Hacker News: Aachen

New comment by Aachen in "JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases"

Aachen — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 23:01:06 +0000

Thanks! Yeah that sorta mirrors what I wrote (Opus allowing me to halve my audiobook library size, making it worth it to switch fully), just that I'd say new generations of people will also grow up with whatever the 'nerds' (including those at large businesses) make the new default or at least ready to use and recommended to anyone who looks it up

New comment by Aachen in "Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not"

Aachen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:17:58 +0000

Bless the Internet Archive for basically hosting a second copy of the internet with sufficient bandwidth to serve whatever is currently down, while this single site didn't survive the traffic it got individually

New comment by Aachen in "Gold is now the top U.S. export"

Aachen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 20:56:42 +0000

Would have thought advertising and transaction fees myself, but the article says it's usually oil (ok I should have thought of that), "pharmaceuticals" (mkay, seems cheaper to make elsewhere so that's a bit strange), or aircraft and their parts (wut? How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!)

New comment by Aachen in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"

Aachen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:05:37 +0000

Which brings us back to the war on general computation. So long as people can have computers that they control, at least in one of the countries or regions, there's no putting this cat back in the bag and we are all along for the ride

Sometimes I want a fast-forward button for life, the times are so exciting and I want to know what else 8B people can think of next but there's so far no way to turn pages faster ^^'

New comment by Aachen in "JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases"

Aachen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:55:14 +0000

> I don't think there's a large-enough margin in this space that a new format could chew into to make the general public care

What improvement do you think is necessary for people to care?

Genuinely curious. Spoiler link with my answer to avoid any bias: https://lgms.nl/p/cau/?b64&ZVRNb9QwEL0j9T%2BMKqFtpe1Cqcq9qoT...

New comment by Aachen in "JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases"

Aachen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:36:38 +0000

Oh, that explains! I tried AVIF and JXL a few years ago and one of the two took ages to encode (a minute versus <1s for jpeg) to get similar compression ratios, and the other was somewhat reasonable on cpu complexity but significantly worse quality at the same size / much bigger to achieve the same quality as good old jpeg. I ended up concluding that jpeg is still the best for the specific image I was trying to lossily compress, but that was probably just the encoder then

New comment by Aachen in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"

Aachen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:11:47 +0000

> [The model's authors] can do this kind of work with Claude, but if you or I try to do it, we will get blocked.

If this seems concerning, wait until the models get effective enough (gets work done properly at a lower energy need than humans have) that there's no reason for them to release anything. Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?

New comment by Aachen in "The engineering that allows articulated buses to bend"

Aachen — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:54:20 +0000

Most metros are like this no? Not much seating, just articulated open tubes(-in-tubes)

New comment by Aachen in "The engineering that allows articulated buses to bend"

Aachen — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:52:47 +0000

Boarding times though? I agree of course about the cool factor and I was sure to ride one when visiting London, but afaik the slower (dis)embarking times are why double-decked trains are primarily used on intercity trains and not on commuter/local trains or light rail (metro etc.). Typical busses stopping every two minutes are probably similar

Edit: wait, I know one in Germany as well. It's expensive but between Frankfurt airport and another major city, there is a rail line but somehow the bus is significantly faster and they're using double deckers. The front row at the top was, n=3, always free for me (all four seats) so you get a quite unique experience, at least so far as my bus experiences in mainland western Europe go :)

New comment by Aachen in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

Aachen — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:53:45 +0000

Fun story, but what about the pain all these years?! I'm mostly joking since I assume you'd have mentioned it if it were still there :), but I am curious if it just went away and never came back or if you found and resolved a different cause

New comment by Aachen in "Fire at Starlink site in Bulgaria after suspected sabotage in Poland"

Aachen — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:21:28 +0000

Yes, they had these plans from the get-go so launching the necessary hardware is not surprising. The question was whether anything like that went live

Once it does go live, anyone could see the lower ping between two users of this network. If they say it got enabled, that wouldn't be hard to independently verify

New comment by Aachen in "StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta"

Aachen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:41 +0000

That's Apple's native way of going back across macOS and iOS no? I'm not an Apple user and even I've come across this when handling a family member's device for a few minutes

Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures

New comment by Aachen in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

Aachen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:00:00 +0000

A better product isn't something?

New comment by Aachen in "How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent"

Aachen — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:30:36 +0000

Isn't it pretty unique to learn from seeing? My cat certainly doesn't understand "monkey see, monkey do". In this case it's about literal monkeys of course, but I'm not even sure all of them have this capacity. Probably also some birds and dolphins and such could learn this way, but not most animals with 'friends' (or late friends)

New comment by Aachen in "PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock"

Aachen — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:01:57 +0000

I have watch history in NewPipe just fine? And I find it very convenient to know what I've already watched. All local, Google doesn't need to store it for you / you can't lose access to it

New comment by Aachen in "PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock"

Aachen — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:54:29 +0000

I tried using Peertube but finding an instance whose content policy fits what you're meaning to upload and responds to sign-up requests isn't trivial. It's basically perpetual storage they're offering for free so I get it, maybe the real surprise is that youtube makes so much money off of us that they can afford this

Found one in the end when I didn't have a choice anymore and put renewed effort into it (Google's algorithm won't let me into my account anymore, saying they don't have enough information to verify it's me (username, password, recovery email.. not enough apparently, but there is nothing else), so I'm a Peertube exclusive now) but iirc I can't use it for everything, like if I wanted to upload something in Dutch I'd have to find a new server that allows my language

New comment by Aachen in "Two-tier encryption in the UK"

Aachen — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:43:02 +0000

They're available if you want them. The main issue is that the userbase is small (in percentages at least, it's probably still an impressive number in absolute terms) and so there are also fewer developers interested in it. But they're functional and available at normal smartphone prices today if you're serious

New comment by Aachen in "F-Droid 2.0"

Aachen — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:48:38 +0000

That's strange, sounds worth reporting. They should be able to tell you if there's anything else to check (maybe some javascript interface says Chinese is the way to go) or if it's really just some strange bug on their end (misdetection of the ip address or so)

New comment by Aachen in "F-Droid 2.0"

Aachen — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:56:13 +0000

https://wutools.com/dev/testing-debugging/http-header-viewer

First hit for 'check http headers', in case that helps find out why websites think you want Chinese content. Maybe it's a bug in the website; maybe it's set as your first preference. Please report the bug if there is one!

New comment by Aachen in "F-Droid 2.0"

Aachen — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:51:09 +0000

Aurora works fine for me, and Google's software needn't chug along in a background sandbox no matter if all it can do is install apps, ping back to the mothership what your IP address currently is, and act as a proxy for other apps whose direct internet access you try to deny