Hacker News Reader

akovaskion The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair

> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.

That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.

akovaskion Why birds do not fall while sleeping

The last image is a pair of pictures of Needle Tower and Needle Tower II, which you can search for if the image doesn't load in the article for you.

akovaskion Keeping Teeth Healthy

You judge it as if you're getting this advice from an acquaintance or a stranger. It's just some guy talking about his experience. If something from the post is novel to you, maybe ask a dentist, or find standard practices that dentists generally recommend.

akovaskion Memorizing the first 100 perfect squares (2022)

I recently leafed through "Mathematics for Engineers"[0], originally from 1926, which begins with many such methods for making arithmetic easier. Though maybe not always more space efficient.

Luckily I got to use a calculator for school.

[0]https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.11725/page/n9/mode/1up

akovaskion Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads

Really they should charge more when it is colder out. What's the point of a free market if it can't respond to consumer demand? Our ChargeTooshie seat warmer uses our comprehensive 5g wiretapping network and innovative AI to provide drivers the absolute maximum value that they can afford. With ChargeTooshie, drivers can be assured that they will not freeze to death, because we now accept credit!

akovaskion A SpamAssassin Surprise

Several email providers provide catch-all/wildcard functionality which can handle arbitrary tagging.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...

https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/receive-only...

https://support.google.com/a/answer/12943537?hl=en

akovaskion Serpent OS Pre-Alpha-0 released

Its fairly common to refer to Linux distros as an OS, or even include OS in the distro name (Pop!_OS, NixOS, CentOS). Linux is the kernel, and disros add stuff to make a functional operating system.

akovaskion CSS adds vertical centering in 2024

It should be left aligned, but it should also be vertically centered within the resizable black-bordered box.

akovaskion Show HN: Learn Blender shortcuts with lots of tiny videos

In case anybody is wondering, Firefox doesn't block muted videos by default. The above poster had changed their settings to block muted video, which can be overridden per site.

akovaskion Spice: Fine-grained parallelism with sub-nanosecond overhead in Zig

One thing I noticed was that when I build in Debug mode `zig build`, I got:

    Baseline,3.92809172
    Spice 1 thread,19.1012624

When I built with ReleaseSafe mode `zig build --release=safe`, I got:

    Baseline,3.264224280000001
    Spice 1 thread,3.78043278

So Spice does have a notable degradation of performance if not built for release. The baseline implementation does not share the same degree of degradation when built with the Debug zig build mode.

(zig 0.13.0)

akovaskion Spice: Fine-grained parallelism with sub-nanosecond overhead in Zig

I'm not terribly familiar with this space, but I do like the concurrency model presented here.

I think the README here is very well written, and I have a good idea of what's going on just from reading it, but there are a few areas where I'm left scratching my head. Thankfully the code is fairly easy to read.

akovaskion A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

huh? The current XPS 13 and many other laptops do not have a barrel plug. My Dell laptop without a barrel plug didn't become bricked when it ran out of battery.

akovaskion Test firing of a 3D-printed rocket engine designed through computational model

One might argue that CAD is "computer-aided human design" whereas this engine was designed using "human-aided computer design". That is, the computer isn't aiding in the design, the computer is the designer (and I assume humans are just providing some basic constraints). The difference between the two is subjective and perhaps meaningless, but it does poetically describe the technological advancements that are being made in physical design.

That being said, I think stuff like this is governed by homeostasis: bleeding-edge technological advancements eventually get turned into regular features. In this case: I'm sure we'll continue to see CAD software to build more complex structures with less human intervention; and maybe eventually designers will expect their CAD software to generate whatever rocket engine their product requires.

akovaskion IEEE will no longer accept Lena image in submitted papers

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

Huh, I did not know that this image was supposed to be sexually suggestive.

akovaskion How the codpiece flopped

Do you have a source for the claim that sperm count for many mammals has been declining?

I was only able to find "Sperm counts in semen of farm animals 1932-1995" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9401823/

Which states that farm animal sperm count has unchanged or has increased over time.

akovaskion Harnessing heat from wastewater

It might help to think of the tub of water as a heat battery/capacitor: the energy you put in is the energy you get out. So, yes, it will slowly absorb energy when you are heating the room. However, it will also release an equal amount of energy as the room cools down. On that front I'd say it equals out.

Technically the tub of water will change how fast the room changes temperature. Because the difference between the room temperature and outside temperature affects the rate that energy escapes the room, this could affect how much energy the room emits to the outside. For example, imagine that you had so much water that the room only went down to 65 degrees F throughout the day; that means that you put enough energy into the bath battery to heat the room to 65 degrees F throughout the day.

The other way that you would be consuming extra energy is by evaporating the water. At <70 degrees F and little air circulation, I don't imagine that evaporation is consuming a lot of energy. A bath tub of room temperature water doesn't seem like it would be very effective as a swamp cooler.

My guess is that a bathtub of room temperature water wouldn't measurable affect your heating bill.

akovaskion A tale of two teenagers (2023)

In sixth or seventh grade, we had to write an essay on a historical figure. The teacher gave us a long list of people and we could choose whoever we wanted.

I chose a random name from that list: Immanuel Kant. We went to the school's small library, and I searched and found the one book by Kant in the library: The Critique of Pure Reason. I quickly scanned through the book to see what I can find out about this Kant fellow, to be greeted with sentences such as:

> For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?

and

> Whatever may be the content of our cognition, and in whatever manner our cognition may be related to its object, the universal, although only negative conditions of all our judgements is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgements are in themselves (even without respect to the object) nothing.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm

I remember closing the book, thinking to myself, "I can't write an essay about this guy", and finding it funny that his name was "I. Kant". I don't remember what I actually ended up doing for that essay. The deadline was very short so there was no possibility of reading a whole book, let alone that book (which anyways wasn't a great reference for writing about Kant, the person).

As an adult, I still find Kant's serpentine sentences incredibly difficult to digest. (Though some of the problems may originate from the translation.) Maybe I'm just a rube, but I wouldn't consider a sixth grader to have average intelligence if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.

Update while writing this post: I'm not well versed in philosophy, so I quickly perused the Wikipedia summaries for Deontology and Consequentialism. The criticism, "The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism." is rather shallow, wrapped in juicy terminology from moral philosophy. Though, I still think it's a notable feat for a sixth grader to read and even somewhat comprehend Kant.

akovaskion Double-mirror illusion

Also, if you're on mobile, switch to the "Desktop site" mode of your browser. I wasn't able to see the figures without setting this.

akovaskion On Limited Editions (1998)

I think the term to search for here is usually "price fixing" and maybe "price gouging". Usually artificial scarcity is used to raise prices. Think cartels, monopolies, Da Beers diamond artificial scarcity, drug companies hiking prices.

I also vaguely recall some fashion brands destroying products that haven't been sold. Probably more controversial if you have to kill an animal to create the product.

Similarly other stores, like grocery stores, throw out or destroy unsold goods.

Some of these are easier to rationalize than others, but I think all have generated some notable level of hate from society.

But they keep on doing it, so maybe it's worth it.

There's also Cryptocurrency and NFTs to consider.

Edit: Adjusting my tone a bit: I do think that society has stopped at least some price fixing. Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

> The lysine cartel was the first successful prosecution of an international cartel by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in more than 40 years. Since then, the DOJ has discovered and successfully prosecuted nearly 20 international cartels.

akovaskion Tuxedo Pulse Gen 3

I was a bit surprised when I read "4x USB, HDMI and 2x Mini DisplayPort". It looks like it doesn't have 2 actual Mini DisplayPorts, but instead the 2 USB-C ports support DisplayPort 1.4.

It's been a while since I was tempted to buy a laptop (granted I don't really look), but this configuration and price seems pretty great.

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

akovaskion Tuxedo Pulse Gen 3

> It also doesn't say not soldered on RAM and SSD which means it probably is.

> Just like the CPU, the LPDDR RAM is also soldered onto the motherboard [...]

> Another advantage of LPDDR RAM is its space-saving design, which creates room in the ultra compact chassis not only for the performant and quiet cooling system but also for 2x upgradeable M.2 SSDs [...]

akovaskion 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

> when you too are ready to grow up

The antagonism is from effectively calling them immature (and thus implying that their opinion is coming from a place of naivety) and placing yourself above them. This is a pretty standard insult that people use to try to be persuasive.

I suppose you could say that posting that insult itself is so immature that readers should recognize it as a joke, but I suggest that you should try to stay away from sarcasm when posting in online forums. It can be quite difficult to detect the sarcasm of a bunch of people you don't know.

I could end my post by sarcastically saying "don't worry, you'll learn what a joke is when you grow up", but hopefully you can imagine how some people would take that as a genuine insult rather than a joke. Though it would be punchier ending.

akovaskion Underwater Chain Saws

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37840371

akovaskion My favorite Vim oneliners for text manipulation

> Did you try it?

Yes

> Because that's not what it does. [...]

I don't see how your description significantly differs from my description.

akovaskion My favorite Vim oneliners for text manipulation

It actually increments each word it finds, so while most words will turn to "1", "356" will become "357". I have to imagine this ending up in the blog is the result of a copy-paste mistake, a LLM hallucination, or something similar.

Others have commented on built-in vim functionality for counting words, but assuming the author copy-pasted a similar looking command, they may have intended something like:

    :%s/\w\+//gn

Knowing that the n flag will return a count instead of doing the substitute may be useful to know, but I personally don't need a search count very often.

Knowing that you can execute a vimscript expression on each search match using \= is also cool and I was unaware of such functionality. https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#sub-replace-expression

akovaskion Dots Will Be Connected

"Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer" came up from a DDG search.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1968, "The Summer Way"

Transcript: https://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_4_gOLK6y...

Video (quote around 10:26): https://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshal...

akovaskion When Americans lost faith in the news

> There is no diversity in ownership nor opinion now. There is the one party...

Is this referring to the "Republicans and Democrats are the same party" trope, or is there a different intended meaning here?

You're comment indicates you think there are multiple parties. I'd assume you mean the Republicans and Democrats, but both of those parties are supported by various news outlets. So yeah, I don't think I understand what is trying to be conveyed here.

akovaskion Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

> I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app

Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to?

I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.

akovaskion Save web pages as PDF in Firefox for Android

Awesome! This isn't a feature I have a frequent need to use, but it was always disappointing to try to save a page in Firefox for Android and being unable to do so. Now there's one less reason to open Chrome.

akovaskion The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)

With a 7 digit denominator, 5419351/1725033 is quite nice. The offset jumps down to 2.21447793E-14.

https://gist.github.com/akovaski/ce7a4230ed2ea0275f70e33c77e...