Hacker News Reader

anonomousenameon Ask HN: Fake AA batteries, or drain acid from current ones

Would not recommend using this on real batteries, but if you end up finding fake ones - spraying compressed air upside down (so it comes out as a liquid) and coating an object in it will make it very bitter, as compressed air commonly has bitterant in it to prevent huffing it. I used it myself to prevent myself from biting my nails.

anonomousenameon Explanation of Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm

http://12ft.io/suhailsaqan.medium.com/explanation-of-bitcoin...

There are plenty of ways to bypass a paywall - if you’re on HN I trust that you can figure it out.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: “Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.”

anonomousenameon Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?

Peacock (NBC’s service) is aggressively pushing Olympics coverage. I saw my roommate watching the Olympics, which he said was the first time he’d done since moving out of his parents.

anonomousenameon IPv4 Waiting List

NAT makes it significantly harder to self host things, and as a consequence limits decentralization.

anonomousenameon El Salvador's Bitcoin use grows but headaches persist

On the original network - about an hour and a half and ~$9. On the lightning network (layer 2) it would be about $0.09 and take less than a minute.

anonomousenameon TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

I don't know if TikTok has a better discovery algorithm - I think its just able to feed you with more videos in a set of time. A 1 minute average video time lets you recommend 10 times more videos than a platform with a 10 minute average video.

anonomousenameon Doing something is better than doing nothing for most people: study (2014)

How come? I'd argue that he made a decent point - one bad action of an individual doesn't invalidate everything else they've done. Using sarcasm can turn a bland, potentially combative statement like that into a joke.

anonomousenameon A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

After my sophomore year in high school, I had a summer job doing some IT work for a very small company that organized medical research. I was very familiar with Excel, which was a huge strength, but also my weakness. I hadn't truly programmed before, but was an expert at throwing together absurdly long, chained together formulas in Excel that could sanitize some data - After a few weeks of work, I ended up making a really poor Excel VBA code that had a time complexity of O(n!). It would take a few hours to churn through the dataset.

I went back this year to visit some of my old coworkers - some of whom I'm still good friends with - and saw they were using the same macro from years ago. I sat down, wrote a small Python CSV script in about 5 minutes that did what I was trying to do back then which ran in about a minute or so.

I was incredibly surprised that they were still using that from so long ago, but they explained that they just hadn't had anyone bother to fix it because they didn't know it could be done better. I'm sure your DOS program was the same, and that they didn't know any better. I wouldn't be surprised if that system was in use for another 10 years or so.

anonomousenameon A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

Given you were so interested in programming as a kid, how did you rationalize a career in engineering? I'm only asking because I'm doing something similar - I was mostly interested in computers/programming growing up, and am now in my second year of Mechanical Engineering (w/ CS Minor, which doesn't mean much) and wondering if I should just bite the bullet and switch over to CS all the way.

anonomousenameon Facebookbreach.com – check if you or your friends' phone numbers are now public

I see a lot of people saying that this is from 2019. In a sophomore in college right now most of my friends created accounts in early high school - well before 2019, yet none of us have found any of our information. The only explanation I’ve got so far is it may have been limited to those over 18 when the data was scraped - most of my friends would have been 17 then. Any other ideas?

anonomousenameon BleedingTooth: Linux Bluetooth Zero-Click Remote Code Execution

I understand the value derived vs. provided, but I disagree about it having to be altruistic. Someone donating large amounts of money to charity just to write it off on their taxes isn’t doing so altruistically, but is still doing a lot of good. I’d say we still owe them gratitude - or at the very least, the people they’re helping.

anonomousenameon Youtuber's 'Titanfall' style grappling hook pulls you up a tree in seconds

Although I'd agree that's the case for technical demonstration, (documenting an invention, publishing the results of an experiment, etc.) the goal of this video is to engage viewers, and entertain them, rather than documentation.