Hacker News Reader

Nouser76on Sparrows may be 'canary in the coal mine' for lead poisoning in children: study

This leaves out the fact that attempting to make a human out of these just results in an abomination (and the ability to do alchemy without a transmutation circle).

Nouser76on “Attention assault” on Fandom

This may be tangential, but the interesting thing to me about the Warcraft Wiki is that it serves the lore and API information in great detail and is my go-to resource for those. But when it comes to precise data about the content (e.g. spell data and its coefficients), guides for current content, etc. Wowhead has much more relevant content in greater detail - which is a shame because to me the navigability and discoverability on Wowhead is nowhere near as good as MediaWiki.

My dream is somebody takes the data from Wowhead and ports it into MediaWiki and the community rallies behind keeping that in date, but I know it's a bit of a pipe dream.

Nouser76on “Attention assault” on Fandom

One of the best cases of leaving Fandom that I know of is the Runescape wiki mentioned in the article[0]. The community that ran the fandom wiki had buy-in from the creators of Runescape to assist with the transition, help with funding, and eventually direct integration into their games. In a game as information-dense as Runescape, that updates weekly, the wiki is basically a necessity for folks to play efficiently, or to find out how a new update actually works.

Fandom isn't the only bad wiki site though. Fextralife had (has? I haven't kept up) an issue where they were embedding Twitch streams on each page load, which was boosting viewer counts for whatever streamer they decided to embed on every page.

I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort to moderate.

[0]: https://runescape.wiki

Nouser76on Vanguard just went live and LoL players are claiming it's bricking their PCs

Unless they've moved backwards, that hasn't been doable for a very long time. The client in the past didn't have the information sent to it about things in fog of war. The closest was seeing a skill shot come across your screen and cheats gave an approximate location of where it was launched in fog of war.

Nouser76on Vanguard just went live and LoL players are claiming it's bricking their PCs

I haven't kept up on the current state of cheats, but 10 years ago there were cheats that would automatically last hit minions (necessary to gain gold), automatically path towards your cursor while aiming and targeting your skills, move you out of the way of incoming abilities, all with inhuman reaction times.

There was a motto through the LoL cheating community of "Spacebar to Win", where spacebar was the keybind for unloading all your abilities and trying to kill the opponent. A player with good game knowledge and game sense would be easily able to climb to Challenger (the highest rank bracket).

There was a bot that played as a support champion and with a basic decision tree it reached Silver 2. Someone wrote a neural net algorithm for it instead and it reached Gold 4.

Nouser76on Zama's homomorphic encryption tech lands it $73M on a valuation of nearly $400M

Just a note, Ethereum uses Proof of Stake now instead of Proof of Work, which is what drives the reduction in energy consumption.

Nouser76on Fine tune a 70B language model at home

Is there any framework/system that distributes the work across multiple GPUs on different computers over a network (LAN or WAN)? I'm not concerned much about latency or generation time, but would love to train or load up huge models and send jobs to run overnight.

Nouser76on BASE TTS: The largest text-to-speech model to-date

I've used coqui.ai's TTS models[0] and library[1] to great success. I was able to get cloned voice to be rendered in about 80% of the audio clip length, and I believe you can also stream the response. Do note the model license for XTTS, it is one they wrote themselves that has some restrictions.

[0] https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2

[1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Nouser76on Making TV Useful For My 94-yr-old Aunt

In my experience, modern entertainment takes too much cognitive load to get up and running. With streaming/on demand, I have to make pointed decisions on what show I'm watching. I don't always want to make a decision right now of what to watch, I just want to watch something that's good enough or fits a certain theme. TV Channel creation programs, like DizqueTV[0] or ErsatzTV[1] have taken the load off, or at least lets me do that cognitive work in advance when making the channels.

You still need some way to get input to swap between these digital channels (I use Plex to surface my shows and schedule), but if you have existing local content it really feels like the "old" way of doing TV. You can even add commercials between episodes if you wanted!

I'm not sure if I'd call this foolproof for a 94-year-old, especially since sometimes the software needs to restart, but it's a step above modern streaming IMO.

[0] https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv [1] https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV

Nouser76on We have used too many levels of abstractions

https://bulletins.psu.edu/undergraduate/colleges/behrend/sof...

Penn State has one.

Nouser76on Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

IIRC from reading a few days ago it was worth ~$60 USD.

Nouser76on Null Island

I'm a big proponent of having sanity checks that values are populated properly, because all it takes is some misalignment between the backend and frontend on the API definition to break some parameters (name mismatch, added in one not the other, etc.). When I work with latitude and longitude, I typically add a test location/customer/etc. at Null Island so that I (and QA) have a very easy time debugging this particular issue. It's come in handy a few separate times!

Nouser76on Flash Museum

Ruffle[0] can be embedded in your website to make flash work in modern browsers. Neopets actually did just this a few days ago[1] to bring back their catalog of old flash games.

So if you can find a way to write Flash (the old tools should still be fine, but I haven't looked too deep) you can leverage it and let folks play today.

[0]: https://ruffle.rs/

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/17/23798368/neopets-relaunch...

Edited for citations

Nouser76on New Yorkers Got Broken Promises. Developers Got 20M Sq. Ft

> The standard penalty for a violation is $5,000, which is a fraction of the value of the bonus space developers receive from the agreements. For example, the owners of 325 Fifth Avenue have been assessed a total of $54,000 in penalties since 2015. By contrast, the bonus floor area that the developers gained could be worth approximately $80 million if used for residential space, based on 2022 sales prices provided by Jonathan J. Miller, a New York City real estate appraiser.

When the penalty is this much lower than the benefit, it's just the cost of doing business. I wonder if this same problem would happen if the fine was scaled to better reflect the increase in value.

Nouser76on RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator

I recently installed Clone Hero, with my only PC Guitar Hero-like experience being Frets on Fire probably 15 years ago, and I was blown away by how it felt exactly like Guitar Hero.

FoF felt so clunky whereas Clone Hero is a delight. It handled high FPS well, the song interface looked exactly like Guitar Hero, and the customizability is the icing on top. The community has ported over basically every song from every Rock Band or Guitar Hero game, so there's more than enough content. Clone Hero was so smooth I bought a wireless receiver to use my old Rock Band drums and play with my wife. It's a blast!

Nouser76on Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

I don't know that it's a great plan to do a blogpost and in-app notification as the first round of reminders and email on the day of the change. Both the blogpost and in-app notification requires you to explicitly go on GitLab and see there's a problem. Maybe there's a reason to avoid it, but emailing from the get-go seems like it is the right move for transparency and not rug-pulling.

EDIT: clarified antecedent

Nouser76on Xbox 360 Architecture

Super exciting read! I was interested in the Xbox 360 modding scene and re-reading this brought back a ton of memories from reading about all this stuff the first time!

Thanks for compiling this, the quality is excellent and the content is approachable.

Nouser76on AWS SNS vs. SQS – Main Differences

>SQS has a many-to-one relationship. You can send messages to a queue from many different producers but only one consumer can be defined. A consumer is another application, most often some compute instances such as Lambda, EC2, or Fargate.

My understanding is that you can have multiple consumers of an SQS through the use of visibility timeouts[0]. Once a message is consumed it is as if that message doesn't exist for all other consumers until it reaches a timeout period or is marked done by that consumer. You can also manually mark a message as being ready for other consumers. This moves the message back into the queue for the other consumers to see.

I'm going to be linking this article to my team. We've been talking about moving to SNS/SQS/etc. and this article helps understand the use cases and distinctions better.

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQS...

Nouser76on Show HN: HomeSheet – easy-to-use home inventory software

One interesting use case to me would be cataloguing features of an item you own. When you are dealing with insurance, they will reimburse you for a product of like kind and quality. For example, if you have an older consumer stand mixer that uses metal gearing instead of plastic gears (like lots of modern consumer stand mixers), then they might be forced to give you a check to buy a commercial stand mixer that does have metal gears. Adding more features typically means you will get a better payout to replace it - you get Venn diagrams of functionality that only an expensive replacement will fully cover.

I'd love to put in a product code and import functionalities of that product. The data integrity and seeding might be tricky to pull off, but it'd become extremely valuable for anyone going through insurance.

Nouser76on Why People Are Acting So Weird

What's humorous to me about this is that both ideologies can probably make this claim. I know a lot of people who are pro-vaccine and mask mandates that are mad that this pandemic is still going on because of people believing misinformation and refusing to do their part. I know people who are anti-vaccine and anti-mask mandate who are mad that they are being "forced" to vaccinate (in effect, because of businesses adding requirements - the government itself is not forcing vaccination for the general public). Both would say the other side is causing their strife. Both are right, if you accept their axioms/premises (which I don't think is reasonable for both sides).

Nouser76on Some tiny personal programs I've written

I have a local media collection that I like to have as background noise/entertainment while I work. One thing I didn't like about self-managed libraries vs radio/television/etc. is that I still had the cognitive load of choosing what to watch, specifically. So I wrote a small program to take a list of shows and shuffle them[0] then interleave episodes. Depending on when you start this channel, it has a time offset so you're dropped in the middle of an episode (just like channel surfing!), and has support for showing a certain show only in sequential order[1], and even adding commercials between episodes.

[0] Native shuffle in my media player didn't feel random enough, with a poor play count distribution. Switching to programmatically shuffling means I can also weight things so that a specific show is more/less likely to show back-to-back.

[1] I actually only consider the smallest continuous run of unwatched episodes, starting from the end of the series, and interleave vs shuffling the episodes.

Nouser76on A database of broken things to identify common failure modes and how to fix them

I absolutely love this! I've been trying to get more into re-use of my existing possessions, and this is helpful for fixing whatever breaks.

I think it would be useful for answers/fixes to have a permanent vs temporary classification, because there are some problems where you can it permanently at a higher input or do a band-aid fix you re-apply later but that takes 1/100th the time. For example, I had a Razer Deathadder mouse where the scroll wheel would double-scroll and continue scrolling after I stopped scrolling. I temporarily fixed it by shooting some compressed air in the scroll wheel's housing, but this had to be repeated maybe 6-10mo later. I could have disassembled my mouse, maybe done something to the PCB or switches inside, and permanently fixed it but that's a lot more work and more outside materials.

Adding this to my bookmark bar, looking forward to consuming and contributing in the future :)

Nouser76on Why does my diet soda taste off? Aspartame hydrolysis

Honestly, I have the opposite experience. I pressurize around 50-55PSI and do at least 2 carbonation cycles, venting in-between. Using cold water is also key, so I keep a 2L full of flat water for later carbonation - we swap between 2-3 bottles. I've recarbonated flat Dr. Pepper and it truly tasted like a fresh cracked can, carbonation and all.

We've also tried carbonating blueberries, which was really interesting. It didn't work great, but we noticed the fizziness and it'll probably be something I try again soon - perhaps using a chamber with a bigger opening than a 2L's.

Nouser76on Why does my diet soda taste off? Aspartame hydrolysis

Honestly, I made my own using this[0] setup and I've never been happier. I had Sodastream before and the cost of refills and inconvenience of restocking them meant that I didn't actually use it that much. I bought some fruit extracts on Amazon, put a few mL in a 2L of water, and have delicious seltzer water without vendor lock-in. Now we need to refill our 10lb tank every few months, unless there's some leak/gasket problem (which has happened once or twice when the cats play near it).

You can make it more automated if you'd like with some sort of automatic agitation to dissolve the CO2, but it hasn't been too big of a bother for me to manually shake it yet.

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/pros-cons-diy-carbonation-rig

Nouser76on Show HN: Magistrate – Plaintext legal contracts for developers

This is interesting! I'm going to throw a few questions your way, please feel free to answer as many or few as you'd like. A lot of these are stream of thought things too, so apologies.

Do you see this product serving the lawyer-lawyer use case, lawyer-individual use case, or to an individual-individual market?[0] As an individual, I feel like there may be a lot of friction in drafting and sending a contract for another individual to sign. The chain of custody/assurance of no editing is one aspect that would drive me to do this process through a lawyer (or any other document signing company, but I don't have any experience with them).

Can I request/propose changes to a document sent to me? Or is this more for final drafts to be sent for final signing? Being plain text, I imagine diffing could be very straightforward.

It seems to me there's an assumption that email access is enough to validate you are the person this is intended for. I wouldn't be surprised if other online offerings like this had similar assumptions, but I'm not sure if I agree with the premise. I would imagine an entity sending a contract could include a PGP key, and you signing it could also sign the message, but a lot of this seems like a post-signing check, not a pre-req to sign.

I like that there is a style manual that formats the draft. I know it exists as a guideline for non-digital uses too, but conforming to a standard in the digital representation should make sharing and templating more standardized. Not a question, just something that excites me as not-legal-expert person.

Do you think making a plugin for Microsoft Word that calls your website would be a middle-ground for moving people into your service?

I like how you mention IDEs as well. I truly do not know the current flow for making a contract, and assume it is that there are templates that you change to match the specific situation. Completing templates in a guided manner seems like it could be a big deal, especially if there are sub-templates for each variation that a section would have.

Overall, I'm excited. I think the legal system has a lot of pain points for lawyers and individuals alike. Some of those can't be fixed, but tech can definitely solve some, and I think this is one of the problems tech CAN help with.

[0] Lawyer in this case can also mean a business' or other entity's legal counsel.

Nouser76on Former nuclear leaders: Say ‘no’ to new reactors

I don't know if I'd use proportion of national energy use when a reactor offers a fixed output while each nation's consumption (and area for alternative renewables) can drastically differ.

In 2019, the 93 nuclear reactors in the US produced 809.41 terawatt-hours of electricity[0]. Each reactor, as an average, produced about 8.7 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. Using a list with the power consumption per country[1], it seems like everything beneath rank roughly 100[2] would have their entire power needs met by a single reactor performing at the avg return of a US reactor (assuming peaks can be met as well).

To me, that seems promising and exciting. Smaller (by landmass) countries may not have the same ability to deploy renewables across wide swaths of land. A nuclear power plant can offset some of the necessity for land to scale energy use in a green-powered world without relying on importing energy.

I'm not sure that this is a good enough argument on its own to develop nuclear, especially given some of the lifetime costs, but I think it's a reasonable concern to want domestic power stability.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

[2] Ranking is not representing total energy consumption per year, it seems, since sometimes the energy consumption goes up as rank decreases. Roughly though, everything in the bottom half of countries is within the reaches of at most 1 reactor.

Edit: Edited for formatting on sources

Nouser76on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2021)

  Location: USA
  Remote: Yes, fully remote only
  Willing to relocate: Open to move to Norway or Ireland
  Technologies: Java, C#, AWS, Python, Javascript
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattyoung219/
  Email: hnjobs@mattyoung.tech

Hi! I'm Matt and I'm a senior software engineer who has been either touring the hackathon circuit (over 30 in undergrad!) or solving problems at scale for over 7 years. I love working on projects where we are building a solution from scratch, getting a scrappy prototype out, and improving it from there. My dream job is to be a system architect, designing our system components, how to implement them, and then getting into the work of actually making and coding it. I find satisfaction from debugging issues and working in interesting problem domains.

In my free time, I like playing chess on the computer, board games with friends, and hanging out with my animals. Some passions include VR, IoT, and sustainable agriculture. I hope to move my lifestyle to one of small scale, sustainable agriculture over the next few years to reduce my carbon footprint and ensure my food is ethically obtained.

Feel free to reach out either for job opportunities or to discuss any of these passion areas of mine!

Nouser76on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2020)

Location: United States, moving to Pennsylvania/New York soon

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Spring, Java, C#, AWS, SaaS, IoT

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattyoung219/

Email: work@mattyoung.tech

Hey there! I'm a mid-level developer with experience in full stack development, GDPR compliance, SaaS, and getting scrappy PoCs off the ground. Outside of work, I'm interested in environmentally friendly agriculture and the emergent behaviors in MMOs.

I'd love to work on sustainable and ethical projects which improve the lives of everyday people. I'm available for contracting work, part time positions, or full time positions.

Nouser76on An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

Because diverse opinions lead to better end products. Having homogenized groups of people means you're leaving some viewpoints out, and those viewpoints have sometimes been extremely helpful for me as a software developer.

Nouser76on [dead]

If you're like me and forgot to look at the publish date, the article is from mid 2018 and not recently.