Hacker News Reader

reon Mario meets Pareto

I'm not sure what exactly "how" is referring to, but by "tight handling" I mean having a smaller turning radius and losing less speed when turning.

reon Guide to bourbon

A not-so-fun fact about the production of bourbon/whisky is the fungus it feeds in regions with distilleries, due to the evaporation of alcohol from barrels (the "angel's share"). I thought that the article might end up mentioning that, but it didn't.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-whiskey-fungus

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-da...

reon Mario meets Pareto

Heavy characters in Mario 64 have tighter handling than lighter characters and can cause them to spin out when bumping into them.

reon The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

Based on the title, I expected this to somehow be related to "Office chair turns off monitors" (it wasn't, but that is also a good one).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004

[Edit: I see this one has also been mentioned a few times already in the thread]

reon Can GPT optimize my taxes? An experiment in letting the LLM be the UX

Irritated by the UX and business model of web-based tax return preparation, I've looked into open source alternatives in the past. I hadn't come across the Open Tax Solver package mentioned in this article which looks interesting. It seems like they all rely on printing and mailing the completed returns. Is there any hope of ever being able to e-file them? I don't understand why it couldn't be possible for Free Fillable Forms to support some sort of import format.

reon We do not prefer chords to be perfectly in mathematical ratios: study

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532586 (28 days ago, 6 comments)

The other article posted also has a audiovisual version of some of the study findings which helps clarify the results: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-pythagoras-wrong-universal-mus...

reon The ü/ü Conundrum

> Can you spot any difference between “blöb” and “blöb”?

It's tricky to try to determine this because normalization can end up getting applied unexpectedly (for instance, on Mac, Firefox appears to normalize copied text as NFC while Chrome does not), but by downloading the page with cURL and checking the raw bytes I can confirm that there is no difference between those two words :) Something in the author's editing or publishing pipeline is applying normalization and not giving her the end result that she was going for.

  00009000: 0a3c 7020 6964 3d22 3066 3939 223e 4361  .<p id="0f99">Ca
  00009010: 6e20 796f 7520 7370 6f74 2061 6e79 2064  n you spot any d
  00009020: 6966 6665 7265 6e63 6520 6265 7477 6565  ifference betwee
  00009030: 6e20 e280 9c62 6cc3 b662 e280 9d20 616e  n ...bl..b... an
  00009040: 6420 e280 9c62 6cc3 b662 e280 9d3f 3c2f  d ...bl..b...?</

Let's see if I can get HN to preserve the different forms:

Composed: ü Decomposed: ü

Edit: Looks like that worked!

reon Vernor Vinge has died

If you haven't read A Fire Upon The Deep (or even if you already have), you can read the prologue and first few chapters here: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De...

reon Bug hunting in Btrfs

The animations also stood out to me. I took a look at the source to see if they used a library or were written completely by hand and was surprised to see that they were entirely CSS-based, no JavaScript required (although the "metadata" overwrite animation is glitched if you disable JS, for some reason not immediately apparent to me).

reon Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster

> Making a per order tax/fee isnt the right method to achieve their goals [...] route delivery can keep the costs down.

The Seattle ordinance doesn't call for per-order fees! It requires minimum per-mile and per-minute rates, along with a per-offer minimum of $5. An "offer" is "one or more online orders presented to an app-based worker as one opportunity to perform services for compensation that the app-based worker may accept or reject."

Delivery companies have long had the opportunity to optimize and batch deliveries to reduce costs. The ordinance only further incentivizes them to do so! Adding extreme per-order fees is not something they're being forced to do, but is more of a punitive response to the legislation instead of building more efficient and sustainable systems.

https://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=55448...

reon How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

New Reddit, per the appendix. I think that Old Reddit is likely to be fairly competitive (I would guess placing near Wordpress), and yeah I agree it would be interesting to have in the table to see how far it's fallen.

reon YX Problem

Also asymmetric about the relationship is that the asker usually gets something more measurably valuable out of the exchange (getting unblocked on a problem, often one that they're working on for money) whereas the answerer is frequently doing it only out of a sense of altruism, for the satisfaction of helping others, or for their own entertainment.

reon YX Problem

The amount of information needed before answering a question can and should vary depending on the question itself, depending on the context. There is zero harm in giving an answer about how to draw a square with HTML Canvas, even if the asker actually has a different problem they're trying to solve—they'll probably figure that out pretty quickly. On the other hand, if the question is "How can I encrypt and decrypt credit card numbers for storage in my database", or "What ratio of bleach to ammonia is best for cleaning mold", some inquiry about the broader problem is warranted.

reon Insult Passphrase Generator

No, it's referring to the tableware -- every word in that position for all the phrases is a container of some sort (or at least a thing that can contain other things).

reon Insult Passphrase Generator

A few interesting generations:

> You malformed garbage can of podagric pig precipitations

That alliteration for the second part is particularly pleasing. Although they wouldn't make good passphrases, it'd be fun to see an "oops! all alliterations" version of this.

> You misbegotten locker of pathological coon cat [dial] dross

I wonder how the "[dial]" slipped in there -- is it part of the animal list or the excrement list?

Edit: after refreshing a few more times I've seen a few other tags attached to other words ("labis [eccl]", "painter [S US]", "budget [dial]", "scrip [archaic]"). I'm guessing that "dial" means dialect, and the words that went into this were scraped from some old version of Roget's Thesaurus.

reon Insult Passphrase Generator

Nothing, but the calculations about bits of randomness already assume that you know how the paraphrase is being generated, including all the possible words.

reon Bob_cassette_rewinder

Those tablets are sized for a dishwasher that holds about 4 times as many dishes, though.

reon Detect when your installed Chrome extensions have changed owners

At least I think it's pretty rare for a sold extension to be turn malicious in a way that it could do permanent damage, such as stealing your passwords. It's usually more along the lines of excessively invasive tracking or injecting their own ads; while I absolutely wouldn't want that normally, I probably wouldn't lose sleep over it if I learned that it had happened for 24 hours before I uninstalled the extension. That being said I would definitely like a better solution to this problem.

reon JPEG XL Is a Stupid Name

I suspect it has to do with the animated geometric background on other non-blog pages of the site, like the homepage, and because the site appears to be a custom Next.js/Tailwind app coded by a college student and not a professional web developer who is used to supporting years-old browsers. (Safari has supported WebGL 2 since 2021.)

reon Combating olive oil fraud with nuclear innovations

> a 50 litre barrel ... At least a year's supply for them

That's an unfathomable amount of olive oil to me! To finish off the barrel within a year between the two of them, they'd each have to be consuming 68 mL (4.6 tablespoons) of olive oil daily, providing 62 grams of fat.

reon Fort Botox, Where a Deadly Toxin Yields $2.8B Drug (2017)

It got no traction any of the previous times, though, and has been posted approximately twice yearly, which isn't that excessive. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=inside-fort-botox&type=story

Interestingly it looks like it this made it to the front page via the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

reon Sam Altman owns OpenAI's venture capital fund

When did Conde Nast/Advance Publications lose majority shareholder status for Reddit? That comment discusses it happening in 2015, but I've seen mixed citations for later dates, some claiming it still holds a majority stake.

2017: https://www.vox.com/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200-mi...

2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/reddit-eyeing-ipo-charge-mil...

2024: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/01/18/reddit-pl...

On the other hand, Wikipedia claims without source that AP has a 30% stake in Reddit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

reon Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM from scratch, step by step

> Thinking in terms of differentiable programming is a given and I think certainly counts as "from scratch" in this case.

I have to disagree on that being an obvious assumption for the meaning of "from scratch", especially given that the book description says that readers only need to know Python. It feels like if I read "Crafting Interpreters" only to find that step one is to download Lex and Yacc because everyone working in the space already knows how parsers work.

> I suspect the don't really understand what's happening under the hood or how contemporary machine learning works.

Everyone has to start somewhere. I thought I would be interested in a book like this precisely because I don't already fully understand what's happening under the hood, but it sounds like it might not actually be a good starting point for my idea of "from scratch."

reon The revenge of Unicode

> Let me explain how you can get Unicode revenge without harming a soul.

Except, of course, anyone relying on a screen reader or other accessibility tool.

https://kence.org/2020/10/02/accessibility-of-unicode-as-sty...

reon Each Facebook user is monitored by thousands of companies

https://www.facebook.com/help/794535777607370#custom

> Advertisers may get information from you (like your email address) when you interact with them outside of Facebook, like if you make a purchase in their store or create an account for a rewards program. They can create a hashed list with that information and upload it to Facebook. We can match users using the list to help the advertiser reach people who may be interested in their business and without Facebook learning any new identifying information about you.

reon Calling 'fake' on the iPhone computational photography glitch

> Claude Zeins takes me up on my challenge.

I think Gruber meant to link that sentence to this post: https://mastodon.social/@czeins/111508306096972808

reon Jaq – A jq clone focused on correctness, speed, and simplicity

From a quick test it looks like it supports exponents up to 9 digits long (i.e. 1.0e999999999), which, frankly, seems pretty reasonable; it's hard for me to imagine a use case where you'd want to represent numbers larger than that.

reon Jaq – A jq clone focused on correctness, speed, and simplicity

I believe this has improved in jq 1.7: https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.7

> Use decimal number literals to preserve precision. Comparison operations respects precision but arithmetic operations might truncate.

reon Write shaders for the (sim) Vegas sphere

Indent the code two spaces for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

reon The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye

> In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for camel is gamlo (ܓܐܡܠܐ) while the word for rope is gamla (ܓܐܡܠܥ).

The blog author briefly references this Aramaic theory in his post and says that it has been similarly debunked, linking to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk

The supposed Aramaic word for rope doesn't appear in any sources until the 10th century CE and is derived at that time from the same Cyril origin.