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tifkap

18 karma · joined May 17, 2020

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tifkap··on A New Oil Shock Accelerates a Return to Nuclear Power
Correct. any nuclear power plant would take forever to build, and be to late to help. Meanwhile electric cars are here *now*, and solar + wind + batteries are not only much faster to implement, but also cheaper. Nuclear is to little, to late.
tifkap··on Sheets: Terminal based spreadsheet tool
I still use sc (apt install sc) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)>
tifkap··on Ask HN: What was it like in the era of BBS before the internet?
Ascii art porn was easy. It was a drag to download a image, because those files were so big. Downloading a .mp3 file was frought with danger, because those file were a whopping 2mb or more in size. You could never know if you actually managed to download these files. Also: BBS'es had limited capacity in the number of connections. You had to be really econmical in what files you wanted to download. I've had so many files wich i had almost downloadeded, just for the connection to die. It was a pain.
tifkap··on Why Autoimmune Diseases Rise Sharply After 50
CAR-T-cell therapy might help in the future:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/11/lupus-car...

tifkap··on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?
This is most likely an attempt to connect to a webserver on your own device to collect data and/or do tracking.

Remember back in June when Facebook/meta got caught tracking users trough a webserver on Android phone thought Messenger and Instagram? Same thing.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940

tifkap··on Ask HN: What's the Oldest App You Still Use Daily
On windows it is still my go-to filemanager (although double commander does the same)
tifkap··on Ask HN: What's the Oldest App You Still Use Daily
vi(m), sc (the spreatsheet), awk, Perl (for quick oneliners), mutt, grep, tcpdump
tifkap··on Ask HN: Why isn't Excel and Google Sheet having a JSON export option?
Because it can already export to CSV/TSV and exporting to json has no direct added value?

Note that Excel and Google Sheet can also not export to sc (spreadsheet calculator), to DuckDB, etc. Just because something is possible, does not mean it therefore must exist.

tifkap··on Ask HN: It's 2025, why would you still choose MySQL over Postgres?
s/MySQL/MariaDB/

* It works out of the box, and continues to work with no (or only minimal) tuning (no vacuum, etc)

* Scaling up through replication is straightforward

* Every techstack supports MySQL/MariaDB

In short: Good enough, No drama.

In my experience developers prefer PostgreSQL, while SysOps / DevOps / SRE's prefer MariaDB.

tifkap··on Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?
I always disliked that saying, because i'm never in it for the money. Money often follows, through paths I could not imagine when starting the adventure, but it was never the goal.

Following your interests and going on weird adventures/side-tracks outside your comfort-zone won't make you very rich, but you'll always have enough, and a life that is fun.

It helps if you don't care to much about collecting useless stuff: Travel light!

tifkap··on Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?
"Trust, but verify"

Used mostly in bookkeeping and nucleair monitoring, but very usefull outside it as well.

tifkap··on Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?
Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive anyway.

In other words: relax, experiment, take a change on new or weird things, and don;t believe that the thing you're working on right now is super-duper important in the big scheme of things. Consider the size of the Universe (Douglas Adam's style), and remember that any change you make (even if traveling at the speed of light), will still be insignificant for the universe. Use this information not to paralyse you, but gain a sense of unlimited freedom.

You are free.

tifkap··on Ask HN: What's a global, low throughput, low latency message bus service?
Not low latency, but onion-adresses/services are actually ideal for this. You only need to know the onion adress, to know that you connect to the correct node.

* encrypted * automatic NAT punching * complete location independence * use 0MQ with tor as transport if you want a queue on top .

Or if it has to be fast and low latency: 0MQ with eliptic curve encryption.

tifkap··on Ask HN: How would you explain an ABI?
A ABI is the low-level implementation of any programming interface, no matter if it uses interrupts (0x80), sysenter, or long jump to code that the OS put there, etc, etc..

It is the nuts and bolts that do the low level real work of implementing a call / interface.

tifkap··on Ask HN: How would you explain an ABI?
ABI is what you use when a Papa process and a Mama kernel love each other very much.
tifkap··on Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?
It's not a thing anymore, for two reasons:

1, It used to be that the only 'real' domain name was .com. Nowadays this artificial scarecity is over. If you want to launch a service as foo.io, that is fine.

2, You can sue to have a domain name confiscated if you own the trademark with the same name

https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/domain/CaseLaw.html

tifkap··on The California tourist town that’s running out of water: ‘It’s a shock’
They are next to the sea. Flushing with salt water, and membrame based desalination for potable water?
tifkap··on Winklevoss 500k Bitcoin Argument
But these can and will be fixed (by banks, the legal system, etc)
tifkap··on Ask HN: Anyone programmed/used KaiOS recently? What are you thoughts?
I'm using one (a Nokia flipphone). It's quite impressive considering its limited hardware. It has thetering, google maps, a browser, etc (the first 2 were hard requirements).

My demands were:

1. Long battery life 2. Small attack surface (security) 3. A phone that is so uncomfortable to use that I would use it only for calling, and some sms. 4. 4G network 5. Thetering 6. Google maps (the only thing that is really, really needed) 7. Flip phone (strong, no worryes about scratches, etc, and easy to put in a pocket).

It turns out to be the best decision I made in years .. no more distractions.