Hacker News Reader

addy34on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Do you mean BYD? They posted USD1.2 billion in profit in the most recent quarter FYI, with gross auto margin of ~20%. Their domestic margins are not good, but they've have strong export growth recently and exports are profitable.

addy34on Keep Our Servers Running

Tax filings are available here:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

        Rev.  Costs(all)  Legal
  -----------------------------
  2019   37       37        0.2   
  2020   22       20        0.4
  2021   30       25        2.0
  2022   31       26        1.8
  2023   24       33        1.0
  2024   27       24        2.2

USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.

addy34on Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal

Not in those words, but the decision did give absolute immunity from criminal prosecution and civil damage suits for all core official acts and presumptive immunity for all acts "performed within the outer perimiter of his official responsibility". It also severely restricted the ability to gather evidence for acts that do not fall within this scope.

This is extremely broad, and not unreasonable to summarize as the president being able to do whatever they want without fear of criminal/civil consequences.

Suggesting that everyone should read the 120 page, highly technical decision and come to their own conclusions is not helpful.

addy34on Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quiet Enterprise Install of Beta 'Photos' App

"We are incubating a new photos experience in OneDrive"

MS no longer build apps it seems, but instead incubate experiences...What a comms team.

addy34on KDE onboarding is good now

I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).

That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.

addy34on Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

Let's not forget this gem in a memo from Summers:

>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...

...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...

...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted

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

addy34on Create personal illustrated storybooks in the Gemini app

>Try it today in the Gemini app. Available globally on desktop and mobile

Not quite. Gemini isn't available in Hong Kong. Unfortunately instead of telling Pixel users that, they updated their phones to use Gemini instead of the functional assistant, and then whenever the assistant is accessed, it just spins forever with a "just a moment" prompt.

It's not even clear why it's disabled, since it works just fine if you pay them for workspace subscription.

addy34on Solitaire

I wrote a cat-themed web version a little while ago for fun.

It's not overly configurable, but there are zero ads, trackers etc. and it's very lightweight with hopefully no (significant) bugs.

https://www.solitairecat.com/

addy34on Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16

The government currently tendering for providers of different systems. See here [1] and here [2]:

Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.

Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).

In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.

[1] https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-readies-age-verification-...

[2] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202409/australia-launches-te...

addy34on Defibrillation devices save lives using 1k times less electricity

Less than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which is itself a lower-energy alternative to the typical 1-shock defibrillation. Their "1000 times less" means three orders of magnitude. From the abstract of the paper:

We find that, rather counter-intuitively, a single, properly timed, biphasic pulse can be more effective in defibrillating the tissue than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which employs a sequence of such pulses, succeeding where the latter approach fails. Furthermore, we show that, with the help of adjoint optimization, it is possible to reduce the energy required for defibrillation even further, making it three orders of magnitude lower than that required by LEAP

Important to note that the study uses:

"an electrophysiological computer model of the heart's electrical circuits "

and

"a simple two-dimensional model of cardiac tissue"

addy34on Character amnesia in China

It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.

addy34on Character amnesia in China

It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.

Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.

This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.

It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.

It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.

addy34on The history of the barcode

Sure, but noone is forcing you to use Firefox. Getting a barcode from GS1 is mandatory if you want your product to exist in the modern retail world.

addy34on The history of the barcode

It does, but the only real requirement is to prevent duplicates. It's not a limited resource like domains or IP4 addresses. There's no justification for the subscription model aside from "because we can". They used to give out numbers in perpetuity, but eventually realized there was a lot more money to be made.

Dividing blocks over multiple competing providers is a good suggestion.

addy34on The history of the barcode

>An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned globally, every day, according to GS1, the organisation that oversees UPC and QR code standards.

GS1 are the ultimate gate keeping monopoly. They provide numbers as a service.

Most retailers like Amazon require you to have a GS1-issued barcode number on your product, and so you need to pay GS1 annually for the right to use a particular number. You can see the pricing here:

https://www.gs1us.org/upcs-barcodes-prefixes/how-to-get-a-up...

That's $250 upfront and $50/year for the right to use 10 numbers. What a business.

They get away with it by being a (tax-exempt) non-profit.

According to ProPublica, the CEO of the US division (Robert Carpenter) earned US$3.3 million in 2022.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/362...

addy34on ASML DUV machines used to produce Huawei Mate 60 Pro chips

For anyone interested in the the details, China Talk released a podcast last week on the updated export controls, which discussed the enormous quantity of ASML machinery purchased by China in the leadup to the regs being tightened [1].

From Bloomberg:

"China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared to 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in January to March."

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/emergency-pod-export-c...

[1] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9jaGluYWVjb250YWx...

addy34on Leaving China

Having lived in Taiwan both before and after China's crackdown in Hong Kong, I can say that post crackdown, I haven't encountered a single Taiwanese that wants any integration with China. They just want to be Taiwanese, which after nearly a century of being an independently governed country, is very different from the life on mainland China.

And yet most of the young people I encounter are somewhat resigned to the inevitability of invasion.

Prior to the HK affair, some older Taiwanese I met would suggest that closer integration could bring economic benefits, but I don't hear that these days.

With a number of HK journalists that I respect now in prison or having fled, I can only agree. The HK spirit and culture that once thrived in the city has all but disappeared, as the Chinese government applies their embrace and extinguish approach to cultural assimilation. When you can be imprisoned for life for uttering the wrong words, it tends to silence any dissent.

addy34on Show HN:I personally created a web service in japan. Please review if you like.

NSFW warning: The current home page has porn hub as a bookmark, which displays a bookmarked image that is likely not SFW (depending on your workplace).

addy34on Denmark to permanently cease using AstraZeneca vaccine

>At least you’re not in Macau, which is 30 sq km?

Macau has quarantine free travel with the Mainland, so that's >9 million sq km ;)

addy34on Denmark to permanently cease using AstraZeneca vaccine

>I wish I was living under (3). Sure it's painful in the short term, but compared to rolling lock-downs for over 12 months?

Having spent the last year under (3), I dream of 1 or 2.

That said, it very much dependent on the country. I live somewhere that is 20 x 20 miles in size (Hong Kong). The strictness of the border control (3 weeks in a hotel room if you leave and come back) make leaving pretty much impossible.

That, combined with extremely conservative local restrictions (not to mention the political situation) takes a significant toll after a while.