Hacker News Reader

Vertical strokes first, and then bridge on top

In school-taught cursive, the uppercase A is written with a single stroke, but the upper element in Б, Г, Т and others need a separate stroke. The full alphabet sheet: https://upload-995750d0fd20690d889c7a976af524b6.hb.bizmrg.co...

zczcon OpenPrinter

From the specs:

  Compatible cartridges  
  HP 63 and HP 63 XL (US)
  HP 302 and HP 302 XL (Europe)
  HP 803 and HP 803 XL (Asia)

So they just use HP inkjet technology. That makes it less open-source, but even "open source" parts are going to be under non-commercial license (CC BY-NC-SA) anyway.

zczcon Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)

They have the same on cheaper (but still "Special"/"Premium") non-lacquer S100 version: https://www.casio.com/jp/basic-calculators/product.S100/

zczcon Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

They definitely knew, Soviet books on industrial design and architecture explicitly mention Birren [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="биррен"+зеленый&udm=36&tbs=... (search for Russian for "Birren"+green in 20th century books)

zczcon Iran acquired facial recognition technology through Russian company

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/Q32eF

zczcon The Dilbert Afterlife

Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:

"People are idiots.

Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."

zczcon [dead]

"Starting December 29, 2025, the ability to create new posts, comments, and other content will be available to users who make a more significant contribution to the platform"

Google translate link: https://1-ru--news-livejournal-com.translate.goog/80899.html...

zczcon The Checkerboard

The initial idea was to first sell 50% of the land and then sell the other 50%. [1] Thanks to corner crossing, the checkerboard pattern made sure that owners of the first batch wouldn't be cut off from their access by buyers of the second batch.

[1] From TFA: "This checkerboard pattern allowed the government to keep all the undeveloped sections in between and wait for them to go up in value before turning around and selling them to developers".

zczcon Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

Probably they meant this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-can-we-break-our-addict...

zczcon Al Jazeera condemns the assassination of its journalists by the IOF

At least some of those journalists seem to be Hamas combatants.

"According to the IDF, [Anas] al-Sharif has served as head of a rocket launching squad and a member of a Nukhba Force company in Hamas’s East Jabalia Battalion"[1]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-says-gaza-documents-prove-... (2024)

zczcon The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

Yes. https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures

zczcon Cops in [Spain] think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer

The primary source seems to be https://en.ara.cat/society/technological-warfare-the-drug-tr... (autotranslated from Catalan)

zczcon Mandelbrot in x86 Assembly by Claude

Maybe because of existing code like https://svn.fractint.net/trunk/fractint/dos/calcmand.asm

zczcon 'Sticky thinking' hampers decisions in depression

The text https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Demystifying_Depression is in this vein.

zczcon US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas

The requirement to list social accounts has been present since 2018, and the FAQ [1] says: Visa applicants who have never used social media will not be refused on the basis of failing to provide a social media identifier, and the form does allow the applicant to respond with "None."

https://ie.usembassy.gov gives 504 so I can't check the primary source, but it seems like the new part is a requirement to make accounts public and applies only to F, M, and J student and exchange visas.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Enhanced%20Vettin...

zczcon US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas

Looks like the new requirement is only for F, M, and J student and exchange visas that already need more paperwork, not for B-1/B-2 tourism and business visas.

zczcon The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

> a version of windows without all the crap

LTSC is a version like that

zczcon Feeling Targeted: Executive Order Ending Wasteful DEIA Efforts

> Who decided to add the A to it too?

First, DEI became DEIA under Biden, see the executive order [1] (now worryingly removed from the site). That had some logic as a mission creep which is always welcomed by the bureaucrats.

Second, when the Trump decided to dismantle DEI, keeping "DEIA" didn't make sense, and surgically removing DEI from DEIA is not his style. So it was removed altogether, and the bureaucrats cared more about going with pendulum swing more than caring about any unintended effects, so anything associated with DEI was removed without any care about accessibility.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250120152648/https://www.white...

zczcon Show HN: celine/bibhtml: a Web Components referencing system for HTML documents

Interesting, but the simpler way is to use plain html with microformats [1], so this:

  @book{kn:gnus,
  AUTHOR = "Donald E. Knudson",
  TITLE = "1966 World Gnus Almanac",
  PUBLISHER = {Permafrost Press},
  ADDRESS = {Novosibirsk} }

becomes this:

  <div class="book" id="kn:gnus">
   <div class="author">Donald E. Knudson</div>
   <div class="title">1966 World Gnus Almanac</div>
   <div class="publisher">Permafrost Press</div>
   <div class="address">Novosibirsk</div>
  </div>

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats#BibTeX

zczcon I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

As someone new to cloud services, I'm curious are there better experiences with the billing of GCP, Azure or Oracle Cloud? Also, is the multi-cloud approach doable?

zczcon Defensive Communication (1961)

It's all in the article, the "offensive" communication examples you describe fall into author's definition of defensive communication categories, which he names "Control", "Strategy" etc.

zczcon In Memory of Stiver

Head of Microsoft Russia was Olga Dergunova.

As for "nobody will go back" - agree in general, but at least Anton Nossik did go back.

zczcon Israel launched a dozen attacks on UN troops in Lebanon, says leaked report

Yes, that seems correct: "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations." - https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule97

zczcon Using Euro coins as weights (2004)

Soviet copper kopecks coins (1, 2, 3, 5) weighed their exact nominal value in grams

zczcon Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting

DeskPad was discussed there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41800602 And for Windows there is RegionToShare https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare

zczcon Show HN: Mermaid ASCII Diagrams

In the same vein: https://plantuml.com/ascii-art

zczcon Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidankyo

The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".