Hacker News Reader

kilolimaon Starlink launches "cellphone towers in space" for use with LTE phones

The worst outcome will be that urban Californians will be able to buy houses anywhere and work remotely, driving up local prices and making every where look like orange county.

kilolimaon How we turned the tide in the roach wars

The best solution to roaches I've found is to support your local ant colonies! Healthy ants will eat all your other bugs and the only drawback is having to keep your dry foods in ant-proof containers.

kilolimaon Having a game I'm into makes every day enjoyable

Good for you! Sounds like an ideal retirement. :)

Dont forget VR might make it one day, and in the meantime you can always get a slight productivity satisfaction by making mods for your favorite games.

kilolimaon Intel's CEO says Moore's Law is slowing to a three-year cadence but not dead yet

FUD!

https://www.pcgamer.com/which-is-bigger-intel-amd-nvidia/

Intel is x10 the size of AMD.

They are also the only ones to have their own chip production capability. AMD and Nvidia are a Tawain Straits conflict liability.

kilolimaon In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users

Organic Maps is great, especially for planning hikes, but I'd be careful about relying on the OSM topos for wilderness travel. I got burned pretty hard in the Alps by OSM when a trail didn't actually exist. Since then, I like to use Organic Maps for a digital "reconnaissance" of OSM points of interest and then a country-specific topo map like USGS or IGN for backcountry navigation or route finding.

Note: AlpineQuest is a great app for this and is one of the few apps that doesn't charge a subscription to access our taxpayer-funded maps.

kilolimaon In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users

You can export placemarks to a file and then use your own tools to sync. There's no reason why every single app has to include the kitchen sink.

kilolimaon The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen

"Russia's war against Europe"... Are you saying that Russia isn't European? Because I thought solving problems with violence was a traditional European past time.

kilolimaon Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

Is there a bookmark export extension? Strangely this basic browser functionality is missing from Firefox on Android.

kilolimaon The AI Trust Crisis

Don't forget Airbnb. Two or three years ago they claimed they needed scanned photo IDs of all users to eradicate racism on their platform, and they were going to use cutting edge ML to do so!

kilolimaon The AI Trust Crisis

Didn't he also claim that the new Mega was Chinese malware?

kilolimaon Make Apps for Linux

I really like the functionality of your notes app, but I don't think emulating Apple UI design is the solution to subpar UI on Linux.

Linux users expect basic desktop conventions like toolbars, dropdown menus, and not mobile design concepts like cramming everything into a hamburger menu.

kilolimaon Switch off bad TV settings

It's "hacker" news...

kilolimaon Several piracy-related arrests spark fears of high-level crackdown

It's unethical if the content owner expects you to pay for bandwidth, computing, and local storage, and then also charge you to make a perfect digital copy that you are entirely paying the costs for.

kilolimaon Chromebook Plus

I did this for a few years with one SSD in various laptops or desktops as logisitics warranted. Desktop at home, 12in Thinkpad while traveling, 14in Thinkpad at work. It was easy to swap drives with the Thinkpad drive bay that they used to have.

Sadly, once most laptops went over to NVME 2280 pcie cards, it got a little too tedious to constantly swap out drives any more, and I started worrying about accidentally breaking them. Also had some weird issues with very poor write speed which I thought was overheating necessating a heat sink, but it turns out nvme speeds are actually just as slow as anything else under real workloads.

kilolimaon $700 a Month for a Bed-Sized “Pod” in Downtown SF? Techies Are Renting Them

Warning : website links to NFT advert. Shame the actual information about this "community" is buried under this crap.

kilolimaon $700 a Month for a Bed-Sized “Pod” in Downtown SF? Techies Are Renting Them

Wow! Two of my favorite films. Thanks for your work on them!

kilolimaon Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

I'm limited to choice of terminal emulator due to having a hard requirement for quake style one-keypress dropdown. Unfortunately, in pursuit of cross-platform compatibility the *critties feel like this is a desktop environment problem, and the last gen of console apps that can do this are getting a little long in the tooth and starting to break in things.

kilolimaon F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

Not really, but I think the A-10 drama is an example of what can happen when an organization that doesn't share your own goals is able to take over a task critical to you. Perhaps like outsourcing your engineering offshore. It may be more efficient to find cheap labor overseas, and push a button from 30,000 ft while going mach 2, but efficiency only makes a few people happy.

kilolimaon Plants can detect sound

Yes! I think you're right. That's a great connection, never thought of Annihilation in that way. "Color out of Space" is the first HPL story I ever read, and still one of my favorites.

kilolimaon F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

As long as the Air Farce runs CAS, instead of the army, they will continue to attempt to kill any mission that doesn't involve winning wars through the holy doctrine of Air Power (ie incinerating as many civilians as possible).

kilolimaon Plants can detect sound

I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.

kilolimaon The Death of Unity

Maybe having a game engine that is universal for mobile, console, and PC is the problem. I'm not interested in playing mobile or console games or the type of gameplay they encourage. I'd like a PC game engine for PC games.

kilolimaon The Death of Unity

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years.

Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now.

And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and movement. It just seemed cartoony and missing some sort of UI feedback that made the game feel 'real'. Maybe because of lag because of the terrible engine, I don't know.

Maybe one day a Linux engine remake of Unity will make all of the amazing RPGs playable and moddable again, like Pillars of Eternity 1/2 or Wasteland.

kilolimaon I chose the ThinkPad Z13 Gen1 as my Linux laptop

7390s have been sub $200 on ebay for the last year or more. They are circa 2019.

Great machine, I'm looking for a replacement currently but the new latitudes have moved the power button onto the keyboard and removed the touchpad buttons.

kilolimaon Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding

For printing the first 10 prime numbers, there's a one line solution to this problem:

print("1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11... and so on!

kilolimaon Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider

Except there's no way to export your bookmarks on android out of Firefox without using their sync service. I think this omission (a simple export!) speaks volumes about Mozilla's true goal of browser lock-in and another example of their chronic mismanagement.

kilolimaon Feral desert donkeys are digging wells, giving water to parched wildlife (2021)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub

Related, great Stanislaw Lem novel about the "Great Decomposition" of paper.

kilolimaon Google Maps has become an eyesore

I've recently switched to Organic Maps as a replacement for gmaps. Navigation is offline, it uses OSM for its basemap and points of interest, and you can easily save points (and export them) without needing to login to an account. I also find it easier to use for planning routes for diving or hiking. The only problem is that it doesn't have that nifty terrain view from gmaps or a way to show an aerial satellite view.

kilolimaon Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)

But the US had already destroyed multiple Japanese cities through firebombing and killed ~900k civilians. How would the threat to destroy one of the few surviving cities left have any creditability at that point?