Hacker News Reader

tpmxon A giant European telescope rises as U.S. rivals await rescue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

It has around 250 times the light gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope and, according to the ELT's specifications, would provide images 16 times sharper than those from Hubble.

Edit: Wow, this construction image from August:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Al...

tpmxon UN AI report to close gaps in government responses

Uh, oh. Bought and/or stupid politicians will want to make LLMs that are not centrally controlled illegal.

tpmxon Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

Ah, just out of beta a few days ago. I'll try it out!

tpmxon macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

That would be: not delivering while still charging a premium.

tpmxon macOS Sonoma Boot Failures

This is depressing. They clearly have they ability ($$$) to do the required amount of manual QA, but don't. Or there was QA and someone decided that your case still wasn't enough to hold up the release.

In my mind, when we pay that ridiculous Apple premium on RAM and storage, we pay for excellent quality in SW/HW. They also need to deliver that quality.

tpmxon Ask HN: Is there a way to get previous iOS timer behaviour back?

Let's guess, they rewrote the clock app using SwiftUI (probably without the original main developer around), because like, how hard/risky could it be?

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/04/apple-stops-signing-ios...

Following the release of iOS 17.0.3 earlier today, Apple has stopped signing iOS 16.6.1, iOS 17, and iOS 17.0.1, preventing iPhone users from downgrading to any of those software versions.

tpmxon Show HN: MicroTCP, a minimal TCP/IP stack

Something similar from... a while ago. How does it compare?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060615041317/http://www.sics.s...

uIP is an implementation of the TCP/IP protocol stack intended for small 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. It provides the necessary protocols for Internet communication, with a very small code footprint and RAM requirements - the uIP code size is on the order of a few kilobytes and RAM usage is on the order of a few hundred bytes.

https://github.com/adamdunkels/uip

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIP_(software)

(I believe uIP was extracted and improved upon from Contiki, a C64 OS with TCP/IP support written in C in 2002: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki)

tpmxon I've overlayed stays on a light pollution satellite map

Greenhouses, apparently. Try Google Translate on https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-1355536.

tpmxon Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

x86-64 docker containers?

https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/384 is still open. :(

tpmxon Apple's Blue Ocean

Waterproof batteries, transferring power to the device via induction? Then the bay where they are installed wouldn't need to be glued shut.

tpmxon Charter Houses (2022)

Hello, Erlich Bachmann! Damn, you're still alive!

tpmxon 'The early adopters have adopted': US carmakers slow their EV growth plans

So, are we in the Trough of Disillusionment or in the Slope of Enlightenment? Probably the former, still...

tpmxon Melting in W. Antarctica 'unavoidable,' potentially disastrous sea level rise

Seems odd...

tpmxon UK bans virginity testing but refuses to apologize to immigrants for past abuses

I now think that allowing political topics on HN was a mistake. I did cheer for it previously - sorry.

tpmxon Cover designs from American Shipper's 1980s magazine issues

Sorry, that's some sad-looking covers. There are many, many better examples of 80s trade mag cover art.

Examples:

https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22personalcomput...

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date&and%5B%5...

tpmxon Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell

A workaround (edit: in some of those cases): Setup a Tailscale exit node in the country where you're normally located - with a residential IP. E.g. in your apartment back home, or at a friend's.

tpmxon SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site

Where? Didn't find anything when looking for that. (Sarcasm?)

tpmxon Wait, what's a bookmarklet?

This is probably the post I'm thinking of:

https://medium.com/making-instapaper/bookmarklets-are-dead-d...

https://archive.ph/hDumY

tpmxon Safety benefits of roundabouts

Seriously, americans need to learn about these.

tpmxon Off-duty pilot tried to crash Alaska Airlines SFO flight, officials say

Yeah, no.

tpmxon Advice to a novice programmer

I used Emacs for about two decades. It worked well and did exactly what I wanted it to.

Then I started using Copilot+VSCode while learning a for me new language (Python) this spring. I've grown rather fond of VSCode since, to be honest.

This extension by Yuichiro Tachibana is the one to use to get Emacs keybindings, btw:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...

tpmxon Ask HN: Was the job market this bad back at the WWW Bubble in 2001?

Money has this way of ruining good things.

tpmxon Wait, what's a bookmarklet?

Wasn't there some fundamental web/javascript security policy change a decade or so ago that broke many bookmarklets?

tpmxon Melting in W. Antarctica 'unavoidable,' potentially disastrous sea level rise

As an example: 10k years ago during the last major ice age, Stockholm was 150 meters below the current sea level. The land is springy...

(https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landh%C3%B6jningen_i_Stockholm - use Google Translate.)

In 2009 a dock needed to lowered by 0.5 meters to keep up with the land rise.

tpmxon Melting in W. Antarctica 'unavoidable,' potentially disastrous sea level rise

In most of Sweden (except the very south) the uplift is faster than the current projected sea rise.

tpmxon Off-duty pilot tried to crash Alaska Airlines SFO flight, officials say

What do you mean, "unlike the story flag button"? That is the primary mechanism used to move posts away from the frontpage when it upsets someone. This is not particularly controversial - I feel you might have misunderstood something.

tpmxon Ask HN: Was the job market this bad back at the WWW Bubble in 2001?

I feel it was worse in 2001/2002 than it is now.

Sidenote: The number of people working in software has grown immensely during these 20 odd years. (seems 5-10x larger now) The typical developer background has also changed quite a bit.

tpmxon Google faces antitrust probe in Japan for pushing search default

It's pretty clear that Alphabet/Google needs to be broken up into at least four separate parts in order to prevent the current entity from illegally using dominance in some areas to grow their size in other areas:

1) Search and ads

2) Media (Youtube)

3) Cloud services

4) Mobile OS (Android)

Next: A certain fruit company.

tpmxon Melting in W. Antarctica 'unavoidable,' potentially disastrous sea level rise

This is a good place to start learning about the phenomenon:

https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/geodata/gps-geodesi-och-swepo...

Postglacial land uplift

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantm%C3%A4teriet

Lantmäteriet (The Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority) is a government agency in Sweden that provides information on Swedish geography and property.

...

Lantmäteriet was founded in 1628, when Swedish general mathematician Anders Bureus was tasked with systematically mapping out the Swedish Empire and educating new land surveyors under directions from the Swedish King Gustaf II Adolf)

tpmxon Off-duty pilot allegedly tried to shut off engines on Alaska Airlines flight

I suppose the root cause is that psychology is still mostly a pseudo science.