Hacker News Reader

bitdivisionon E Ink’s color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays

https://www.waveshare.com/product/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-...

The spectra color displays seem to be available cheaper than I expected ($250). Note that the refresh cycle is really long on these though.

I'm now tempted to put something together.

bitdivisionon E Ink’s color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays

The displays seem to be available for around $250

https://www.waveshare.com/product/13.3inch-e-paper-hat-plus-...

bitdivisionon Show HN: Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio

Very cool project! And well done on doing it without being a software eng!

How long have you been working on it out of interest?

bitdivisionon We're bringing Pebble back

No, pebble was definitely e-ink. And I think the most recent ones had colour epaper.

Edit: Sorry, looking further down I see that they say epaper, which is not the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845508

It looks like they're memory in pixel (MIP) displays, which are basically reflective LCDs I think.

bitdivisionon Build a Database in 3000 Lines with 0 Dependencies

Hunter S. Thompson copied The great Gatsby on his typewriter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696790

bitdivisionon Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18

I don't know, though certainly the experience is a lot simpler without the 15 minute timeout, painful login, and extra security checks I see on web banking.

Edit: Not to mention that many of the newer banks don't even have web banking. It's app only. Of course, its your choice to open an account there though

bitdivisionon Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18

Depends where you live. In the US, probably not much, but in other countries where transfers are ubiquitous, being unable to use a banking app could be a real problem.

bitdivisionon Uncut Currency

Danske bank? Isn't that Danish?

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

Looks as though it's just Ulster, Scotland and the Crown Dependencies nowadays

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_(Northern_Ireland) Danske bank is a Northern Irish bank (I had never heard of this)

bitdivisionon Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

Zigbee is wonderful, especially alongside things like zigbee2mqtt device support [0]. The downside is that its not uncommon to see non-compliant devices, or buggy implementations which is almost more annoying.

I recently installed a zigbee thermostat in my bathroom, which turned out to be flooding the network and causing the rest of my network to become unstable

[0]: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/

bitdivisionon Do We Need a 37-Cent Coin? (2009)

This made me wonder about the origins of the 0.99 price. I had always thought it was largely to avoid theft, by ensuring the worker had to open the till for change on every transaction. Which makes sense if there's no sales tax, but if there is sales tax then you might as well round everything to the dollar.

Possibly sales tax wasn't a thing when this became a common practice.

Makes the argument for the psychological effect of 0.99 vs 1.00 much stronger these days though I suppose.

bitdivisionon PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

There is https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel to tunnel over whatsapp

bitdivisionon RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio

Of course. I'm just suggesting an optional switch so that people who don't care about bandwidth have a better experience

bitdivisionon RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio

Might be worth considering a switch for this? I think a lot of people wouldn't care about the data, but the switching time is a little annoying at the moment.

bitdivisionon Ultrasonic Coffee

The transducers are fairly cheap from China [0]. I've thought about making a high powered bath before but never pulled the trigger.

0: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-ultrasound-transducer...

bitdivisionon Ultrasonic Coffee

I'll try it another day, the cleaner is packed away now.

Perhaps a ziplock bag would work well.

bitdivisionon Ultrasonic Coffee

True, the one I have was a China special, but does say 60W.

bitdivisionon Ultrasonic Coffee

I just tried this with a mug of coffee in an ultrasonic cleaner. Left it running for about 5 minutes with room temp water and ground coffee in the mug.

Compared afterwards to a mug left outside the ultrasonic cleaner. There was definitely more extraction in the ultrasonic cleaner, though the coffee was still fairly weak. Likely needs more time given that they are using a custom horn etc.

bitdivisionon Why Are Sloths So Slow?

No it's not. It's pronounced in the same way as the US, unless you're David Attenborough.

Edit: It seems as though others do say slow-th, but it's not something I've really heard from the younger generation

bitdivisionon What's New in Neovim 0.10

You might find relative line numbers useful. `set relativenumber`

bitdivisionon Pyspread – Pythonic Spreadsheet

Blender wasn't originally designed to be used for CAD type applications. It's possible of course, but you're likely better off with something specifically meant for precision CAD models. Specifically for 3d printing, I don't think blender is ideal.

I think most programmers like OpenSCAD - what better way to make parametric CAD models than by writing code?

bitdivisionon Show HN: Balancing game for the mobile browser with increasing difficulty

It's accelerometer based, though arrow keys do seem to work for me on Chrome / Linux

bitdivisionon Boy photographer seeks danger as others flee (1968)

I found a vietnamese blogpost [0] seeming to say he was active until 1975? But also mentioned at the end:

"Then the boy seemed silently disappeared from the Saigon newspaper village. No one knows the fate of What about the special reporter later"

There's also a comment saying that someone worked with him in San Francisco later on.

"That young reporter, also known as Hole M Cuong. Me and Cuong, worked in a San Francisco Wash Lab in 1977 until 1981, when I On vacation, I still work there and now I have the pleasure of mastering the Pentax-shaped machine that Cuong used to take pictures of at that time."

Perhaps someone more familiar with Vietnamese names could work out if he pops up somewhere else.

[0]: https://www.quinhon11.com/2016/08/lo-manh-hung-phong-vien-ch...

bitdivisionon What is going on in Argentina?

Yep, western union do tend to have a long kyc check after your first transfer I think. Which can delay things a few days. But after that I never really had a problem. I never heard of anyone getting their transaction completely blocked though.

bitdivisionon What is going on in Argentina?

This is very accurate. Normally western union will give you notes of 1000 pesos, which is just about manageable in pockets if you're getting a few hundred dollars.

I had one instance where there was only one western union I could use (because of the weekend) and they only had 100 and 200 peso notes. I walked out with 300 dollars worth of notes in a black bin bag and hurriedly tried to find a taxi before anyone noticed...

bitdivisionon What is going on in Argentina?

I guess some US cards also charge a lot for foreign transactions? I always paid in pesos on card, and in fact I don't think anyone ever even tried to charge me in dollars.

Also, with Uber, you're not likely to get many rides if you pay by card.

bitdivisionon What is going on in Argentina?

I was there a few months ago. For me (without dollars), the best way to get cash was to western union it to myself. They tend to have rates at or around the dollar blue rate. The only painful part of this is that if you send yourself more than around $100 you're going to have to try various western union shops before finding one with enough cash.

The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later.

There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/

bitdivisionon Moore vs. United States: Tax Unrealized Income Case

Sure, you're unlikely to be taxed twice, but there's still a high burden to having to file a US return every year.

The cost of getting a US / UK accountant to do the most simple of returns will run you around $1000 in total (at least in the UK), and the costs increase dramatically as your taxes get complicated.

That doesn't even get into things which aren't covered by the DTA, like ISA accounts in the UK. And worse it's extremely easy to run afoul of PFIC rules which lead to punitive US tax and a higher reporting burden if you do any investing.

Being a US expat is expensive if you don't want to give up your citizenship.

bitdivisionon Flawless – Durable execution engine for Rust

It's probably overkill depending on your use-case, but temporal has a python client: https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-python

bitdivisionon Show HN: Fire UK Calculator and Visualiser

I tried signing up to timeline, unfortunately have to pay for a trial in order to see the plan for a client

bitdivisionon Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched

You're building a banking backend as a side project? I'm interested. Is this more of a fun project, or is there a commercial end-goal?

Any chance it's open source?