Hacker News Reader

gravitronicon US EPA sets health advisory limits for PFAS from 70 ppt to .02 ppt (2022)

Has those tests been repeated by any other researchers? The company refutes the results and I've never heard of this group previously. Not refuting the risk but would like corroboration

gravitronicon Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

When you send a cold email (initiating a thread or first email to someone) does it land in the recipients inbox or spam?

This was what eventually broke my self hosting plan.. too many emails sent and never received.

gravitronicon You can't build a moat with AI

Before I clicked I expected the article to be about LLM's failures in structural engineering applications

gravitronicon Ukraine Is the First "Hackers' War"

Even if you wanted to go specifically about electronic hacks, there were electronic warfare officers flying in bombers since possibly WW2? Definitely soon after, my wife's grandfather had that role in Vietnam

gravitronicon Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the climate crisis?

For people who want to explore this potential future I recommend Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock as a near future sci fi read.

Not saying it will happen like that but he brings up some interesting potential cause and effect

gravitronicon Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the climate crisis?

Oh, people hit that level all the time indoors. One person sleeping in a bedroom with a closed door overnight reaches high CO2 levels. A classroom of students are swimming in it.

gravitronicon Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone

I like some TE gear.

But it would be an omission if we didn't also include the fact that TE hardware often has weird flaws like OPz cases never fit together properly even years after release and the more recent problems with shipping the ko2 sampler and broken faders.

gravitronicon [dead]

Which includes all classic valve games like portal and half life, as they were never updated to 64 bit.

If you bought those for OSX this is the end of the line for being able to play those games on that platform.

Not posted to incite rage, just elaborating on the impact.

gravitronicon HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true

Once a parcel is in the mail system, is it legal in the UK for anyone, including the sender, to pull it back out of the system?

gravitronicon Shopify live dashboard

I see lots of criticism in this thread and elsewhere about that carbon removed stat. I would love to see more productive criticism, where people make suggestions on how they could do it better, instead of just criticizing a company of this scale at least doing something. Or examples of companies that are doing a better job of it.

Personally I'd prefer if they didn't call it carbon removed unless they were actually doubling the shipping carbon removal, and they should call it offsets unless it's all coming from some of their direct capture partners (which iirc Shopify does buy from).

gravitronicon Rivian software update bricks infotainment system, fix not obvious

No no, I figured that out afterwards, in a past development iteration someone added it on purpose and then forgot all about it - "oh yeah we needed that to <solve some mundane problem>".

So... worse than subterfuge? That being said it only listened on the local socket, so it's slightly less bad, and I don't want to get into the myriad of correct ways that original problem could have been solved, but lets just say that company doesn't exist anymore.

gravitronicon Rivian software update bricks infotainment system, fix not obvious

oh, yeah, this place was a total shit show. BUT we were ISO9001 certified!! So we had source control (CVS) and a Process (with a capital P) to follow. In this case that code was added in a previous development iteration because someone needed to run something as root when a user pressed a certain button on the LCD panel in front and this was the decoupled solution they wrote intentionally. Somehow I feel like that makes it worse than if it was a malicious three letter agency lol.

gravitronicon Rivian software update bricks infotainment system, fix not obvious

I used to work for a company that built satellite receivers that would be installed in all sorts of weird remote environments in order to pull radio or tv from satellite and rebroadcast locally.

If we pushed a broken update it might mean someone from the radio company would have to make a trip to go pull the device and send it to us physically.

Our upgrader did not run as root, but one time we had to move a file as root.. so I had to figure out a way to exploit our machine reliably from a local user, gain root, and move the file out of the way. We'd then deploy this over the satellite head end and N remote units would receive and run the upgrade autonomously. Fun stuff.

Turns out we had a separate process running that listened on a local socket and would run any command it received as root. Nobody remembered building or releasing it but it made my work quick.

gravitronicon First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

> pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt

Glad we agree

If anyone's reading this and wants a decent resource I suggest Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

gravitronicon First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh:

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

gravitronicon X is reportedly selling inactive usernames for $50k

Oh fun, can you please give specific examples to what sort of thing is now allowed on X but not on facebook, that keeps you on X?

gravitronicon Are Microplastics Causing Upticks in Dementia?

I'm getting worried about the retainer I wear at night to prevent teeth clenching related problems. It's old and starting to decay.. time for a new one but what's worse? grinding my teeth at night or slowly degrading this plastic retainer and ingesting the wee bits?

gravitronicon Shopify files lawsuit over DMCA abuse

Sad no major platform implemented step two of the DMCA process as it was written in law (as far as I remember):

The subject of the DMCA takedown can appeal and then the original filer has a time period where they can escalate to a court case or drop it.

gravitronicon DAWproject: Open exchange format for DAWs

I mean, you could, but that would get really gross when implementing certain scales that are nowhere similar to the MIDI tuning (like working out the fractions for a 13-note scale)

gravitronicon DAWproject: Open exchange format for DAWs

At this layer of note information, fact is the data will be either sent to a MIDI device or a plugin as a MIDI event, so you might as well keep it in the native format and not convert to a frequency.

gravitronicon Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

There's other significant issues, such as concrete.

Read Bill Gates' "how to avoid a climate disaster" for a complete rundown, with receipts.

gravitronicon Doom for 16-bit DOS computers

Sweet, I can run it on my new book 8088 laptop

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005534146618.html

gravitronicon Degraded performance on ChatGPT

Let's not be ridiculous

gravitronicon Ask HN: What niche task/tool websites have you built?

https://synthmodes.com

Cheat sheets for multi-mode eurorack synthesizer modules. Before I made this the standard was to have a binder you flip through when going deep on a module

gravitronicon Most of my Instagram ads are for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts

If I remember correctly the ad was for a specific niche factory production line, like a complete pizza factory

gravitronicon Most of my Instagram ads are for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts

It was like, a picture of a building that they'd ship to you in pieces and you'd assemble, or at least in theory (what would arrive, who knows?).

The ad might have been for alibaba, stuff like this https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

gravitronicon Most of my Instagram ads are for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts

I've gotten into a nice algorithm niche of "sketchy scams" that I find endlessly amusing. A device that strips the coating off copper wires, "We'll buy catalytic converters no questions asked", a prison metal toilet / sink combo, temu vibrators, $40k aliexpress factories in a box, ...

gravitronicon The median return of 2022's SPAC mergers: -82%

We call those scams

gravitronicon British Columbia declares a state of emergency amid devastating wildfires

Reposting my comment:

warmer air holds more moisture, pulling it from the ground and holding it longer. Explains drier conditions and more extreme rainfalls when they do finally occur

gravitronicon British Columbia declares a state of emergency amid devastating wildfires

There is simple physics: warmer air holds more moisture, pulling it from the ground and holding it longer. Explains drier conditions and more extreme rainfalls when they do occur