HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jasinjames

224 karma · joined March 1, 2022

submissionscomments
jasinjames··on Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi
The F-35 uses firewire [0].

[0]https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060009084/downloads/20...

jasinjames··on Guilty Displeasures
Good news: video games are still fucking awesome. Since it costs nothing to make one, weird and smart and cool people from all across the world are trying the craziest stuff. It's true they're purchasable through steam, mostly. But there's spectacularly creative stuff at low or no cost. For example, skimming my steam right now I see:

- Tales From Off Peak City (surrealist walking simulator with a film camera mechanic; 9.99$)

- Baba is You (sokoban puzzler; 14.99$)

- Straftat (brutalist/surrealist competitive shooter set to jungle music focusing on randomized community-map style alternative fps gamemodes; free)

- Untitled Goose Game (light puzzle coop set to dynamically scored classical piano music; 8.99$)

- Norco (prescient pre-gen-ai pixel art VN about AI, faith, and the environment; 5.24$)

- Brazillian Drug Dealer 3: I opened a Portal To Hell In The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Aia I Need to Close It (it's quake; 3.75$)

jasinjames··on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs
Huh. I never knew "champing" was the proper spelling [0]

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/memmos/2016/06/09/605796769/che...

jasinjames··on List animals until failure
This is actually one of many techniques used to identify dementia symptoms. Hopefully 85 is enough to pass.
jasinjames··on Feds order Washington power plant to keep burning coal
Unfortunately the gov cannot decide who ultimately pays for the tax, just who ends up needing to put it on their balance sheet. If residential consumers demand is inelastic, relative to the commercial customers, then they will pay the tax. I have zero insight into whether domestic or commercial customers have higher demand elasticity, but it's worth being aware of this general principle [0].

[0]https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/...

jasinjames··on Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle
> If there are leftover funds, we’ll donate them to the OpenJS to continue defending civil liberties in the digital space. None of the funds will go to Deno
jasinjames··on New DNA Map of the Pistachio Could Create Better Varieties
wait, what fungus? I am allergic "to" exactly those two nuts but can't find mention of this online.
jasinjames··on Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base
I agree. An AI agent doesn't replace an engineer, it works on behalf of an engineer. The engineer who let this thing loose is, transitively, the software engineer that deleted the prod db.
jasinjames··on AtomicOS – A security-first OS with real crypto and deterministic language
From “test_everything.c”:

// ============== TEST 6: ¿Claude AI militar?==============

int test_military_ai() { printf("\n[TEST] Claude AI Militar\n");

    // Check if military AI exists
    if (access("kernel/claude_military_grade.c", F_OK) == 0) {
        printf(" Archivo existe\n");
        
        // Check if it's real crypto or fake
        FILE* f = popen("grep -c 'XOR' kernel/claude_military_grade.c", "r");
        char buffer[128];
        fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), f);
        pclose(f);
        
        if (atoi(buffer) > 0) {
            printf(" Crypto FALSO (solo XOR)\n");
            return 0;
        } else {
            printf("? Crypto no verificable\n");
            return 0;
        }
    } else {
        printf(" NO EXISTE\n");
        return 0;
    }
}

New whole-program analysis just dropped (it's grep).

jasinjames··on Curl: We still have not seen a valid security report done with AI help
Can someone explain the ip address in the hackerone profile[0]? I can't tell if 139.224.130.174 is a reference to something real or just hallucinated by the LLM to look "cool". Wikipedia says that this /8 is controlled by "MIX"[1] but my google-fu is failing me atm.

[0] https://hackerone.com/evilginx?type=user [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

jasinjames··on My TV started playing a video in full screen by itself. What happened?
I second this. Great for movie parties and sporting events. I got a reasonable quality one as surplus from a high-school IT department on fb marketplace.
jasinjames··on My TV started playing a video in full screen by itself. What happened?
If you have a "smart" TV you'd like to avoid connecting to the internet for reasons like this, you can try disconnecting the wireless module entirely. I had a Sony Bravia TV I didn't trust, and after popping off the back I disconnected the wireless module's ribbon cable. The android-TV OS handled it gracefully, and now I don't have to worry about it attempting to smuggle data through any other WLANs in my apartment building.
jasinjames··on An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages
Probably Java/Clojure
jasinjames··on Surgery implants tooth material in eye as scaffolding for lens
I think this is an evolution thing but not in that way. I believe when our diets changed due to agriculture the foods we ate got softer and our mouths subsequently changed [1]

[1]https://www.pittwire.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/cur...

jasinjames··on Copyright reform is necessary for national security
Not sure if this influences your thinking at all, but whatever duration copyright applies for starts once it was made, whether it was published or not.

> Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation ... [1]

And "creation" basically means "written down" [2]. IANAL.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...

jasinjames··on I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled
I think you're thinking of this case [1] from Missouri where a reporter notified the state that teacher SSNs were exposed, and the Governor went ballistic. Luckily, it seems like the local law enforcement set the record straight.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-crime-educati...

jasinjames··on Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
How would someone get into this work?
jasinjames··on Show HN: A simple web game to help learn chords and basic progressions
No need for any ML models here, you can "just" do an FFT on a conventional signal and pick out the peaks
jasinjames··on Sora is here
I agree. Also, tangentially related: I use a black and white filter on my phone, and it is way harder to distinguish fake and real media without the color channels to help. I couldn't immediately find anything in the subway clip which gave it away.
jasinjames··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Wikipedia [0] says Louisiana hasn't adopted all of the UCC articles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

jasinjames··on 8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)
Compilers are a good one. I know Rust's original compiler (before being self hosted) was implemented in OCaml. Darklang's compiler was in OCaml as well.
jasinjames··on Kids are getting ruder, teachers say. And new research backs that up
My SO is a Occupational Therapist, so she spent part of her master's degree studying pediatric development milestones. A LOT of those milestones (ability to handle objects with hands, develop muscle strength, resolve conflict with others, etc) depend on playing with other kids in the real world. If a child is proportionally spending more time on a device than interacting with peers, they're going to have problems.

Prime example: W-sitting. Lots of "iPad kids" have an unusual sit pose where they splay their legs out. Oftentimes it's because they're sitting on a device so often that their core muscles are underdeveloped.

jasinjames··on One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)
I think another factor is that the spreadsheet model has basically zero barrier to entry from a users perspective. You can have elementary school students punch data from a classroom experiment into an excel table, which is great!

Any replacement system which, for example, enforced a strong separation between operations, input reference data and output result data would require users to learn the model before attempting to use the software. This is a pretty big ask, especially since lots of small-scale users wouldn't see an immediate benefit. I think of it like the tradeoff between dynamic and static typing when programming- it's the same "upfront mental overhead versus long term maintainability" question IMO.

jasinjames··on One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)
I had a similar issue just two weeks ago at $DAYJOB. I was scraping a log file and I had written an awk script to convert the HH:MM:SS.uuuuuu timestamps to nanoseconds since epoch for ingestion by another tool. Little did I know that awk uses floating point for numbers internally, and so my conversion function was incorrectly rounding the result, which messed up my later analysis in arcane ways. To add insult to injury, I had the same problem again when paging through the data in Visidata, but there was an easy workaround I don't exactly remember.
jasinjames··on US FDA approves nasal spray alternative to EpiPen for allergic reactions
Wow, this is incredible news! I had no idea this was available.
jasinjames··on US FDA approves nasal spray alternative to EpiPen for allergic reactions
> ARS Pharma will offer neffy at a price of $199 for two doses via digital pharmacy sites like BlinkRx and GoodRx for eligible patients whose insurance plans do not cover neffy. Some commercially insured patients can access the treatment at $25 for each filled prescription of two single-use neffy devices through a co-pay savings program.

This is considerably lower than the non-insured cost of an Epi-Pen or generic equivalent[0]. Hopefully this spurs some competition and makes the whole market more affordable. I needed to use an Epi-pen in college, and though I never took issue with needles I'm glad than an alternative is available for those fearful of them.

(I didn't feel it. I was about to pass out. But I remember looking up from the floor while administering and seeing my RA terrified. He was so scared of needles that if I had lost consciousness, he wouldn't have administered for me!)

[0]https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-much-does-an-epipen-cost

jasinjames··on A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)
In your view, what word(s) would you use to describe the following?

"a carefully designed API for interacting with piece of data which provides both a consistent technical interface and conceptual understanding of the meaning of said thing"

The reason I ask is because the word I've always used for that is "abstraction", but I'm getting the sense that over-abstracted and over-architected frameworks has soured many people to the word. I want to communicate the idea without conjuring up images of java classes with 90 character names. What would you recommend?

jasinjames··on Rare footage of largest uncontacted tribe in the world [video]
That is precisely what the monoliths from 2001 were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey)
jasinjames··on A Louisiana gas plant sea wall shows challenges of flooding, energy demand
If you're interested in the dynamic in this area of the country, I highly recommend the 2022 game Norco[1]. It's really more of a piece of literature than a game, and it tries to capture the dynamic of the folks who rely upon a similar plant in LA for their livelihoods.

(At the risk of overselling a point-and-click game, I'll literally buy it for you if you're on the fence about it. I thought it was that good).

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/

jasinjames··on The joy of reading books you don't understand
For the divine comedy I can recommend the Robert Durling english translation. Each canto has a large section of notes which give all of that context and various interpretations in condensed form. Really excellent stuff.
Page 1 of 2Next →