Hacker News Reader

The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086181

You can still try it at https://chatjimmy.ai/, but it's running the rather outdated Llama 3.1 8B

bruteon Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting

Or from some months ago: Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791

bruteon Steam will drop support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 1, 2024

98% to be precise.

But still, with 132 million active monthly users, that leaves 2.4 million people who now can't access their games. So I disagree with that being "not worth the effort".

bruteon The Kobayashi Maru of comparing dates with times

Quick reminder that those timezone abbreviation are not unique (i.e. Philippine Standard Time)

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/

bruteon Robinhood, in Need of Cash, Raises $1B from Its Investors

https://xkcd.com/2270/

bruteon Scrollbar Blindness

Judging from this [1], even more countries don't use it.

[1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34950/which-large...

bruteon FDA Approves Clinical Trials to Use Antibodies from Recovered Patients

Do you have a source that young and healthy people are dying from COVID-19? Just curious.

The best I have is the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) which did a study on all 2003 dead (back when that was the number). Only 5 have been under the age of 40 and all of them had medical preconditions.

There are young and healthy people that show heavy symptoms and even need ventilation, but they all seem to survive.

bruteon Mark Text: Simple and Elegant Markdown Editor Focused on Speed and Usability

http://www.inkcode.net/qute does it quite similar (on a paragraph basis instead on a word basis) and it's open-source

bruteon A brief history of government efforts to stop people from wearing masks

Well, it's true. Here [1] is the corresponding law, here [2] is wikipedia with some expamples what counts as passive weapons (plastic film, basecaps reinforced with plastic, gasmasks, knee pads, … ) and here [3] is a case where a paramedic was sentenced for wearing a helmet.

[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/VersG/17a.html

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzwaffe

[3] www.labournet.de/interventionen/grundrechte/grundrechte-all/demonstrationsrecht/schutz-durch-selbstschutz-demonstrationssanitaeter-wurde-wegen-vermummung-und-passivbewaffnung-verurteilt/

bruteon The internet is an SEO landfill

then SEO would turn towards having an army of bots upvoting your product and downvoting the competitor. And if you have something in between to detect bots, users wouldn't want to use it (who would solve a captcha to help optimize search results?) and SEO would find ways around it

bruteon Fyne: Cross-Platform GUI in Go Based on Material Design

> Fyne ships with two themes by default, "light" and "dark". […] The default is dark

As someone who uses dark-themes for absolutely everything, which sometimes requires quite some hassle (I am looking at you Slack), I welcome the trend to offer a dark theme next to a light one. And having dark as default is even better. Thank you!

bruteon Sex censorship killed the internet we love

An eye-opening moment for me was when the game 'Bulletstorm' released in 2011. It was heavily criticized when it launched (and even before) but for vastly different reasons.

Germany had a HUGE problem with the violence (even the 18+ version has blood and dismemberment removed), US criticized the sexuality (two achievements were called 'topless' and 'gang bang'), and in Japan it was about the promotion of drugs (you could get drunk to perform extra skill shots) and to a lesser extent about the violence.

So every cultural region has its own ideas of what their children need to be shielded from (and what to blame social misconduct on). But they all fail to realize that the children of the others, who get exposed to the 'bad stuff', still turn out fine by some miracle.

bruteon Warriorjs – An exciting game of programming and artificial intelligence

You are probably thinking of http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

I played this like 17 years ago and to my most pleasant surprise, the project is still alive.

bruteon Attack of the Week: Group Messaging in WhatsApp and Signal

People are in jail because they felt secure using Telegram. It's the kind of people who should be in jail, but nonetheless it is beyond me how anyone could still use it.

bruteon Berlin's Plan to Become a City for Cyclists

The major factor here is Berlin's street width, which was chosen to be 22m by law in 1862 for fire safety reasons, much wider than other german cities. Consequently during WW2, Berlin proved to be a problem for allied incendiary bombs. At some point they were even building a to scale model city in the desert (Dugway Proving Ground) for testing various methods of igniting fire storms.

> Berlin, however, would “prove more difficult than most other German cities”, the leading incendiary expert Horatio Bond avowed before the national commission for armament research of the USA. “The building quality is higher, and the single blocks are better separated from each other.” As the tests at the Dugway Proving Ground showed, is “was hardly to be expected that the flames would jump unhindered from one building to the next”.[1]

[1] http://www.principality-of-sealand.ch/pdf/sealandbrief0503e....

bruteon Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal

> If they were stored directly as text files it would be slow to query them, it would be very hard to make it work on mobile (and even slower), and you wouldn't be able to easily create relations between notes and tags, notes and notebooks, resource links, etc.

Zim uses plain text files and folders. You can have images, tags, link to other notes, links to the filesystem...

Maybe I am not using it with enough files for it to be a problem, but I cant say that it is slow.

bruteon OpenShot 2.4.1 Released

I was really happy when I found OpenShot, because of it's clean and intuitive interface. Unfortunately it was somewhat unstable at the time (which seems to be fixed by today's patch, yeay!), so I was even more delighted when I found Shotcut, which is also free, open source and cross-platform, has an equally nice interface, but has an even bigger set of features.

bruteon Can you make your brain not see this circle illusion?

Minor correction: Predators like lions have no problem distinguishing individual members of a herd. The stripes pattern messes with the way blood-sucking, disease-spreading flies (such as horse flies or tsetse flies) see the world.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbzwpv/the-reason...

bruteon Can you make your brain not see this circle illusion?

Cats that grow up in an environment without any horizontal lines are unable to see horizontal lines [1]. This indicates that it might not be as much "evolution made me recognize these shapes" as it is "I learned to recognize these shapes since I see them often", which is more inline with OP's explanation. Of course evolution plays into what you are able to learn to recognize in the first place.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-food/201404/the-c...

bruteon Qbrt – Cross-platform HTML/JS desktop apps using the Firefox Gecko runtime

There are plans to rewrite Thunderbird because of this issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251

bruteon Last Words From Death Row (2015)

Nice to analysis but one should be hesitant to draw conclusions. Word frequency analysis lacks context. Same problem for approaches that separate words into positive and negative categories.

Example:

   I love to kill your family and the people that support my death.
   God is going to come for you and all your friends and I know that even your lord Jesus will not forgive what you have done.
   You will be sorry, you will see.

bruteon Wikileaks Documentary Makers Accuse Assange of Censorship

> always remember that he was arrested, then freed on bail, in both countries

That's not how I remember it, but given that it has been a long time (2010), I accept that my memory could fail me here, so I tried to google it.

Assange was questioned by the police during the preliminary investigation. He left Sweden about a month after the start of the investigations. The sources are a bit fuzzy then, Wikipedia writes: He left Sweden on 27 September 2010. According to one source his departure was with the permission of the Swedish authorities. Another source claims that the Swedish authorities notified Assange's lawyer of his imminent arrest on that same day.

So he was neither arrested in Sweden nor freed on bail in Sweden.

bruteon Facebook fined €110M for providing misleading information on WhatsApp takeover

Maybe it is because of Facebook Ireland Limited, which technically is the company everyone outside of USA and Canada does business with

bruteon Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

They actually talk about this a little way deeper into the thread. Here is a prototype they made

http://benbucksch.github.io/trex/fastlist-test.html

bruteon Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Night mode by luminosity inversion

DESCRIPTION: Contrary to some other suggestions here, I am NOT talking about f.lux / redshift or similar blue light filters here. These are supposed to make you feel sleepy, but all I want is to remove blindingly bright lights in the middle of the night. Here is the pseudo-code for how it could work:

    Get some region on the screen (possibly the content of a window)
    convert all pixels in that region from RGB to HSL (not HSV/HSB)
    if average L value in the region > 0.5 {
        for all pixels {
            L = 1 - L
            re-render pixel
        }
    }

Similar color inversion modes that I know of:

  - a Kwin invert script, possibly assigned to meta+ctrl+i in KDE based distros

  - MS Windows color invert mode: win+"+", ctrl+alt+i

Note however that these are inferior as they change color composition since they invert RGB channels and dont do a HSL conversion

bruteon AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics

Every german keyboard can do this. And a quick (non-exhaustive) google image search shows that many other keyboard layouts support it, e.g. french, turkish and portuguese (brazil but not portugal)

bruteon Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

That's a real unfortunate analogy you have chosen there :)

http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

bruteon Ask HN: What do you use to take notes?

Zim - A Desktop Wiki

http://www.zim-wiki.org/

Mostly because it just creates a bunch of .txt files, which are easy to handle (sync, backup, read via ssh, ...), and by placing them in subdirs you get a hierarchy. It is mostly for text, but it supports links, links between notes, links to files, pictures, code, lists, checkboxes, latex, gnuplot, ... and if you really need something you can create your own tool.

bruteon How Sweden Has Redesigned Streets to Route Around Bad Behavior

I'd like to add "kmh" to that list as well. (occurs in the article)