Hacker News Reader

”AI's global water footprint could reach 4.2–6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027”

This is about as much as the annual consumption of the California almond farms.

(An acre-foot is approximately 1200 cubic meters.)

https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-a...

pclon She left her ex. He tracked her through a network of policing cameras

pclon Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

Why is that? Vinyl has some unique characteristics. But as far as I’m aware, blu-ray is just a storage format for bits, so other than the box art, what is compelling about a blu-ray pressing?

pclon The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

Following your lead, I haven’t researched Örebro’s proposed policies. But I would find it surprising if “large scale remigration” really was scoped to an everyman’s definition of “few years”. I would expect that their targets for “large scale” exceed three or four years’ worth of immigration.

pclon What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.

pclon I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

What sorts of processing times are you seeing for I-130 green card applications? I filed for my wife in late July, and we've still not received anything but a receipt notice.

pclon Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

Apps (such as Signal) that care about end-to-end encryption do their own key management. So, Apple / Google servers only ever see ciphertext, and don't have access to the key material that's used for the encryption.

pclon “Your frustration is the product”

It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font.

Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.

pclon Global warming has accelerated significantly

Of course, the relevant thing for us as a species is whether or not the forecast temperatures are sustainable for us.

The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.

pclon Oxide raises $200M Series C

Oh cool! That looks like a super interesting product.

https://zoo.dev

pclon Apple I Advertisement (1976)

I think the offline storage situation is improved with the latest manifest structure, although I haven’t experimented in depth. I know that at least one of my PWAs has local data going back a couple years at this point.

I really wish Apple had kept investing more fully in this space. So many of the pieces are there, but like you said, there are still assorted blockers.

It’s clear they still care about this space to a certain extent, since they have been fixing bugs and making improvements (screen-lock APIs and offline support, for example). But it could be so much better.

pclon My AI Adoption Journey

”I've never personally found a compiler bug.”

I remember the time I spent hours debugging a feature that worked on Solaris and Windows but failed to produce the right results on SGI. Turns out the SGI C++ compiler silently ignored the `throw` keyword! Just didn’t emit an opcode at all! Or maybe it wrote a NOP.

All I’m saying is, compilers aren’t perfect.

I agree about determinism though. And I mitigate that concern by prompting AI assistants to write code that solves a problem, instead of just asking for a new and potentially different answer every time I execute the app.

pclon Apple I Advertisement (1976)

Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?

pclon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

pclon White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says "the memes will continue"

That's not at all what the person you responded to said. I'm not sure if you're intentionally misrepresenting their statement or if you're just reading too quickly or are under-caffeinated or whatever.

pclon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

I’m one of those lucky ones! It sounds like you’re implying that most aphantasics have SDAM. Is that the case? Do you have any sources?

pclon Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

> ”They will not persist across many generations though”

Why not? Is there some tempering mechanism on epigenetic transfer? I could imagine that some sperm-conferred epigenetic markers could continue down the male descendants unbroken.

pclon A guide to local coding models

Sure, but I am not one of them. I find myself wanting to code on trains and planes pretty often, and so local toolchains are always attractive for me.

pclon A guide to local coding models

Or if you want to do development work while offline.

pclon CSS Grid Lanes

Yeah I’d assume you’d eagerly load enough to make sure everything gets at least partially into the viewport, and maybe a fee more to optimize for network latency. And then perhaps track elements whose trailing ends are not in the viewport, and load more once those become fully visible?

pclon CSS Grid Lanes

Moving this sort of stuff out of JavaScript and arcane hacks allows the browser rendering engines to optimize these common patterns. This is sorta the opposite of syntactic sugar. The syntactic sugar is the libraries that implemented these patterns without rendering support.

Shall we call it syntactic umami perhaps? Or syntactic lipids?

pclon Classical statues were not painted horribly

Fermented mushroom sauce sounds so much better than ketchup! Tell me more. Does it still exist commercially?

pclon Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued

When I moved to SF, someone told me that the three most important things you can do for earthquake safety are:

- make sure nothing can fall on you when you're in bed (no mounted artwork above the headboard; no lamps etc on side tables that are high enough to fall on you)

- make sure you have footwear in your bedroom, so you can be mobile if there's broken glass everywhere

- store extra drinking water somewhere (I used a 6-gallon carboy that I periodically refilled)

Probably there are other good things to do, but all those made a lot of sense to me. Most of us spend more time in bed than in any other fixed location, so making sure the bed is a safe place rings true. And water is life.

pclon Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

I think you really pretty fundamentally missed the point of what he's saying. Perhaps you've never had to confront the full brunt of the bureaucracy of a large-scale medical provider.

If you've got a serious condition, you really do need to have a patient advocate, whether that's yourself or a family member or someone you're paying to fulfill the role or some combination thereof. The medical systems I've encountered for non-trivial care (US HMO, US PPO, Belgium, Norway) just aren't designed for holistic patient care. Each department does their own thing, and it's just luck if there's someone watching over the whole process from the individual patient's standpoint.

Perhaps you took exception to the comment about looking for an expert instead of a newbie (a resident, in the text) working on the author's 9-month-old. One could argue that that's a different issue than the general need for a patient advocate. Fair enough. But if I were watching out for my 9-month-old, I'd definitely want to ask about the track record of each of the doctors in the room. I mean, sure, new trainees need to practice somehow and all, and there's a tragedy of the commons there. But I certainly wouldn't brush someone off as "absolutely entitled" just because he wants the best care he can get for his 9-month-old.

pclon Facts about throwing good parties

Fwiw, you can neutralize tomato sauce with a little bit of baking soda. Start with a pinch, stir, wait thirty seconds, and taste to see if you need more.

pclon We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

No, this doesn't get at the point of end-to-end encryption. Better to look at it in terms of the parties involved -- E2EE implies that there are two or more parties, and that only some of those parties should have unencrypted access.

In the case in point, the parent (camera owner) is one party and Nanit is another party. (Prior to the work in the linked post, AWS S3 was another party). The goal of E2EE is to deny plaintext access to some of these parties. So, in an E2EE deployment, Nanit (and AWS) would not have unencrypted access to the video content, even though they're storing it.

As chrismorgan pointed out, if Nanit did not have access to the unencrypted data, they could not do server-side video processing.

(Also, FWIW, there are multiple clients in this scenario -- the parents' phones are clients, and need unencrypted access to the video stream.)

(As an aside, where I used to work, we did some cool stuff with granting conditional access to certain server-side subsystems, so that the general data flow was all end-to-end encrypted, but customers could allow certain of our processes to be "ends" and have key access. This was really elegant; customers could dial in the level of server-side access that we had, and could see via the key authorization metadata which services had that access.)

pclon American solar farms

How do you suggest fossil fuel subsidies should be positioned in the equation?

pclon Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

Are there any good online databases with fuel level details for individual commercial flights? I've been on a few flights that had to circle for a long time / had a number of go-round attempts, and I've never been able to find details after the fact about how close to the margins we were.

pclon Vibe engineering

I, individually, am certainly much more productive in my side projects when using AI assistance (mostly Claude and ChatGPT). I attribute this to two main factors:

First, and most important, I have actually started a number of projects that have only lived in my head historically. Instead of getting weighed down in “ugh I don’t want to write a PDF parser to ingest that data” or whatever, my attitude has become “well, why not see if an AI assistant can do this?” Getting that sort of initial momentum for a project is huge.

Secondly, AI assistants have helped me stretch outside of my comfort zone. I don’t know SwiftUI, but it’s easy enough to ask an AI assistant to put things together and see what happens.

Both these cases refer almost necessarily to domains I’m not an expert in. And I think that’s a bigger factor in side projects than in day jobs, since in your day job, it’s more expected that you are working in an area of expertise.

Perhaps an exception is when your day job is at a startup, where everyone ends up getting stretched into domains they aren’t experts in.

Anyways, my story is, of course, just another anecdote. But I do think the step function of “would never have started without AI assistance” is a really important part of the equation.

pclon Highest bridge unveiled at more than 2,000ft above ground

Is this true? Does the center of a canyon have higher wind speeds than the edges of that canyon? And what about gusts? I'd assume that boundaries are more turbulent.