Hacker News Reader

hi-v-rocknrollon Α phase-locked auditory stimulation to treat symptoms of sleep onset insomnia

I've had periodic exploding head syndrome when I lie on my neck wrong. Random phantom noises like a single slap on the wall, gunshots, explosions, breaking noises, and crashes that aren't there but seem like they could be.

hi-v-rocknrollon As Cassettes Come Back, the Dilemma Is Finding a Tape Deck

> 8-track

Oh lord. Inevitably playing Barbara Streisand's greatest hits in my grandpa's light blue Dodge Dart.

While DAT was an expensive and equivalent stepping-tone, CDs were such a vast improvement because they delivered human perceptible Nyquist bandwidth-complete reproduction (PCM 44.1 kHz @ 16-bit 2 CH stereo). And still audiophiles and other sorts of liars insist on making absurd claims without evidence or demonstration that they "can tell the difference" between CDs and higher sample rates because it's simply beyond the laws of physics and limits of human perception. 44.1 kHz @ 65536 levels of sample choices is plenty. If anything, better quality DACs and preamps/amps would be more beneficial.

hi-v-rocknrollon As Cassettes Come Back, the Dilemma Is Finding a Tape Deck

Hides my Nakamichi DRAGON

I honestly can't see the appeal because tapes generally sucked. I prefer records or PlexAmp/Foobar2000/Tidal. If people in their 20's today want to pretend to time travel to 1984, more power to them.

hi-v-rocknrollon Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

Not hardly, and not in the way you think. They replaced their arguably purer ZFS port to replace it with ZoL. As such, it's nowhere near as tested and proven as existing solutions like ext4 and xfs Redhat has deployed to millions of machines for decades. ZFS has too many religious fanboys who hype it without considering that boring and reliable are less risky than betting on code that hasn't had nearly the same scale of enterprise experience.

hi-v-rocknrollon Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)

> Fry's Electronics

Silicon Valley's convenience store when JDR Microdevices, Graybar, and such weren't open... such a tiny addressable market that vanished to zero and failed to keep up with the advent of the internet. Other regional shops in other regions like B & H Photo at least figured out how to sell to a national audience and keep parity with their brick & mortar to complement each other (MicroCenter and Central Computer Systems also managed to survive). Fry's carried overpriced oddball inventory and failed to focus as Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy grew while even CompUSA (the long-time tech hypermart) died.

hi-v-rocknrollon Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)

I was told I managed to disassemble most clocks and electronics in my parent's and grandparents' homes before kindergarten age. I don't even remember most of it.

hi-v-rocknrollon Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)

So sad that the :CueCat didn't last until the year end of 2001. It was basically dead as soon as the 2001 catalog was printed.

hi-v-rocknrollon Eliminating Intermediate Array Allocations

Almost everything in (MRI) Ruby can be modified on-the-fly (which is itself problematic), except compiled-in methods and classes have some (lots) limitations on runtime modification of built-in things.

For example, here's one way to instantly break most programs:

    String.class_eval { undef_method :initialize }

While it might be possible with some other hackery to restore this, it's not guaranteed. In general, if you're modifying core Ruby stuff on the fly, it should be done safer on a limited basis with refinements. https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/2.5.0/syntax/refinements_rdoc....

hi-v-rocknrollon Striking port workers to return to work Friday as negotiators reach an agreement

Also, the ILA demands were reasonable while USMX was making absurd profits while not being reasonable themselves.

hi-v-rocknrollon Darwin was no atheist, he didn't say humans came from monkeys

Queue Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould.

hi-v-rocknrollon Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users

I see they are still a tiny regional provider in Santa Clara county, Santa Rosa, and LA. Had them when I lived next to eBay HQ ~15 years ago. https://bestneighborhood.org/sonic-availability/

hi-v-rocknrollon Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

Meta does a lot of things that don't scale for reliable/trustworthy systems and aren't suitable for all use-cases. (I also used to work there too.)

ZFS is only reliable where it was battled-tested: on Solaris. ZoL has been infinitely tinkered with and smashed up that it's nothing like running a Thumper as a NAS.

XFS + mdadm on Linux is, without a doubt, far more reliable than ZoL. Ask me how I know. I have the scars to prove it.

hi-v-rocknrollon Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

I used them for shared personal website hosting until the Obama era when they were mostly/all FreeBSD. I moved off around the time AWS came about.

hi-v-rocknrollon Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)

Easter eggs are joie de vivre character against the tyranny of mediocre, boring doldrums and people who suck the life and joy out of everything cool and interesting, or can't grok art.

hi-v-rocknrollon Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)

I prefer all bah corps.

hi-v-rocknrollon Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

Sonic is still in business? Had DSL with them 20 years ago.

hi-v-rocknrollon Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users

I get 250 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload on Spectrum (Charter Communications) in semi-rural Texas for $60/month. (I'm itching to switch to GVEC.) Recently, I had Google Fiber 2 Gbps symmetric with an option for 5 and 8 Gbps with a trial for 20 Gbps.

hi-v-rocknrollon Mystery creator of Bitcoin identified, new HBO documentary claims

This appears to be about as useful as mediums, fortune tellers, and alien history hunters.

hi-v-rocknrollon Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

Florida units.

hi-v-rocknrollon A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect

    #!/usr/bin/env runhaskell

^ Works just fine. No need to reinvent what already exists and blog throwing shade on an inability to learn shell scripting.

hi-v-rocknrollon Broadcom offers AT&T a 1050% increase to renew VMware contract

This is what late-stage corporate software product strip-mining suicide by footgunning looks like. Broadcom has just made it all that much easier for a new entrant to displace and replace similar functionality with less onerous terms and more consistent pricing.

hi-v-rocknrollon Kris Kristofferson has died

Well, except for people with Asperger's who don't care about pop culture. ;o)

hi-v-rocknrollon Kris Kristofferson has died

His part in Blade was pretty good too. I'm surprised he wasn't (type) cast more often for grizzled dude or a pirate.

hi-v-rocknrollon California bans legacy admissions at private universities

Yep. It's a cliche that the token scholarship students are paid to do the homework of and take the tests for the rich kids.

Large public research universities (in STEM) skew to far more rigorous than Ivies because they're always clamoring for prestige and ranking because of their inherent insecurities about not being said Ivy. Little/no grade inflation and less homework and test trafficking. TLDR: Generally, people who put in the work and get things done went to state schools; while people who earn MBAs and found companies like Theranos and FTX go to big name private schools.

hi-v-rocknrollon Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd

Cramming more NIH garbage down GNU/Linux users' throats.

Nanomsg ng and cap'n proto already exist.

hi-v-rocknrollon Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring?

The appropriate response is to reject working for unethical corporations, unionize, and/or form your own company to keep more of the value of your effort.

hi-v-rocknrollon Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a 'warrior class' to enact violence on others

Water is wet and this techbro profiteers from war, so obviously he's pro war and violence.

hi-v-rocknrollon Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a 'warrior class' to enact violence on others

US police are such a warrior class who have qualified immunity allowing them to kill people at random with little or no accountability. Blowing up people's houses and making people like Anthony Silva hospital-bound quadriplegic for a year before dying.

hi-v-rocknrollon US govt hiding top hurricane forecast model sparks outrage after deadly Helene

Public-private "partnerships". This is just one of a litany of perverse side-effects of letting for-profit corporations subsume government functions.

hi-v-rocknrollon Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

That would be totalitarian and goes against how open societies work. So not banned, but constrained to sensible limits. Speculative investment markets should also be limited because they are also non-value-add activities.