claim. Wolfram's idea to examine the universe by exploring CA-space is the novel part I think.

Eelongateon USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables

I could have sworn they changed it to 'Uncertain Serial Bus'

Eelongateon Smart Homes Alter Human Behavior

Is the mercury switch the important part of that, or the bimetal strip that's tilting the mercury switch? I think you could probably find mercury-free bimetal thermostats still, though I haven't looked.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

What it was "optimized for" is irrelevant if it's legible and has good information. The mpv manual read in a web browser is both of those. The VLC manual is a mediawiki (if we're talking about subjective appearances, mediawiki has always been fugly) that's both sparse and out of date. Changes to mpv make it into the manual because they're both in the same repo and people making changes to the code are expected by community convention to have the corresponding updates to the manual in their pull request. This doesn't happen with VLC.

The only upside of the VLC manual is that only one in a thousand VLC users will ever need to look at it in the first place. mpv's manual is necessary but high quality, while VLC's manual is low quality but extraneous.

Eelongateon ADSL works over wet string (2017)

Front door etiquette still works basically the same way. A doorbell rings and the whole house hears it. Once person goes to answer it, then passes off the conversation to whoever it's actually for.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

I guess the F1 screen is really important to you, but I'm looking at VLC's F1 screen right now and it looks worthless to me. It's just some links to online materials. Could mpv have that? In principle, yes. Is it worth the development effort and technical debt? I doubt it. If you're the sort of user who balks at this, it will be the least of your worries anyway and you should almost certainly use VLC instead. I think VLC is a very good program (albeit with very poor documentation) and I recommend VLC to almost everybody who asks me for a recommendation. The reason VLC's poor documentation doesn't stop me from recommending VLC is because I think most users will never need to consult the documentation in the first place.

But, if somebody is the sort of user who might find themselves wanting to consult the VLC documentation, say because they are trying to write their own extension to VLC, recommending mpv instead is a no brainer for me. mpv doesn't give you an F1 window with a clickable URL to the manual, but anybody who's capable and inclined to write scripts to extend their video editor will not be hung up by such a minor omission. And when they do manage to land on the documentation for either editor, mpv's documentation has a much better chance of actually having the information they're looking for.

> What problems does that have? What arbitrary commands do you have?

Concrete example: I control mpv from a media library application on my desktop. I can load a playlist of files from that media library into mpv. When mpv starts playing the next file, it can send a message to the media library notifying it of this. VLC can do all of that too; so far so good. In addition to playing the playlist, from within mpv I can also select files (without playing them), tag them, or delete them. When my mpv scripts do these things, they send events to the library application over the same interface that the library application is using to control mpv. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no VLC equivalent so I would need to open another communication channel between the two (instead of doing this, I decided to drop VLC support entirely.)

> I don't hate CLI, I hate having a GUI that is more complex than a GUI for playing videos

I'm starting to think we're having a fundamental communication breakdown here, because this seems completely backwards to me. VLC is the one with a complex GUI, not mpv. mpv has a very simple GUI; too simple to a fault [from the perspective of most users, who are better served by VLC.] If your needs are solely to play a file, just drag and drop the file into mpv and it will play just fine. It only gets more unfriendly when you want to change parameters and configuration, which VLC has very complicated GUIs for while mpv does not.

> Is there a practical reason to not have F1 invoke the shortcuts

In principle it could display shortcuts in the psuedo-GUI. Displaying the shortcuts in another window or in another application would require platform-specific code to be maintained for this, and I'm guessing that none of the mpv developers think that is worth their effort.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

> but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files.

I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage.

> I can control through d-bus

Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capable than an old IR remote control. If my VLC lua scripts can send arbitrary messages across that interface, I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere.

> ncurses

I've controlled ncurses interfaces before using Tcl/Expect. It's a world of hurt. Besides, I thought you hated terminal emulators (frankly, I do...)

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

> Take a look at VLC documentation (https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/)

Trust me, I have. Extensively. The mpv manpage (which is actually written in the reStructuredText markup lanugage) is comprehensive and easy to read. Era of text terminals? Give me a break, I just gave you a link for reading it in your browser, just like the VLC wiki, except the mpv manual is very comprehensive and up to date, while the VLC manual is scattered, sparse, and frequently out of date. I practice terminal emulator avoidance; I don't edit text in a terminal emulator, I don't read manpages in a terminal emulator, and I almost never start mpv from a terminal emulator either.

> So it's a personal preference not that mpv is superior to vlc [...] most use cases [...]

I have been upfront about that. I recommend VLC to the vast majority of users, including all of my family and most of my friends.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

It has the JSON-IPC interface, which is much better than vlc's telnet interface (which is barely documented at all.) The pseudo-gui is written as a lua script and can be swapped out with your own to suit your personal whims. It comes with builtin support for youtube-dl/yt-dlp (which work on a wider range of sites than vlc's equivalent feature), which can be modified to allow changing the format/quality on the fly. Relating to that, scripts can add new protocol support for things like torrent files, magnet links, etc. With the right scripts and configuration, you can turn it into a capable image viewer suitable for reading comic books (cbz files).

I have a gallery view (for the playlist) and a contact sheet view (for the current file) that both have thumbnails. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get this in VLC (surely there must be a way, right? But the documentation is crap and I can't find it anywhere in the menus or preferences window. All I can find is the playlist view that doesn't have thumbnails.)

But the big differences which enable everything else is better documentation, particularly for the scripting and IPC interfaces. If you can find the documentation for VLC's Lua interface please let me know, because as far as I can tell that documentation is nonexistent. It's certainly not in the manpage, nor the worthless F1 window, nor can I find it on the VLC wiki). It's difficult to figure out what VLC's Lua interface is even capable of, but if you go by the addons listed on VLC's website the sole advantage of VLC's Lua scripting seems to be the ability to create basic GUIs.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

> Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player.

It's very much like learning to play a piano by the same twisted logic.

> where is the manual for it even?

Here: https://mpv.io/manual/ Linked from straight from the mpv homepage. Also linked from the github page. You can also read it here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/mpv.r... Or you can read the local manpage on your computer using the manpage reader of your choice (I prefer KHelpCenter, but you can use `man` if you like that more...) If you have trouble finding the manpage, then you've definitely taken a wrong turn somewhere and should

> What is the benefit of not having a right click menu

The mpv psuedo-gui is drawn using the libass subtitle rendering library. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It's cross platform, so the same psuedo-gui code works the same on every platform (unlike the MacOS specific menu code.) It can be modified, extended, replaced or supplemented using Lua or JS user-scripts using the same libass techniques (the psuedo-gui mpv ships with is implemented as a builtin Lua script.) The biggest downsides to this are being limited to doing things subtitles can do (which doesn't include right-click menus) and the fundamental weirdness of using a subtitle library to render a GUI in the first place (personally I think it's endearing, but I acknowledge that it's weird.)

> People who want to memorize keys for their media player? Is that not like a CLI user?

No? Shortcut-focused GUIs and command line interfaces are not the same thing. Incidentally, mpv does have a embedded REPL if you do want to control it using a commandline interface. You can access it by pressing `. It is useful in some scenarios but you'll soon find it's a hell of a lot more convenient to use keyboard shortcuts instead. I virtually never use it except for testing when I'm writing mpv user-scripts.

> but who do you recommend this player to?

Only to people who are able and eager to hack on their media player. Suppose you want to control your media player from another application; vlc can support this with the telnet interface, but it's very limited and poorly documented. mpv's IPC interface is extremely powerful and well documented.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

> There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for.

It is true that mpv usually doesn't have a GUI menu for this (I believe it does on MacOS, but lets ignore that.) However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Speed is changed using the [ and ] keys, which is documented in the manual. Obviously this is not friendly to novices, but it certainly does not require using the command line.

> Its minimalist for no good reason

It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software must aspire to be good for everybody.

> what is the benefit of the design?

To you? Probably none. So I don't recommend it to you.

Eelongateon ADSL works over wet string (2017)

Couldn't you send an amplitude modulated signal down a DC line by modulating the voltage but keeping that voltage always above zero? If the current never actually reverses, it wouldn't be AC as I understand it. It would be PDC, pulsed direct current.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

> MPV needs learning CLI to play videos.

It certainly does not. You can launch mpv by clicking/doubleclicking on any media file in your file manager, the same as any other. You can also drag media files to your mpv icon, or drag media files to a running mpv instance.

Edit: Also I don't know where you found that "migaku" guide, but it's crap. Why is guide written in english telling people to download a config file that sets Japanese as the default audio and subtitle language? Why the hell is it turning hardware decoding off by default? Also, sudo to curl into usr/local/bin/youtube-dl when you could just put yt-dlp/youtube-dl in the regular mpv configuration directory? Fucking... why?

Do yourself a favor and read the official documentation if you really want to give mpv a try.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

MPC is better? Maybe if you run windows. But if you don't then MPC isn't only not better, it's completely irrelevant. VLC on the other hand supports pretty much everything under the sun, so you can safely recommend it without playing the "what kind of computer do you have?" game.

Eelongateon The team that powers VLC (2019)

I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.

Eelongateon U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

There is also the matter of "the one democratic state in a region" being BS, or incredibly disingenuous at best. Even if you don't count Lebanon as a democracy (presumably not counted because Israel and Hezbollah hate each other) there is the matter of America's role in toppling other democratic governments in the region, particularly Iran in 1953. Furthermore, America seems to have no trouble cooperating with other monarchies around the world, so the premise of America only being able to cooperate with democracies is nonsense. What's so heinous about Jordan being a constitutional monarchy? Nothing really, it certainly didn't stop America from defending Kuwait (also a constitutional monarchy) when Iraq invaded.

Eelongateon YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

> Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order.

That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.

Eelongateon U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

NSO is skilled at hacking androids, not making them. You know that; you are arguing in bad faith.