HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

fainpul

1,451 karma · joined April 27, 2025

submissionscomments
fainpul··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
Because they're not circular arcs with a constant radius. They're "squircles". Apple uses those all over the place.

https://arun.is/blog/apple-rounded-corners/

In my opinion it only makes sense for reflective surfaces (e.g. cars) to have nicely flowing reflections, while most of Apple's products have a matte finish. In 2D UI elements it most definitely makes no sense. But some designer must have been a big fan of this and somehow they now use it everywhere.

fainpul··on Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)
CARRION - a reverse horror game

https://store.steampowered.com/app/953490/CARRION/

fainpul··on 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
About that artist's impression with the blue spiral: wouldn't any planet or other object do one of these things:

- approach and hit directly, without spiraling

- approach, make a close fly-by and fly off into deep space again

- be in a steady, eliptical orbit

My knowledge is basically that of a Kerbal.

fainpul··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs
"delightful"
fainpul··on Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?
The user wants to "disable data collection". The manufacturer offers only a kill switch for all connectivity, with all the unwanted effects (which they helpfully list).

I've seen this pattern before. It's a lame cop-out. "Of course you can do that, but you'll have to accept all these negative consequences. There's nothing we can do about it. You brought this onto yourself."

fainpul··on For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa
The birth rate in Switzerland (just as in many highly developed countries) is already way below 2.1 children per woman, which would be required to sustain the population. Any population growth comes from immigrants. Xenophobic people are scared by that.
fainpul··on Waymo in Portland
YES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fm567YGy5c

fainpul··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
Because you can conceiled carry a smartphone? Please explain.
fainpul··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
Even after Google puts this crap in place, you can still uplodad your own apps to your own Android devices, using ADB. Doing the same for iOS, using Xcode, costs you USD 100 or more (depending on country) per year.

I'm in no way defending Google here, just pointing out you're going from bad to worse and think it's a good thing.

fainpul··on When the cheap one is the cool one
My personal perspective: 2 out of 3 MacBook Pro, I worked with, had expanding batteries after about 5 years. Replacement was a big hassle and the new no-name batteries are nowhere near as good as the original ones.

I sure wish it was as easy as a battery replacement on a Framework laptop (with an original part).

I know the Neo has easier battery replacement (not glued in), but still it has an iFixit rating of 6/10 whereas the Framework 12 has a 10/10.

fainpul··on AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
> We have people who can still do maths well after the introduction of the calculator.

I assume by "do maths" you mean doing simple calculations, like adding a bunch of small numbers, in one's head. That's because in many situations it's more convenient to do so, than using a calculator. So the skill is preserved / practiced, because a calculator is too cumbersome to use. The skills of most people settle at the equilibrium where it takes the same effort to take out the calculator and focus on typing, as it would to strain the brain doing it without a calculator.

> We have people who can still spell after the introduction of spell check.

When using spell check to fix your document, you automatically learn to spell. Your skills improve by using the tool. A better analogy to AI would be an email client with a "Fix all and send"-button, where you never look at the output of the spell checker.

fainpul··on AI created SE050 PCB for me and it works, damn (not an electrical engineer)
It created some "unconventional" routing :)

The PCB also could be much smaller and the price seems a bit steep, when the IC itself costs only about $3:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nxp-usa-inc/SE050...

fainpul··on Ask HN: Honest question about text-to-CAD. Is it BS?
My observation is that there's a certain group of programmers who "don't get graphical CAD" (their words) and prefer code based CAD. Now with LLMs, many of them like to spin up their own solution of "text to CAD", "image to CAD" or just another "code based CAD" and then do a "Show HN", praising it as the bee's knees.

When I look at their examples, the objects are usually non-functional, lacking precision and control, and could much more easily be done in a graphical CAD application.

I think some people just don't want to learn graphical CAD and hence are unable to see where their own solution is lacking important features.

fainpul··on nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL
Similar to mdview.io (markdown only, not offline) and a suggestion I made a while back:

https://tinyurl.com/mrpas5dc

fainpul··on Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns
It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
fainpul··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
Have you actually done it? Mine were 15" MacBooks, not 13" like in the video – maybe that makes a difference. It took me about 20 minutes. In the video the outer two battery packs just pop up without much resistance – that is not how it was in my case. It needed lots of acetone and patience and it was a messy process. I also had to apply quite a lot of force and was worried I might tear a battery pack open in the process (they were already swollen and looked like they might explode any moment).

The noname replacement batteries also have nowhere near the same capacity that the Apple batteries had originally.

fainpul··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
MacBooks are not easy at all. I did it twice and it's an annoying, dangerous mess (danger of tearing the battery open). Apple won't even bother with it. If you want an "official job", they will just replace the whole top shell including the keyboard, because they can't be bothered to remove the glue. And of course it's expensive because of that.
fainpul··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
You're wrong about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835530

fainpul··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
> without requiring […] thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.

No heat or solvents required. Sounds good.

fainpul··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
212 cycles, still 100% capacity (maybe 99.5 rounded up) "relative to when it was new". Doesn't that seem a bit dodgy to you?
fainpul··on Sudo for Windows (2024)
Of course it doesn't help if a beginner doesn't understand why their curl command fails. I wrote this half in jest, because everytime PowerShell comes up, people like to Bash it for its stupid aliases on Windows. Yes these aliases are really stupid, but if you are using PS on Linux, it's not an issue and if you are on Windows, you just remove those aliases and continue living your life.

Some examples from this discussion:

> The curl alias in powershell is not compatible so it is an inconvenience.

> *nix fanboys were totes fine with wget and ls being an aliases in PowerShell for years but when they found out what PS is coming to Linux they made a biggest stink.

> Only the old powershell.exe builtin to Windows has these aliases and it’s worse today because curl.exe is builtin and the curl alias takes priority when you run just curl.

> It's wget for Windows all over again

> Ah yes, the 'curl' alias in powershell, vs the 'curl.exe' binary that uses the traditional options.

fainpul··on Sudo for Windows (2024)
If you're on Windows, run this once:

  'Remove-Alias curl, wget' >> $PROFILE
Now please stop whining about these stupid aliases.
fainpul··on I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months
What the fuck is this? What even is a can holder for?
fainpul··on CadQuery is an open-source Python library for building 3D CAD models
True, the logarithmic scale lends itself to programmatic creation. I just wanted to show that the wrapping part is easy. Actually much easier – that code looks non-trivial.
fainpul··on CadQuery is an open-source Python library for building 3D CAD models
> wouldn't generally be easy to do with Fusion 360

Actually...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNiQJyRTs50

You would create the numbers and marks in a vector drawing program (Inkscape, Affinity Studio, Illustrator) and import that into Fusion.

fainpul··on CRISPR takes important step toward silencing Down syndrome’s extra chromosome
I understand the concerns, but some things just make life much harder. I would definitely want to spare my child from living with autism, ADHD and certainly Down syndrome, given the choice. It's not like we're talking about choosing eye color, height or gender here.
fainpul··on An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story
> AEPD […] known to be brutal.

Nice. I wish more countries had something like that. Many of these organizations are lethargic and have to be forced into action by civilian efforts or the press.

fainpul··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
> This article’s framing and title are odd.

It's called clickbait.

fainpul··on High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain
"Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to track and manage your app’s memory usage."

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

fainpul··on High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain
If it's an "array of strings AND numbers", then it should not be allowed to call the function with a string[], because those are different types.
Page 1 of 16Next →