russellbeattie

I was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well.

I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.

An MBA's rule of thumb is that a full time employee's hourly cost to a business is at least 1.5x to 2x times their salary depending on employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, perks, etc.

> Then the dedup table, because deliveries arrive twice and the docs cheerfully call this “at-least-once.”

Documenting unexpected or intermittent behavior: The easiest bug fixes of all.

After 20 years my account on reddit was "permanently suspended" after some right wing nitwit reported a comment of mine as threatening. (It wasn't, though it also wasn't kind towards him and his ilk.) Happily, my login still works fine so I just keep using it as a permanent lurker.

I find I spend a lot less time on the site as a result, which really is a blessing in retrospect. I'm pretty convinced it's at least half AI bots now. Given how much AI sites use reddit as a source of "truth", it's not a good sign.

Still, I was among the first couple thousand people to create an account, so it still annoys me that the automated process just happily nuked me. Oh well.

Whoever decided it would be a good idea for ".well-known" to be a "hidden" directory is a complete fool. All it does is provide the opportunity for confusion, misconfiguration, skipped backups, missed git check-ins, forgotten updates and more. Literally the only people a folder like that is hidden from is the whoever is managing the web server.

Sure, if everyone knows what they're doing, it's not a problem. But we all know how long that assumption lasts.

The ban is 100% politically motivated retribution because Anthropic told Trump and Hegseth to go pound sand. The US government is purposefully screwing with the company because they refused to play ball and embarrassed the administration. It's a transparent effort to take revenge on a perceived political enemy as well as promote a jingoistic agenda of "US Citizens Only" nationalism.

I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book.

I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.

Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.

Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.

If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.

All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.

I caught a live stream of Stonehenge during this past Winter Solstice (it was cloudy, naturally) and the streamer provided a bit of trivia that I hadn't heard before:

George Washington's English ancestors, specifically Sir Lawrence Washington, were the owners of the West Amesbury Estate in Wiltshire, England, which included the land where the ancient Stonehenge monument sits. (Via Google)

If you hadn't that before, welcome to the "Huh, that's a funny coincidence" club.

All I want is for iPhones to have physical keyboards. That's enough for me. Makes you wonder how much money Apple has poured into touch screens over the years.

I do the same even though I never watch regular television where I live.

But my disappointment with streaming TV is that it's not the same as actual live TV. I want to see local news clips and commercials, weather updates, announcements for local events, etc.

Without all that, it's just a bunch of pre-recorded content that you can't pause or rewind.

Amazingly, IBM is still making videos like this. You can find great videos online from them explaining the technical details of LLMs, ML, and the like [1]. The guy in this IBM clip is a progenitor of what they still do today.

I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.

1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology

It makes me angry that people are taking this seriously. Reading this screed would require having to continually parse out the generally loathsome Catholic ideology and dogma from whatever insight it might contain. I have no desire to even try.

The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based on prejudice, subjugation and outright delusion built on literally millennia of persecution. All of their observations will be made from the standpoint that their worldview is the only correct one, which is unacceptable in every way.

For example, ChatGPT will quickly and efficiently answer all your questions about how and where to get a safe abortion, including pros and cons, history and other specifics. This is something the Church is vehemently opposed to on principle. Anything else they have to say on the topic is therefore irrelevant.

I guarantee that whatever AI doom they're warning about will never be anywhere close to the damage the continued existence of the Catholic Church causes and will continue to cause in the future.

Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know history nor read the headlines of the past several decades.

Hey, I love it when Bob from Chicago tells Trump to go to hell, but beyond that I couldn't care less what he or the truly horrific religion he leads thinks about anything, let alone new technology.

> "...like Formula 1"

Or projectiles like bullets and missiles. A sniper bullet with nanoscale textured surface that's able to go x% farther due to reduced drag seems plausible.

Wow, this is super interesting! Just checking out the Bay Area I learned a lot about the size and placement of the powerplants that supply the area.

San Francisco has a power line going to it via the underwater "Trans Bay Cable (200kV DC)" from Pittsburg. I'll have to look that up as that's quite an engineering feat in my opinion.

If you select a powerplant, wind farm or solar project, you can see how much power is generated in MW. It lists battery projects as well like the one in Moss Landing (182.5 MW). It's enlightening to compare how much power each type of generator provides, especially if they're located near each other.

Fun find: The Apple Campus's solar power output is 14.4 MW. There needs to be more of these around.

Really educational link, thanks!

As a 54 year old, viewing the grid with the Weber-Fechner "psychophysics" grid is depressing as hell. Thanks.

> "Slashdotted"

Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.

We need a Rich Text Standard akin to Unicode. It's truly absurd that we can universally read and write emojis with variable skin color across all platforms, but I can't send bold or italic text.

If can use emojis in my terminal text editor - even in a Markdown document itself - why the hell can't I bold or italicize?? We desperately need to fix this insanity.

Markdown by itself is: Headings, bold, italic, lists, blockquote, code, horizontal rule, link and image. That's it. Everything else is some sort of custom addition like tables.

Surely in 2026 we can figure out how to make this a universal standard.

I truly despise Markdown. I'd say about 25% of my posts on HN is me ranting about how much I hate it. This has mostly just lowered my karma, but that's OK. I'm not wrong, it sucks.

Apparently, the shape of a peeled orange (a flattened sphere) is unrelated to a violin's f-holes. I had it in my mind that the S-shapes were similar for acoustic reasons.

Looking it up just now, it turns out that, "Modern physics research shows that the f-shape allows the instrument to push much more air than a traditional round hole, resulting in greater acoustic power and projection."

Just wanted to share in case someone else had that same bit of false knowledge in their head.

The climate concern pearl clutching is pure muckraking. The author doesn't care, they're just looking for some sort of controversy. Do they (or the other seemingly horrified commenters) know how much data is transferred during a single evening of watching HD streaming video?

In 2026 4GB of data is not going to have any measurable effect on the climate.

There's a level of hypocrisy involved which is truly absurd. Literally no one reading this is going to curb their data usage. They'll just try to justify their outrage with farcical strawman arguments to be pedantic and then go binge watch some Netflix series without another thought.

Agreed - I was waiting for a more insightful explanation. I'm not a scholar, but I associate Swift with hyperbole and this seems way too subtle, if not bland.

Given how exact Swift was in terms of where and how the epitaph was placed, there definitely seems to be some meaning there that's been lost. There's got to be more to it.

Here's something random about "Neanderthal".

The word comes from the Neander Valley (Neander-thal) where their fossils were originally discovered. It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century German pastor. Neander is a latinization of his family name Neumann, meaning "new man".

So not only did we discover a new type of man in a valley named new man, but the computers that are used for artificial intelligence (a future type of new man) all use the von Neumann architecture.

I found that amusing.

(Other random detail: The word "dollar" is derived from "thal". The Holy Roman Empire first minted standardized 1 ounce coins made out of silver from mines in Joachimsthal ("Joachim's Valley") and so were called Joachimsthalers. That got shortened to "thaler", then through Low German "daler" then Dutch to English.)

My ex-wife grew up in a small town in 1970s Francoist Spain, so I've heard these types of stories before. (Though she didn't have to crank her phone!!)

She actually had two phone lines in her house: One for employees of Repsol - the national oil company - which didn't have a dial and used a central operator, and another with a dial to make regular calls. It created a sort of 1970s "blue bubble" effect because the company line was free to use. Friends whose family also worked for the company were sort of privileged as a result.

Visiting my kid's grandparents in the late 2000s was a blast from the past as they still had the same pink phone in the living room they had had since forever (it may have even been a rotary phone, I can't remember). My son at the time was honestly perplexed at the whole idea of a landline.

Are you trying to say that you could dial a rotary phone by feel alone?? Please be real. It was super easy to mis-dial even when looking at the phone. Dialing in the dark would probably require counting finger holes and take 10 times as long, though I honestly can't remember ever even trying.

I grew up with rotary phones... They really are not something to fetishize.

I can close my eyes and still feel the plastic cutting into my index finger after repeatedly mis-dialing a long distance number, or having to redial a few times because the phone was busy. (Good luck if you were at a payphone.) You'd try to dial faster, but you'd always have to wait for the dial to return sooo slooowly... It took literally 15-30 seconds to dial a number. Then there was the yelling at someone to get off the line when they picked up and started dialing right away (clackada-clackada-clackada). Oof.

Yeah, there are reasons rotary phones are gone for good, and it's not just because of touch tones. The "good ol' days" sucked and always will, no matter which generation is trying to claim otherwise, don't listen to anyone who tells you differently.

Hah... Your response proves my point quite well, thanks!

Let me help.

He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from the overall quality of the article and limits its audience for no reason.

What I've always thought was interesting about folding bikes is that it doesn't seem like it's possible for it to be done elegantly. It's been 150 years since the "safety bicycle" was invented, yet folding bikes are the exception and not the norm - even though it would be really handy if every bike could be easily shrunk down and packed up as easily as a baby stroller or a wheel chair.

Maybe it's just my experience, but every folded bike I've seen in the wild looked more or less like a bundle of bike parts, with bits sticking out here and there. You'll never look at a folded bike and think, "Hey, what's that?", because it always looks exactly like what it is.

It seems like there's something about a bike's geometry and mechanism which doesn't lend itself to symmetry and easy compaction.

You'd think by now the LLMs would have figured out that the body of a bicycle is basically just a bisected rhombus. → ◿◸

(I hope I don't ruin the test.)

I think on my 6.8" WQHD+ 3200 x 1440 phone screen (70.5mm width), an actual 5x5 pixel square might be the size of a period → .

Doing the math, 70.5mm / 1440px = 0.05mm per pixel, x5 = 0.25mm wide. Just a guess though, I'm not exactly sure how big a period is without a microscope.

To those HNers working at Palantir - and there's bound to be a few - what's your deal?

You do realize what sort of company you work for, right? Is it cognitive dissonance or are you really a paranoid right winger that's fully on board with Palantir's efforts to enable authoritarian governments akin to 1984's Big Brother?

I'm curious. Please feel free to explain how you go to work every day and do what you do. Fair warning, the rest of us are pretty disgusted with you.