Hacker News Reader

loukyon Base84 deserves a place in file names

Same! Although I still have muscle-memory replacing spaces with _ or - when creating/saving files on any OS. Hasn't done me wrong lo these past 40 years. As for the others tailing the ASCII, no thanks.

loukyon Microduck

I got a Big Trak in ~1983 and came back to programming and using it and hacking it over years until it got lost in a fire in my mid-twenties. I'm sure most of those weren't used much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak

loukyon Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

The major proponent was also known as

Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]

Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]

[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

loukyon Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin

Old trade beads can sometimes be found, old stashes and caches. Pony beads, seed beads, and others. They were traded/used as "money". The Hudson's Bay Company brought millions of them to this continent.

https://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol2/iss1/6/

loukyon My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

My Grandfather was around in the early days, had a ham call sign from the early 1930s and was involved in the Manhattan Project as a senior non-scientific engineer.

He was also involved in the development of radar/microwave comms after the war.

He and colleagues did the same - warming their hands in front of microwave antennae.

He developed and later died of some unknown neurological issues related to nerve transmission in the early 1990s. He had been exposed to so many different possible dangers that it's impossible to tell.

After he died I helped clean out and save/donate the double-garage full of ham equipment and home-built telescopes - one was ~.75metre diameter and ~3 metres long, just huge - I was just a teen and let most of it go as my grandmother didn't care by then.

There were also many containers of classified documents, related to WWII and after. Those were appropriately dealt with.

I've always HAD microwaves but have been aware of the issues. I'm a ham as well and still occasionally use the morse key he gave me when I was 7. Still miss him, he taught me so much.

72s

loukyon Asterisk AI Voice Agent

I don't mind music-on-hold as much except when they break with a human voice at intervals saying inane things such as "your call is important to us. Thank you for holding" Which makes me think the call has been answered. If there's not actual call queue information, just play music so I can ignore it and continue working without that NOP interrupt.

loukyon Pomodoro Flow

An interesting alternative "reverse" take on the Pomodoro technique.

loukyon N-Back – A Minimal, Adaptive Dual N-Back Game for Brain Training

the buttons jumping up and down when correct or incorrect is jarring on my smaller screen, forcing a constant space there or moving the message would be a smoother UX, in my opinion.

loukyon Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge

So does Time Team, and they're back making new episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpbubYLW2fdf9ySyCS0f...

loukyon How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully

>> As of 2025, he also teaches mathematics at Rudgers University.

In the second sentence.

Not even run through an AI grammar-checker?

loukyon Firefox tab groups are here

I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

loukyon Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time

Dendrochronology (dating cut trees via counting rings/size/ratios) has its own subjective interpretations, and different databases that don't always line up.

loukyon Windows 11 turns the tide against Windows 10

I ended up on Debian/XFCE. Lightweight enough and I've worked out how everything works and have it customized 100% to my workflow.

loukyon The South Vietnamese pilot who landed a Cessna on a carrier to save his family (2019)

I remember seeing women on the sides of the highway in one part of town gathering plants to eat, there's plenty of edible stuff out there, and my parents telling me they were refugees. Must have been in '74/'75 and I was a wee lad. In a Southern state. My parents were PhDs from Berkley and UCLA who got positions in the south so it was a weird time and place. For everyone.

loukyon Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

I think I saw some of your work at a few Dead shows in ~1992

loukyon Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

The hate for the GDPR I read of is actually about the "allow cookie" popups that aren't needed at all are are just a form of protest by those individual sites because they are storing and selling personal information including IP addresses.

If you aren't engaged in those practices then there's no need for any GDPR annoyances for users.

I may misunderstand, I'm in America currently.

loukyon XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

Absolutely! It was a game changer for me. No more OOM with 16GB RAM

loukyon A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

I worked in a place where the waitresses tipped out to the kitchen, and everyone got some of the money - including the dishdogs. It was a union (UFCW) restaurant. Cheap health insurance and 2 weeks paid vacation after 2 years, 4 weeks paid after 7 years. Not bad benefits for restaurant work. This was a while back though.

loukyon Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

Glad I saw this - I thought it was some local issue. Amazingly laggy for me with firefox/Debian 12. I restarted firefox thinking it was the problem, apparently not. Very high CPU usage as well.

loukyon A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

In this particular case they seem to pull from https://www.maxmind.com/en/home

There's a bunch of IP/GPS and physical address lookup sites, services, and databases out there.

loukyon In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality

Thanks for those book recommendations. I'm always interested in discussion or reactions to Heinlein.

>particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book

Interesting statement, I'm grabbing those books now.

loukyon The Ridgeway: The 5k-year-old pathway that's Britain's oldest road

Presenter Tony Robinson, from Time Team, Blackadder, and others has a whole series on hiking ancient Britain.

Here's a playlist, it's got the ridgeway and many other interesting places. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72jhKwankOhU9PaMnSMA...

loukyon Vikings in al-Andalus and the Maghreb

Ah, presented by Waldemar Januszczak. He's produced quite a few great videos and series.

loukyon Drew DeVault: "I needed a break from Real Work so Im speedrunning writing a Unix

We ran through the Andrew S Tanenbaum OS book and implemented most of MINIX in two semesters in the late 90s at evergreen state, the basketweaving prototype

loukyon Federal frenzy to patch gaping Gitlab account takeover hole

I have a system running Debian LTS for ~2 years, with Firefox ESR. No complaints, no nightmares. So far it's just working!

loukyon Federal frenzy to patch gaping Gitlab account takeover hole

I'm updating to bookworm on my daily driver laptop today - testing the full system backup now.

I've had minimal issues recently with debian but decades of debacles (not just debian, everything from RSX-11 to windows server) have made me cautious. So exhausted with wasted time.

loukyon Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

Is a great read, Star based plasma intelligence and the travel to the heat death of the universe.

loukyon How does an independent bookstore survive for 90 years?

101 In Oregon used to have at least one in every tiny town, haven't been out that way in a while but I found some amazing deals on some old and rare books.

loukyon The Lost Worlds of Telnet (2019)

Same here, it was a great day discovering that back in the early 90s

loukyon J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote some great global disaster novels as well. Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer.