HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pippy

1,129 karma · joined November 5, 2010

submissionscomments
pippy··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
The irony is that the statue is being guarded by the London police.
pippy··on Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
I built a bit torrent extension for Cockpit. it was pretty fun building software for it
pippy··on Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated
The Unicode can be ridiculous at times. It contains a character used once in a single manuscript in a extinct language, but not a standardized glyph for an external URL link.
pippy··on The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)
Also would the world be a better place if they gave it back to some third party, so it can be sold to a private collection and be locked in a vault somewhere?

Where it is now has a lot of historical and cultural significance. It is currently being admired publicly by thousands of people, sitting on the coffin of Queen Elisabeth.

pippy··on WebP is such a goated format
Webp is something you can push into production today: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF%2CWEBP

however AVIF only has about 65% market penetration.

If you ran a serious webserver, it would make more sense to do automatic on the fly conversion using mod_pagespeed. This way it handles browser support for you.

pippy··on What's the most efficient language?
I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.
pippy··on CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”
It seems the article you're talking about is the opponent color process, which here's some great articles about it: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html https://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html

I had some fun modeling the color space in 3d on codepen: https://codepen.io/torleifw/pen/jOwjPxp

(or a more boring slider option here: https://codepen.io/torleifw/pen/OJgdyPJ)

One of latest papers I've read recommended using a matrix to transform color spaces, which i've also done a codepen for.

Interestingly the opponent process mirrors the LAB color space, which is soon going to be available in Safari. This is pretty cool and can enable developers to color coordinate easier.

I'm going to give the webpage you linked a good read, looks very interesting.

pippy··on CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”
I highly recommend reading Human color vision / Peter K. Kaiser and Robert M. Boynton. It's a great read if you've gone down the color vision rabbit hole as it has nearly every single topic in regards to human color perception. The biggest surprise for me was that there's still a bit of debate about how exactly neurons in the eye are wired together to produce the color signals that go to the brain.
pippy··on Old CSS, New CSS (2020)
Tailwind is great, but ironically it is full circle in regards to OP's post. You describe the page structure in HTML using classes, much the same before CSS was a thing. This is ideologically opposed to semantic HTML where you describe what the structure is, and not how it is. Using server side frameworks hides this, as long as you don't need to write static HTML. Tailwind has plenty of hype behind it and it's good, but it also has plenty of downsides too. As long as you're aware of where it's be suited for. I think Tailwind is a CSS framework for people who don't want to do CSS.
pippy··on NASA returns Hubble to full science operations
NASA could have built two or more as backups, as most of the cost was in R&D it would have been (comparably) cost effective to do so.
pippy··on 100 years of whatever this will be

  People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism. 
I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.
pippy··on Japanese Dome House
Kitset houses are cheaper and better.

These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.

it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.

pippy··on First confirmed hatchings of two California condor chicks from unfertilized eggs
There's a great passage about this in Genome by Matt Ridley, which is a great book for anyone interested. In mammals both the male and female gametes imprint their DNA in their sex cells to repress certain genes, if you combine two generic sequences from two males (with no modification) the zygote forms with no brain and too much placenta and dies soon after. If you do the reverse with females, you wind up with a oversized head and no placenta. The working theory is embryonic development is a competitive environment, where males want the best for their offspring at the expense of the female host, and the females 'fight' back by limiting the amount of resources the child has. it's only been recently we've had the technology to remove the epigenetic markers from DNA sequences to allow combinations of same sex strands.
pippy··on Single sign-on: What we learned during our identity alpha
The NZ govt did a good job with their version: realme.govt.nz

While proving your identity was easy, they've had trouble achieving the next step of information sharing. Traditionally government departments under law were not able to share information. This has only recently changed and they're struggling to reach the next step.

pippy··on Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord
The verify email process has a link to go to your email provider. that's slick.
pippy··on The open calendar, task and note space is a mess
I wish them luck with the rewrite, but those sorts of rewrites are usually just replications of Apple's Copland. I suspect these sorts of rewrites are attempts at capturing the zeitgeist of younger developers.

OP is going to be in for a world of hurt trying to find a solution, there's a reason why all these libraries are in 'old PHP'. Most of the big companies have 'Appified' their APIs with calendars, and the old .ical etc formats are there for legacy support. So you need to create an app, delegate it permissions and then you've got a REST API to play with. If you've got the skill to do this, you'll have the skill to write a syncing script.

pippy··on The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus
Immunor & St Georges University of London released a paper outlining evidence that SARS-CoV-2 Spike was artificial. The paper was criticised for going against the popular narrative. While I hope they're wrong, many researches dance around the topic. https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNat...
pippy··on Stop Using Icon Fonts
with tools like this: https://github.com/tancredi/fantasticon using font icons is pretty easy to use. The biggest issue I found with font icons was getting upskilling new devs. online tools are clunky and explaining how to use it was always a pain. sometimes i'd wind up just saying 'use an svg'.
pippy··on Kenyan recycles plastic waste into bricks stronger than concrete
Plastic recycling by and large is a farce. The majority of all "recycled" plastics in western countries winds up being exported to developing nations who then extract a tiny percent that can be melted down and reused. The rest winds up in rivers, or the ocean, or being burnt. It's horrific that countries like his is being used as a global rubbish dump.

If western countries actually want to make a difference, we need to take a hard line and ban all single use plastic.

pippy··on RNA Memory Hypothesis
There's clear evidence of epigenetics playing a role in brain activity, though these are more linked to hormonal responses such as stress. It's also been proven that RNA transcripts are used to trigger maternal instincts when a zygote is present in a mother: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

Scientists have already modeled memory retrieval using current neural network models. There's literally videos on youtube demonstrating this. I'd be surprised if RNA was used to encode memories to the extent OP is suggesting: there would have to be a mechanism for storing this RNA inside cells or there would be evidence of random strands of RNA floating around in the body. We would have been found it a long time ago, and scientists would also be able to decode it if these strands of RNA were standardized and could be transferred person to person.

Though the way evolution works and how complicated the body is, it could be occurring in a small sub process in a neurons somewhere in the body. though this would likely be tied to hormonal responses or something equally boring.

pippy··on Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
>France has 70% nuclear

Not for long sadly :( Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.

pippy··on Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut
American Superconductor sells wire for $200 per kiloamp per metre. It would worth it getting a lighter superconducting cable given it wouldn't need cooling.
pippy··on Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018)
I would recommend looking at the PSIO if you're wanting to mod a PSX today. It's a bit on the expensive side, but it allows you to insert a SD card instead of having to use CDs. Over time discs degrade and become unusable, as well as the optical drives of the playstations themselves.
pippy··on 1MB Club
Yes, what I was alluding too was that new tooling tends to make it easier for client resources to explode out of control.

Don't get me wrong, jsx is great. but it should be used in the right place.

pippy··on 1MB Club
The culture change around the importance of performance is frustrating, new developers all seem to love their massive JavaScript libraries. Giving a trivial function such as search box on a webpage or some animation results in a convoluted 10MB JavaScript monster from hell. If they run into anything remotely challenging they'll simply add a library to do it for them creating more bloat. It used to be the opposite. When asked 'why not just some jQuery and DOM'? they'll reply it's too hard. React, webpack, node etc are great tools but they need to used carefully.
pippy··on GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned
The original DMCA request stated that they violated copyright by suggesting songs in their source code. While this is a dubious copyright claim, surely the easy solution is to uphold the claim by simply replacing the songs with open source items such as big buck bunny in the source?
pippy··on Show HN: Build your own isometric city
very cool. I struggled to find a good tile editor a few years ago, Tiled didn't seem to make the grade.

I would like to suggest a JSON export option.

pippy··on How Discord Won
It's a shame that the old guard refused to modernize. Talk to IRC or Jabber fans and they despise basic things like emojis, let alone important things like preserving offline messages and ease of access. There are hills to die on, and they died on too many hills.
pippy··on The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation
Traditional media companies have a motive for social media to implement prohibitive self policing measures. Youtube recently caved and gave media companies an extra boost in their trending algorithm and exceptions to expletive language, which made vloggers upset: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44279189

Traditional media tends to stick to big three excuses to implement these measures; 'think of the children', terrorism, and cyber bulling.

pippy··on Original Soviet Tetris on Big Iron How To (2017)
I love that VT100 in the background of that image. I have a thing for video terminals.

Sadly I don't think you'd get tetris running on it very well as it only supported scrolling text

Page 1 of 14Next →