Hacker News Reader

emdashcommaon Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025

I love these things. If you want to see them in action on video, check out clabretro on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@clabretro (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRO_M1S145M).

emdashcommaon “When you use a Walkman all the memories come back”: In love with old tech

Okay, I'm intrigued. Are the custom built RFID cards physical manifestations of albums which you can use to select and play a given album hosted with Navidrome? I'd love to see your setup/some examples.

emdashcommaon Ask HN: Easiest way to create a CRUD web app in 2024?

You might find PostgREST (https://postgrest.org/en/stable/) interesting. The 'Tutorial 0' gets right to the point with what you can do: https://postgrest.org/en/stable/tutorials/tut0.html

emdashcommaon 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221

My geometry teacher gave this to the class in high school. I love this sequence.

emdashcommaon Ask HN: Stem pioneers who also wrote about Philosophy and meaning of life?

I feel Richard W. Hamming fits this definition. You can find recorded lectures on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw) or books such as 'The Art of Doing Science and Engineering'.

emdashcommaon Ask HN: Best intro to programming book for 2nd graders?

Interesting to see this here, as I came to the thread with the intent to re-recommend QBASIC. I started around a similar age with QBASIC via 'QBASIC Programming For Dummies'. I was crushed when my dad's work laptop was upgraded and QBASIC was no longer bundled in (Windows 2000?).

emdashcommaon 1.56M dehumidifiers recalled due to fire and burn hazards

In my case, I had to take a picture that showed all of my name (on a piece of paper), the model number on the back, and the power cord having been cut. I submitted this and maybe a month later I got a check in the mail. I didn't buy the unit; it was already in my house when I moved in.

emdashcommaon 1.56M dehumidifiers recalled due to fire and burn hazards

I noticed a dehumidifier in the basement of the house I moved into. I did a search for the model number - looking for a manual - and found out it was recalled. Same thing - fire risk.

It's really unfortunate because I had a home inspection done after I moved in and part of that is I get an email every month about anything in the home being recalled and that wasn't part of it. Good thing I happened to search for that manual that day. I was able to get a partial refund on the thing, though, so that's good (it was quite old). It seemed to have been in a "fan" mode, not running as a dehumidifier (water tank was empty).

emdashcommaon Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

And for some reason some tech journalists don't account for it. "Ah, but this Thinkpad has an MSRP of $4,395, so it's much more expensive than the competition" when approximately nobody would purchase it for that price, and the consistently-on-sale price would be right in line with competitors.

emdashcommaon Pinkerton (Detective Agency)

> In 2023, Wizards of the Coast hired Pinkerton to seize products from the March of the Machine: The Aftermath card set for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering from a YouTuber who had received them in an order from a local game store[38]. The YouTuber published a video showing their contents on YouTube ahead of the release. The Pinkertons used intimidation and threats of detention, arrest, fines and jail to force compliance with their goal[38]. According to Wizards of the Coast, this was after several attempts had been made to contact the individual in private, with no response. [39]

I did not expect to see something like this in the article. What in the world?

emdashcommaon Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

This reminds me of the first 25 seconds of this clip from The Matrix: https://youtu.be/Smwrw4sNCxE

emdashcommaon Java 20 / JDK 20: General Availability

Here are some resources I've found helpful and have read or are on my backlog to catch up with these developments:

- https://github.com/wesleyegberto/java-new-features (terse, includes links to JEPs, good jumping off point)

- https://github.com/winterbe/java8-tutorial (quick tour through features of Java 8)

- https://winterbe.com/posts/2018/09/24/java-11-tutorial/ (same for Java 11)

Books:

- Java 8 in Action / Modern Java in Action (Raoul-Gabriel Urma, Alan Mycroft, Mario Fusco; 2014 and 2018 respectively)

- The Well-Grounded Java Developer (Martijn Verburg, Benjamin Evans, Jason Clark; 2022) - not specifically focused on new features but does cover them in the context of going deeper into Java and the JVM.

emdashcommaon Wi Flag (2002)

One of the impacted players had an in-game character named Wi.

emdashcommaon Choropleth maps with ggplot and R

Of note is that this is a chapter of the book 'Data Visualization: A practical introduction', by Kieran Healy: https://socviz.co/index.html

emdashcommaon ClockworkPi – uConsole, “fantasy console” for indie game developers

I believe the difference is the core module included, where (CM4 = Compute Module 4):

RPI-CM4 Lite: Raspberry Pi CM4 104000 lite (ARM Cortex-A72 quad-core, 4GB LPDDR4, WIFI 2.4 GHz, 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac wireless + Bluetooth 5.0, BLE)

A-06: A-06 Core module (ARM64-bit Dual-core Cortex-A72 + Quad-core Cortex-A53, Mali-T864, 4GB LPDDR4)

A-04: A-04 Core module (ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53, Mali-T720, 2GB DDR3)

R-01: R-01 Core module (RISC-V 64bit Single-core RV64IMAFDCVU @ 1.0GHz, No GPU, 1GB DDR3)

emdashcommaon Replit Mobile App

I agree. A great start would even be to do something like what iSH does, where you have buttons for tab, control, escape, and a similar joystick for the arrow keys. As of now, I can't issue a tab in the shell, for example.

emdashcommaon Halo system link still holds up more than 20 years later

I had a couple really long running matches on XBConnect. One in particular I remember was team shotguns on Lockout (Halo 2); the points-to-win was something absurd like 10,000 and it was lasted all day. People would come and go as the day went on. I took a nap, went outside, came back, picked up the controller, and got right back into it. Really not something, as far as I'm aware, you can do now on, e.g., Halo MCC over Xbox Live. Good times!

emdashcommaon Facebook approved paid ads inciting violence against the Rohingya

Interesting. I saw the same one, also multiple times.

emdashcommaon Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?

Two come to mind that I really enjoyed.

"Type-Driven API Design in Rust" by Will Crichton (Strange Loop) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnnacleqg6k

"Opportunities and Pitfalls of Event-driven Utopia" (QCon) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjYAZ0DPLNM

emdashcommaon Noise pollution hurts the heart

My car lets me configure it to work that way. It's one of my favorite features. I haven't heard it honk on lock in years.

emdashcommaon The VT-69 portable data terminal

If you haven't seen it before, you might enjoy this: https://youtu.be/2XLZ4Z8LpEE (Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal).

emdashcommaon Windows93

These are both references to the movie War Games (1983), which is excellent.

emdashcommaon Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490)

I don't remember much of the Arabic I learned, but I mastered the script because I found writing English-in-Arabic-script so much easier as a lefty that I wrote a lot of my notes that way.

emdashcommaon "I fly 747s for a living. Here are the amazing things I see every day."

Then, less than an hour after the long-stilled wheels of the 747 were spun back to life by the sun-beaten surface of an African runway, I'll be on a bus heading into Cape Town, sitting in rush hour traffic, on an ordinary morning in which, glancing down through the windshield of a nearby car, I'll see a hand lift a cup of coffee or reach forward to tune the radio. And I'll think: All this would still be going on if I hadn't flown here.

I finally made an account to comment on this. This is one of those realizations which, to me, still has its full effect every time I think about it. I think it really hit me the first time when I was on a road trip, passing city after city, neighborhood after neighborhood, house after house, and then thinking about the population of the area I just passed compared to that of my state, my country, and outward. Thinking about the challenges and experiences I've had among my friends and family, inside each of those houses, etc. It's a very powerful source of empathy.