Hacker News Reader

userbinatoron Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)

They use more water because they do a much better job at cleaning than side-loaders, especially the new "high efficiency" ones that seem to barely work. Just look at all the complaints online.

and thus they also have to use a lot more energy to heat it.

Most if not all top-loaders don't heat the water.

userbinatoron Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)

clean better

with less wear and tear on your clothes

Yes, but then they're still dirtier.

using less water

Yes

In other words, they're so gentle they barely clean lightly-soiled clothes, and that's why they also use much less water; forget about heavy soiling or thicker textiles. For true cleaning, you need a top-loader that submerges them in detergent water and actually forces it through the materials with an agitator.

userbinatoron Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)

They're cheap, effective, reliable, very easy to service[1], and parts are also readily available. I'd only choose a side-loader if I was extremely squeezed for space and water.

[1] There are multiple YouTube videos of these machines being completely disassembled very quickly, as well as repairs.

userbinatoron Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)

I suspect it's due to the amount of water they use (or lack thereof) which leaves a lot more residue along the drain path, along with the horizontal drum that tends to trap rising water vapour attempting to escape. Leaving the lid on a top-loader open after use is natural; the water evaporates upwards, and they use enough water to wash themselves clean too (at least the older models do.)

userbinatoron Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)

How do you do that without the water spilling out? Or do you mean waiting for it to drain, opening it, and then refilling (along with more detergent, having wasted the previous dose)?

userbinatoron US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution

China became the manufacturing capital of the world because it doesn't have these regulations. It's time we caught up.

userbinatoron US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution

besides water vapor, obviously disregarded

Don't be so sure about "obviously" when they start talking about "water vapor emissions"...

userbinatoron Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%

This section of highway had one deer-vehicle collision per day.

That sounds like an extreme outlier.

userbinatoron Regeneration of used batteries via electrode–electrolyte interphase dissolution

Just like the periodic news about a new study on a method that makes batteries last effectively forever, this is unlikely to be implemented.

userbinatoron New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb

The tomb, which was built in the fourteenth century bc and discovered in 1922

Discovered 104 years ago, and yet...

Ballard says he doesn’t yet have permission from the Egyptian authorities to release all of the data

Oh FFS... doesn't space-based ground-penetrating radar already exist?

userbinatoron AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

Not all HN commenters; it's only a tiny extremist faction, which unfortunately is also the most vocal about it.

userbinatoron AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.

userbinatoron Typesafe-computer-use drives a Mac toward a goal for 1/50th of a cent per step

The title was perplexing enough for me.

userbinatoron The Farnese letter

Definitely, although a bit less annoying to read than the usual level of Claudish, so it was either edited or the AI is improving.

userbinatoron The first new cat species discovered in 100 years

It's a sign of the times that I'd probably think "AI-generated" if I saw those images without any surrounding context.

(Maybe a few years ago, I might've thought "great Photoshop job" instead...)

userbinatoron The Farnese letter

Mentally autocorrected the title to "paypal cipher" and got enticed to click...

More seriously, this looks like the context modeling that advanced compression algorithms do, but in reverse.

Recovering the key does not settle the text.

That said, the Claudish in this article is only slightly annoying.

userbinatoron Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA

"sandwiched between two wafers"

Pun intended?

userbinatoron Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

others would be free to take it and give you nothing

And that's fine, because I'm being paid to provide a service, actual labour (which might admittedly involve prompting an LLM), but it's still doing something new. There's tons of people being paid to work on OSS, and much of which would still exist by volunteer effort alone.

userbinatoron An update on Wayback Machine access

Further evidence that they're not actually going after your data, but just DDoS'ing.

userbinatoron Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA

It seems that within the past few years, there have been a great increase in the number of articles on low-level GPU internals/programming, which was previously a very niche subject. However, once you understand that a GPU is conceptually a processor specialised for graphics operations, with its own instruction set and RAM, then everything seems quite straightforward, and you can actually start thinking about how to implement one.

The specification is a behavioral target, rather than a circuit diagram.

Did anyone else get a slight feeling of LLM-ism from that sentence? Not a complaint, because I've noticed AI is definitely leading to some great boosts (the somewhat related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717638 is on the front page as I write this.)

userbinatoron Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

I don't give a flying fuck.

Ignoring the idiocy of Imaginary Property is how China is winning.

It's time we caught up and then leap ahead. Everything is a derivative work.

userbinatoron Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Can't wait for someone to point an LLM at that and "open it up" ;-)

userbinatoron An update on Wayback Machine access

It's not. There is no evidence, just propaganda.

userbinatoron An update on Wayback Machine access

I say put your data up in torrents, host a few KB of plain HTML linking to them, and let decentralisation do the rest.

userbinatoron An update on Wayback Machine access

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic

Thank you for not immediately blaming it on "AI bots". I suspect there's some entity manufacturing consent for strong identity/age verification/sanctioned-browser-OS "walled garden" Internet, and these random DDoSes are part of that.

I knew something was up when a few alternative YouTube front-ends I use suddenly put up the 'nubis and complained about the high volumes of traffic they were getting flooded with; of course someone actually going after that data would be aiming their "AI bots" at YouTube directly instead of trying to suck it through a tiny little-known proxy-site, so it really strained the credibility of the argument.

userbinatoron Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

Just make user-agent-discrimination illegal.

userbinatoron Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

...and the only way to stop[1] that is by effectively DRM'ing everything, which is a level of dystopia that I don't think even Stallman ever anticipated, nor do I want to happen.

[1] Analog hole and other workarounds aside, naturally.

userbinatoron Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

CF classifies anyone not using a popular browser with Javascript enabled as a "bot"

This is my biggest complaint about CF. They are implicitly supporting user-agent discrimination in favour of Big Browser, instead of discriminating on actual behaviour.

...and of course there are already companies running tons of VMs with "officially sanctioned" browser + OS stacks, that can get past all these "protections", for a fee.

"AI bots" is the newest boogeyman they came up with to take away freedom.

userbinatoron Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?

Note that INT1 was originally called ICEBP before Intel finally documented it publicly (very recently).

userbinatoron Every invoice in Brazil's economy runs on SOAP 1.2

The answer is probably "because SOAP was the hot new thing when they first decided to do this".

Working with enterprise software is in general a horrific experience, especially that which originated in the 90s at the peak of OOP dogma-cults and insane architecture-astronautism abstraction mixed with SOLIDly thick levels of bureaucracy.

My memories of COM, CORBA, DCE/RPC, XML, etc. are not great. Some of the stuff reads like satire today, but people were actually serious about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Management_Group (I recall an article in a physical magazine long ago which started with "The Object Management Group's Working Task Force, also known as OMGWTF...")