Hacker News Reader

halfdanon 1M+ German households have hung solar panels off their balcony railings

German here.

I have four panels that are plugged into a 5.12kWh battery. Battery is controlled by a small 3-phase meter and automatically feeds power in when usage is there.

From May to early September the battery and panels were enough to cover almost all power usage in my household.

halfdanon Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed

I, a non-smoker, would like to not walk through clouds of smoke.

halfdanon 5.6M vacant homes and counting: There's a housing crisis brewing in the US

They mean to cover their loan payments they need to pay >50% of their income.

halfdanon Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

Portfolio Performance (http://portfolio-performance.app) does just that.

halfdanon [dead]

I'm not quite sure how to place this. For general app telemetry there's https://opentelemetry.io and for tracking user behavior similar to how it's explained in your docs it looks like https://segment.io would be the closest competitor.

How is telemetry.sh different from the above-mentioned?

halfdanon ICQ will stop working from June 26

In the purest sense of those two words it was a social way to interact with a network of people?

halfdanon Superconductivity scandal: the story of deception in a physics lab

The big problem in academia very often is that you cannot simply take your research and finish your PhD elsewhere. With jobs you mostly can switch without losing much. Obviously depends on the situation.

halfdanon Heads up – effectively offline for now

Ok: How do you charge your device?

halfdanon Spotify starts divesting from France in response to new music-streaming tax

They basically killed off all the other minority languages they had in their country (like oxitan) and homogenised on standard French. Some irony in that.

halfdanon Indexing a billion pages

Except then it needs to be 30M pages/day. 3M * 30 days just nets you 90M

halfdanon Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

You’re looking at salaries for COBOL programmers in the UK which is a small subset of an already small market.

halfdanon Uber raises its minimum age for California drivers to 25

Ah yes, hence why Americans get their drivers permit at 16 and can shoot weapons and deploy to war shortly after.

halfdanon Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands

This seems a US centric problem. No one in Europe has carried checks since the 90s and large bank transactions are really a non issue as they resolve within a banking day and for a small fee you can usually do real time transfers too.

halfdanon Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands

And you clearly want to carry 3000+ EUR in your pocket than paying by card? Europe is safe, but I will definitely not walk around with that much cash on my person.

halfdanon Federal Judge Upholds Finding That AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable

What’s with the burden of proof? How do you prove that something was AI generated in the first place?

halfdanon Californian Roads Could Soon Have Speed Cameras Issuing Tickets

The way it works in Germany is that the fine will go to the owner. The owner can then accept the fine or identify who was actually driving when the offence was committed. In case this ends in the dispute the owner can be made to keep a record of all rides - with hefty fines should they not be accurate when a later offence occurs.

halfdanon A conversation with a newspaper owner raided by cops

It’s ambiguous and I also read “him” as the police chief being raided.

halfdanon Automatic music playlist generation via simulation-based reinforcement learning

Add to that having kids at home that sometimes listen to Paw Patrol and you will end up with a daily mix that consists of (in my case): Death Metal, news, random clip from paw patrol, German rap (I only like one artist not that genre in general).

I’ve been longing for a “kids mode” for a long time.

halfdanon Ask HN: When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page?

I think you misread the latter part of the sentence - OP said they provided the raw text in a comment. This is no different than some other paywalled articles posted here where the first comment usually just links to the web archive for a non-paywalled version.

halfdanon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://geekmonkey.org

Fifteen years of on/off blogging. Took it way too serious ten years ago and published anything I could and nowadays I just blog when I have something useful to share. Working on a couple of Elixir posts currently.

halfdanon Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

> I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.

That wasn’t what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time chat where there’s no easy way to search through history.

halfdanon Europeans drain billions from banks, fed up with shrinking savings

My guess is that their assets are similarly exposed like SVB or First Republic's. Any long term asset they hold has just lost a massive amount of value and so they need to make up for it by taking the ECB rate and not passing it on to customers.

The fee banks that do pass it on will only do so for newly deposited money.

halfdanon The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys (2016)

Amazing to see it still getting sold now in 2023.

I own two of these and while they now sit in my garage I've probably used them for 15 years. I bought them exactly for the reason laid out in the article - this router has solid hardware and the fact you could out just openwrt/ddwrt on it was amazing.

halfdanon WezTerm is a GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator written in Rust

Main thing was support for ligatures which Alacritty does not support: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

halfdanon Alaska’s Fisheries Are Collapsing

I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Arabia’s oil it will eventually stop being a sustainable source for the economy. Alaskan fisheries collapsing, rivers that support water hungry crops in the desert running dry might be first indicators of many that things are collapsing.

halfdanon RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

There's also a lot of pressure to deliver weekly episodes if that was your goal. I think at some point you become unable to reflect that you're approaching burnout and should have taken a break twenty episodes ago.

halfdanon Ask HN: EU Bank with Good API?

The author stated that Wise wasn't giving them sandbox access before signing up for a business plan which ruled them out.

halfdanon IPinside: Korea’s Mandatory Spyware

What frustrates me most is that every bank develops their own shitty-in-their-own-way app for this purpose. There really needs to be an industry standard and then apps like Google Authenticator to exist for this purpose.

I have multiple bank accounts with different banks and upgrading my phone is an absolute nightmare because of apps like this.

halfdanon Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

Funny. I just stumbled upon this yesterday. The only thing that I wish to see improved is having the backend serve the frontend from the same docker container. It's a bit of a hassle to use nginx as a proxy in the docker compose setup (or in fact set all of that up on my Synology NAS).

halfdanon ‘Why am I talking to 10 guys?’ The rise and fall of dating apps

Not to sound snarky, but what’s the point of chatting if you could hang out face to face and have the same conversation in a ten minute timeframe while seeing their reactions?