HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

inportb

564 karma · joined June 27, 2011

submissionscomments
inportb··on Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons
Try bamboo chopsticks. They are smooth because they are made parallel to the grain. There is minimal end grain surface area, so you rarely have to interact with the rough bits. And they do almost everything you'd want a consumer-oriented utensil to do.
inportb··on Burner Phone 101
Interesting, but you should probably use a control. Two phones, same hardware, same software. One inside the faraday cage, one outside, both in the same room with the same conditions otherwise.

Repeat the experiment a few times. Then cross over: liberate the caged phone, cage the free phone, and repeat the experiment a few more times. Or alternate the phones' positions between experiments. This mitigates hardware and software differences that might've been overlooked (such as a faulty battery, etc).

Analyze the results, draw your conclusions, publish, and encourage others to reproduce.

inportb··on When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
An interesting solution to a challenging problem. Thank you for sharing it.

I must admit, I had some trouble following the author's transition from "celebrity" with many followers to "bot" with many follows. While I assume the work done for a celebrity to scatter a bunch of posts would be symmetric to the work done for a commensurate bot to gather a bunch of posts, I had the impression that the author was introducing an entirely different concept in "Lossy Timelines."

inportb··on Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
Profit.

I use these guidelines all the time in the PDF format for free, and I'd love to have these in a structured format. For $3000/year you could get 50 users access to PDF prescription templates to speed up their work. That's not bad, but it's still all PDF.

For the nice low price of "contact us for pricing," though, you could have EMR integration. They couldn't justify $$$$ for EMR integration if all this information is easily accessible.

https://www.nccn.org/compendia-templates/nccn-templates-main...

inportb··on Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
Nothing, but I do find it amusing that we're comparing Boeing aircraft with guided missiles. How the mighty have fallen :)
inportb··on GDDR7 Memory Supercharges AI Inference
If it could really do that, then it wouldn't be DDR, right?
inportb··on Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary
Came here to say the same. The shipit program relieved a major pain point that prevented me from getting into Linux at the time: dial-up networking. It was a clever idea :)
inportb··on WatchYourLAN: Lightweight Network IP Scanner
I use this and this was the first issue I encountered. And I fixed it by making an exception for my home network.

Now if anyone showed up with random MAC addresses, well, it ain't me :)

inportb··on Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place
This is more similar to iVentoy, which implements PXE boot, but is closed source. netboot.xyz, on the other hand, requires boot images to be extracted and served in an iPXE-friendly format, which their CI/CD system does automatically. These solutions are good for facilitating OS installations across a fleet of computers on a network.

But for system rescue purposes, Ventoy still wins. You bring your own boot images, which could be arbitrary ISOs, and don't have to worry about networking availability.

inportb··on Student uses black soldier flies to grow pea plants in simulated Martian soil
It's not surprising that seeds need little more than moisture, earth-like atmosphere, and gentle heat to sprout. They contain all the nutrients and instructions required to start new life.

It's also not surprising that too much frass would inhibit growth. Even in earth-like soil, too much fertilizer is toxic.

But it's good to know that Mars-like soil doesn't inhibit plant growth.

inportb··on Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
I agree with you about YAML's treatment of tabs. I still use YAML because there's often no other choice.

Python is actually flexible in its acceptance of both spaces and tabs for indentation.

Maybe you were thinking of Nim or Zig? Nim apparently supports an unsightly "magic" line for this (`#? replace(sub = "\t", by = " ")`), and Zig now appears to tolerate tabs as long as you don't use `zig fmt`. I haven't used either yet because of the prejudice against tabs, but Zig is starting to look more palatable.

inportb··on A recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven
Even the camshaft-crankshaft system could be considered an analog computer that renders (in realtime) the positions of the valves based on the phase of the pistons. Any car with an internal combustion engine has "computers."
inportb··on Kolibri OS: fits on a floppy disk, programmed using interrupts
Hobbyist effort is human labor for the hobbyist's benefit, not someone else's benefit.

If the Kolibri OS folks experience unique enjoyment from developing this project that they would not obtain from Menuet OS, then the labor would not be duplicated.

inportb··on Insect-sized robots that can crawl, hop and turn
Would this be a tiny internal combustion engine?
inportb··on Water-purifying cup makes drinkable water from creeks and streams
As a result of using this device, you'd drink only the microbes that are not attracted to your electrode?
inportb··on Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation
This project seems to perform some rudimentary 3D to 4D conversion by rotating the object as a function of time. A first step, perhaps, on the path to inferring entire timelines.
inportb··on A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
Overlooking the cell chemistry issue...

... you cannot just dump unlimited current through a superconductor. Once you exceed the critical current density, your superconductor becomes a regular conductor.

inportb··on WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser
Ooops! I suppose it does not work in private browsing mode.
inportb··on Unix Koans
So it does! Neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage
inportb··on Show HN: I made a SQL game to help people learn / challenge their skills
Agreed. A good error message could help the user make it work.
inportb··on Show HN: I made a SQL game to help people learn / challenge their skills
Interesting idea. Didn't get very far in Firefox private browsing mode... https://imgur.com/LZBMPff
inportb··on Philly cheesesteaks became big in Lahore
You could probably make it kosher by using dairy-free "American slices."
inportb··on AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable
That "zero footprint" viewer over Citrix is susprisingly resource-intensive, even at 1080p with lossy compression. If everyone used it (say, if every workstation were a Citrix client), it quickly adds up. During peak hours, it positively chugs. Not sure if networking or compute is the bottleneck here. Perhaps you're right: some institutions have not caught up to this day and age of 4K streaming, and their pre-Netflix infrastructure is buckling under the weight of all these Citrix streams.
inportb··on StableLM: A new open-source language model
Ire is the result of irritation.
inportb··on AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable
Other than telehealth, we also use the bandwidth for remote desktops/apps and lossless high-resolution radiographic images. While one might expect this traffic to occur over local networks, many hospitals have multiple sites and partnerships that are connected over the internet. So, for example, one might operate the hospital's apps while sitting in the library at the affiliated university.
inportb··on The electron is so round that it’s ruling out potential new particles
If an electron were the size of Earth... did its mass increase or did its density decrease?

Would it be a black hole with a planet-sized event horizon?

What would happen to a sugar molecule on the north pole of a planet-sized electron with infinitesimal density?

inportb··on WebGPU Fundamentals
I think WebCPU is where it's at. First class virtualization in the browser so you don't have to emulate :)
inportb··on Show HN: Cadseer. a parametric solid modeling CAD desktop application
This appears to implement nontrivial features such as constraint solving and the ability to easily fillet edges.

I like the idea of programming geometry, but never got the hang of the OpenSCAD language. I eventually settled on JSCAD.

inportb··on Is it time to open source SublimeText?
What about CudaText? https://cudatext.github.io/
inportb··on Smart urinals stuck on boot at a gas station in Germany
You need Google Fiber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re0VRK6ouwI
Page 1 of 11Next →