Hacker News Reader

bcravenon Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time

https://www.lego.com/en-gb/holiday-gifts/advent-calendars

24 doors on the Lego calendars too

I let Home Assistant turn it on once the house is empty, and then off once someone is home.

bcravenon "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

Imagine a video is recommended that is for a specific how-to search; if it has a poor rating then you can be confident it's a bad match for your search.

E.g. a plumbing video for fixing a tap with a bad rating is unlikely to actually tell you how to do so.

bcravenon Betty White's shoulder bag is a time capsule of World War II (2023)

Perhaps there were spares in case anyone lost theirs? I don't know enough about the military to say whether that's likely, but as sensible chaps it seems a reasonable assumption.

bcravenon Roc Camera

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 (2013)

Interestingly it wasn't the OCR that was the problem but the JBIG2 compression.

bcravenon Roc Camera

It's not the camera that is important though, but the technology:

https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/inde...

bcravenon Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

Third example may sway you;

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1688383/porn-industry-...

bcravenon Friendship Begins at Home

Also if someone were running a system to screen out trigger words, such as "suicide", it would not trigger when the word is obfuscated like this.

Self-censorship is a worrying trend.

bcravenon Carbonized 1,300-Year-Old Bread Loaves Unearthed in Turkey

Author: https://www.anatolianarchaeology.net/author/oguz/

They may be using AI for some language conversions, but I think they are real.

bcravenon Carbonized 1,300-Year-Old Bread Loaves Unearthed in Turkey

"NO PART OF THIS WEB SITE [...] MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, COPIED, PLAGIARISED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING [...] VERBAL CONVEYANCE"

Imagine asking people not to talk about your work. Astonishing.

bcravenon Google's $1,800 foldable phone is first smartphone to explode in durability test

Fully agree. Watching that chap go ham on trying to destroy phones then give them some sort of reliability score always rubbed me the wrong way.

bcravenon Smithsonian Open Access

Well I'd very much like to see those!

bcravenon New computer model helps reveal how the brain both adapts and misfires

Woe betide those who try to communicate science to a wider audience

bcravenon GrapheneOS is ready to break free from Pixels

Actually I'm not sure it's reasonable to complain about a feature that you're informed won't work, on a phone that you're using in a region it's not meant to be in, doesn't work.

Yes, Pixels should probably be sold in all markets. But if you're explicitly circumventing that you shouldn't be surprised.

bcravenon Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid

>The mom and girl stayed with their neighbor for three days, he said. He doesn’t know where they are now.

bcravenon What Japan Taught Me About American Trains

The answer is, of course, in the article

bcravenon Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs

Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).

_This paragraph becomes more astonishing as it goes on_

bcravenon TiVo exiting legacy DVR business

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...

In rare cases, you may decide that you wish to allow very specific access from the local network without authentication. You might do this if using a third-party Plex app, which doesn’t support authentication, for instance (though all modern official and third-party apps should already support authentication).

To make an exception, look in your Plex Media Server’s advanced network settings, under Settings > Server > Network > List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth.

Here, you can specify LAN addresses as either a specific IP or a IP/netmask (to specify a range). Separate multiple values by a comma and be sure not to include any whitespace (e.g. spaces).

bcravenon Tesla Cybertruck Isn't Allowed in Germany, Not Even the US Army Can Change That

(U)

(N)

bcravenon Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams

Some of the torrent releases out of MVGroup are done as h266.

I think as technical tests as much as anything, but they're interesting to see.

bcravenon Aphantasia and Psychedelics

I listened to a recent podcast that discussed why giving people with aphantasia the chance to see images is ethically complicated:

https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/listen/hyperfixed/third-eye-bl...

(Presented by Alex Goldman from Reply All)

bcravenon How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)

I know of no phone camera that can produce the portraits of an X100s 23mm lens at f/2.

bcravenon How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)

See the trick is not to buy it new!

https://www.mpb.com/en-uk/product/fujifilm-x-t5

Or, as I have done myself and would recommend:

https://www.mpb.com/en-uk/product/fujifilm-x-t50

(Smaller, lighter)

bcravenon How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)

This comment exhibits the normal sort of hideous gatekeeping attitude that is common in photography.

bcravenon Farewell friends

Somehow the fact 'Readers' and 'Words' weren't capitalised meant I completely missed the association. Thanks.

bcravenon Farewell friends

I have to admit I don't understand the epitaph "Family • Readers • Words"

Is it a reference to something?

bcravenon New in Firefox: Visual search powered by Google Lens

Ooh go on, tell us all about your homelab where you run multiple proxmox servers and have pi-hole DNS blocking for your whole family.

bcravenon How to draw construction equipment for kids

The best part about that site is the page on helicopter landing. Delightfully niche.

https://www.diggerland.com/helicopter-landing/

bcravenon Find SF parking cops

This is a poor format to put forth an argument in.

bcravenon The Fisherman and His Wife (1857)

I'd never heard of that story before I heard the Decoder Ring episode. America sounds _wild._

https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2024/09/how-if-you-g...