Hacker News Reader

pagadeon How big are factorials?

Reminds me of: Professor asked us to find the biggest factorial using C programming language. And then using LISP. You can imagine our surprise.

pagadeon iPhone Duo

Was there a reference to using AI to decide where to place the hinges?

pagadeon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.rockoder.com/

I wish I’d written more. This site is almost 20 years old now. I bought the domain using a friend’s credit card because I didn’t have one back then and there was no other way to purchase online.

pagadeon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

Currently working on to auto sync Notion events to Google Calendars based on Project property. I needed this desparately so decided to do it myself.

pagadeon ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials

Antisemitic. Every time I hear this word, I can’t help but think of its irony—a term used exclusively for describing discrimination against one community, as if prejudice against them carries more weight than against any other. Perhaps, though, it serves as the best reflection of our hypocrisy.

pagadeon Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

Prediction: Demis Hasabis will win second Nobel.

pagadeon Ideas to make money as solo dev

Could you share some ideas or pointers on how to monetize an extension?

Also, probably a dumb question but what stops other developers to reverse engineer your extension and release a clone?

pagadeon Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

To a layperson like me, could you explain how these balloons will be cleaned up / collected after their life? What material are they made up of?

pagadeon Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

I mean I mark my vote as same as XYZ's vote in the system. XYZ doesn't have to know about it.

pagadeon Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

> On the one hand, the costs of becoming politically informed—learning about politicians, issues, policies, and relevant social science—are very high for individual voters. It takes a lot of time and energy, which could be spent on other important—or simply more fun—activities. On the other hand, the negligible impact of individual votes means that being informed has little benefit. Given this, political ignorance is rational.

I have been toying with the idea of a system that allows voluntarily delegating my vote to someone who I think is rational, more informed than me, and cares about things important to me, more than me. I would love to know the flaws in such a system.

pagadeon Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

I recently watched these 3 episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Highly recommended.

Opioids III: The Sacklers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaCaIhfETsM)

Opioids II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCKR6wy94U)

Opioids: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pdPrQFjo2o)

pagadeon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

http://www.rockoder.com/ Few tech blogs, some opinions, some suggestions.

Sample: https://www.rockoder.com/2020/04/26/passformula/ (Passformula: Create Complex, Unique Passwords and Remember Them All)

pagadeon How did the chess pieces get their names?

> While it may seem logical that the king has a queen by his side, that’s not how things started out. In the Indian original, this piece was the king’s “counselor” (mantri in Sanskrit). The Arabs used wazir (“vizier,” i.e., the ruler’s minister/secretary), which was Latinized to farzia, which became the French vierge (“virgin”).

Just the other day I was wondering what a stupid name for the Queen's piece. Not at all logical. It's battlefield and not wedding/ceremony for queen to be by-his-side. Vazir is popular piece name in India as well.

pagadeon Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?

- The one who was laid off/fired will form a to-be-billon-dollar company.

- Suddenly there will be high quality, eloquent and verbose written form of English everywhere (emails, books, movie scripts, blogs, news, poems, school/college essays).

- Climate change protests turns fatal.

- Twitter will be on the path to profitability (don't know what it will have to pay for it though).

pagadeon Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

- Compare yourself with your previous version and not with others. (Taught in school to us to not compare grades with other students but with yourself. This stuck with me for life.)

- Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential of power. (Brought me out of the false sense of comfort that reading book or completing course/training will automatically benefit me or is progress towards actual work. You need to apply the knowledge else it is useless.)

- You don't have to complete the book you are currently reading. (First heard from Naval)

- Arrange documents alphabetically and cross reference if required. Any other system will fall apart.(From GTD)

pagadeon Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain

Reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/chaitex/status/1583118970089263104

pagadeon Ask HN: How to learn to sell?

No substitute to getting out and actually doing the sell but this book will get you tons of ammunition to make your offer bullet proof. Don't go by the title. It has very actionable advise:

$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No

https://www.amazon.com/100M-Offers-People-Stupid-Saying-eboo...

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

It doesn't scale. Also we intuitively identify a tab by its location in our browser. Opening a different window and then locating that tab there is slow.

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

After few dozen tabs the tab width becomes so small that it is difficult to click on them or figure out which tab is which. Multiline helps in maintaining the tab width.

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

I finally got time to try https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus and it worked! Thank you for the suggestion.

pagadeon Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac

User manual turned into ad. Amazing.

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

I have pretty much used all possible Firefox addons for this.

No it is not fine. Using vertical tab navigation was painful and slowed me down.

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

Used following work around for few years: https://wrw.is/multiple-tab-rows-in-firefox/

Then finally gave up Firefox (after using for 15+ years) when Chrome released tab groups. Use above workaround to believe me that I tried before giving up.

pagadeon Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS

For a while now, performance has not been an issue for me to not use Firefox. It's the no support for the multiline tabs and/or tab groups. Both features which were previously possible in Firefox. This is pretty much a blocker for me and they don't seem to have any plan to fix this.

pagadeon Show HN: I developed an app that creates interactive product demos in minutes

Same

pagadeon Goat Rental – Hire Goats

Ok, I have to ask. Why did the school have goat?

pagadeon Excel never dies (2021)

Every non-trivial enterprise software project eventually need to add support for upload and download of Excel files.

pagadeon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)

When posting on international forum as this, it is important to highlight that German language is a must for this role. Could save time for everyone involved.

pagadeon Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious

The one which no one has mentioned so far: Big Think - https://www.youtube.com/c/bigthink

I like the no-nonsense, ~5mins video from the authors summarizing core message of their research/book.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovBtoHkeK68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJL8A6vQyW0

pagadeon Absurd Trolley Problems

Reminds me of Harvard University lecture that starts with this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&list=PL30C13C91C...

I would highly recommend.