Hacker News Reader

mklon Prism

I think it may be a generic word that's hard to trademark or something, as the existing scientific analysis software called Prism (https://www.graphpad.com/) doesn't seem to be trademarked; the Trademarks link at the bottom goes to this list, which doesn't include Prism: https://www.dotmatics.com/trademarks

mklon Prism

> Turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX, saving hours of time manipulating graphics pixel-by-pixel

What a bizarre thing to say! I'm guessing it's slop. Makes it hard to trust anything the article claims.

mklon 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

No it wouldn't, as we already think it's pretty likely. Chimpanzees use tools, so our most recent common ancestor with them, something like 6 million years ago, may well have used tools too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...

mklon Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds

They can go at high speed:

Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab

Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow

France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320

China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains

UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train

mklon Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds

Japan, Germany, France, China, and the UK check their tracks at high speed. I don't know if Spain does, but there are news articles about them ordering such an inspection train in 2019: https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/adif-orders-high-...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320

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

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

mklon New YC homepage

And the Back to the Future title is totally wrong - it's always in the stylised logo form on posters.

mklon I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

That's at least two major updates ago. Probably worth another try.

mklon eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

For everyone. Sellers and auction house get a good price, and buyers don't get sniped.

mklon Show HN: yolo-cage – AI coding agents that can't exfiltrate secrets

The object detection method name is a pun on YOLO as in "you only live once", which refers to taking risks (which might be exciting).

mklon eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.

mklon Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Earlier discussion (4 days ago, 67 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640462

mklon A Brief History of Ralph

I think it was an attempt at a useless use of cat joke (cat isn't needed at all here, but IMHO helps readability).

mklon A Brief History of Ralph

This is meaningless without knowing the contents of PROMPT.md. The blog post hides the contents of PROMPT.md in a second subscriber-only post (I don't know if the post's 36 minute video explains anything - 33% in it still hasn't).

https://github.com/repomirrorhq/repomirror/blob/main/repomir... (discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45005434) provides a bit more detail, and prompts, but only seems to use the method for porting existing software.

mklon The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime

In some circumstances it has a registration wall. I recently ran into it on one of my computers, and it prevented me from reading some articles until I removed the modals with browser devtools. Stupid and pointless, and just pushes people away or towards workarounds like archive.is. I've given The Guardian money in the past but I don't have or want an account.

mklon East Germany balloon escape

From the second sentence, "over a year and a half of preparations". The third paragraph gives a starting agreement date of 7 March 1978, and the successful flight was 16 September 1979.

mklon List of individual trees

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superlative_trees

mklon Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout

That's GWh and vanadium flow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

mklon The <Geolocation> HTML Element

Not default permissions, it turns out, but you have a global choice between letting sites ask for permission or blocking the requests entirely.

mklon The <Geolocation> HTML Element

The Zoom mention was about camera and microphone permission with <permission>, not location:

> Zoom reported a 46.9% decrease in camera or microphone capture errors

mklon The <Geolocation> HTML Element

This might be easier than refusing permission every time - it sounds like I can just not click it. I really dislike location permission things. I don't know what location will be shared, I don't use anything that needs a precise location, and I don't ever want to share my actual location. If location permission things showed me a map with where they think I am and let me click a (vague) location to share, I might use them, but currently to find nearest stores or whatever I just type in a postcode or use their map.

Edit: this has prompted me to go find a way to turn off location permission requests in the browser settings. It turns out you can do it under Privacy and Security > Site Settings in Firefox and Chrome.

mklon Show HN: The Tsonic Programming Language

The webpage is broken on mobile, as the lines go off the screen (Firefox Android).

mklon “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

> I didn’t assume agi.

You literally said:

>>> What happens when we put an artificial general intelligence in an F-16? That's what happened here with this proof.

You're claiming I said a lot of things I didn't; everything you seem to be stating about me in this comment is false.

mklon “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

Not really. A completely unintelligent autopilot can fly an F-16. You cannot assume general intelligence from scaffolded tool-using success in a single narrow area.

mklon “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

This is very narrow AI, in a subdomain where results can be automatically verified (even within mathematics that isn't currently the case for most areas).

mklon Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

Run this in the JavaScript console:

  document.querySelector('#particles').remove()

mklon I switched from VSCode to Zed

Try finding a new 1080p screen small enough to count as high DPI; there aren't many! Using 218ppi from elsewhere in the thread as the threshold, you'd need a 10 inch 1920×1080 screen to achieve it, so a 1080p computer screen is almost certainly low DPI.

mklon A spider web unlike any seen before

https://archive.ph/25NVv

Some other stories about it that got no traction here: https://www.livescience.com/animals/spiders/worlds-biggest-s..., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-sp...

mklon The suck is why we're here

You've changed the hypothetical there. Calling yourself a vibe plumber and calling yourself a plumber seem like very different things.

mklon Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

Binary search is a very old trick, going back to 1946 on computers, and probably thousands of years before that, since searching sorted lists goes back to at least ancient Babylon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search

mklon Pickle 1 AR Glasses (YC W25) May Be Fraudulent

https://xcancel.com/thedowd/status/2007337800430198913 has some of the info. The main article doesn't work for me on x.com or xcancel (X account only? X app only?).