Hacker News Reader

sparklysoupon The climate benefits of retiring an operational combustion engine vehicle

Pretty much all new cars incorporate touch screens - that's the wrong thing to look at. What's important is if they retain physical/tactile controls for the things that matter (or matter to you). There are a number of cars out there that still have old-fashioned controls - Hyundai Kona is on my list for that reason.

sparklysoupon Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices

You're close. It's not Gmail, the product that killed it. It's the business model of "free products." That's because Gmail is not the product - it's a delivery platform that's just useful enough to you to keep using it. The product is ads, and you are not the customer.

sparklysoupon The fine print that follows you out the door: non-compete clauses are spreading

> PE

Name and shame.

sparklysoupon 3D-Printing a Trombone

Yes, but "spit valve" is a misnomer. It is water condensation that collects inside the tubes and have to be removed. For anyone other than absolute beginners, anyway.

sparklysoupon Ethiopia gets $350M World Bank financing for its digital ID project (2024)

Having a single (government ID) is bad, so instead we hand our personal details over to one of a dozen private companies, none of which has any contract with us, the user, and all of whom happily share it with the (20 or so, in Persona's case) other companies they use to farm out bits and pieces of the identity verification job. Sure this is better.

Meanwhile, I have never had any fraud, scam, identity theft or anything else as a result of, or with any connection to my country's national ID. But I can't avoid also having to hand over my details to private (and foreign to me) companies that only exist because Americans can't get act together.

Srsly.

sparklysoupon I reverse-engineered Netflix's 4K restrictions

> They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle.

Any idea what this looks like? I assume it's not visible to the human eye, but being able to survive this level of degradation is quite impressive.

sparklysoupon Pink Power Ranger takes down white supremacist dating sites

> the journalists found that it's a 57-year old lady who's never been known in the scene, who was married to a French banker whose parents survived the holocaust, but in the last decade fell into the rabbit hole of white-victimization-theory.

Just to clarify, she fell into the rabbit hole, not him. He divorced her. Your comment can easily be read both ways.

sparklysoupon Worlds largest electric ship launched by Tasmanian boatbuilder

700-ish tonnes - it's in the wikipedia article:

"In 2020, Buquebus originally commissioned Incat to deliver a new ship to use dual-fuel propulsion, capable of operating on liquefied natural gas and diesel, with around 400 tonne of main engines, 100 tonne gearboxes, 100 tonne cryogenic fuel tanks and 100 tonne fuel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Zorrilla_(ship)

sparklysoupon Detecting AV1-encoded videos with Python

There's a python module for this:

https://pypi.org/project/ffmpeg-python/

https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python

  >>> import ffmpeg
  >>> video_metadata = ffmpeg.probe('test.mp4')
  >>> print(video_metadata['streams'][0]['codec_name'])
  h264