Hacker News: Doxin

New comment by Doxin in "1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed"

Doxin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:14:20 +0000

"legitimate interest" was supposed to be for things like remember-login cookies and the like. Not for advertisers going "my interest is legitimate because it's how I make money".

New comment by Doxin in "Camera Chase Vehicle"

Doxin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:16:44 +0000

You can even get carbon fiber reinforced TPU for if you want shear strength but don't need the flexibility. From what I hear it's kind of bonkers how tough that stuff is.

New comment by Doxin in "OpenPrinter"

Doxin — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:25:58 +0000

There's a video of the prototype printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM

New comment by Doxin in "The case for physical media ownership"

Doxin — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:16:07 +0000

You can still share pre-DRM copyrighted work without running afoul of any laws. Stuff like lending out or selling VHS tapes. Copyright is concerned about copying, not about moving. Digital media just makes the line between copying and moving sufficiently blurry that companies get away with making moving impossible under the guise of making copying impossible.

New comment by Doxin in "Uber and Lyft Use Artificial Intelligence to Price Rides"

Doxin — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:53:30 +0000

Work on your reading comprehension. I never said anything was illegal. Spying means the act of keeping a secret watch for intelligence purposes. This is what they are doing. And just because it's legal does not mean it isn't wrong.

New comment by Doxin in "Uber and Lyft Use Artificial Intelligence to Price Rides"

Doxin — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:57:23 +0000

Increasing prices at busy times (i.e. surge pricing) is... to some degree defensible. Spying on people and charging different prices to different people for the same thing (i.e. surveillance pricing) is not. Can you imagine the mayhem if companies just straight up knew salary information for all of their customers?

New comment by Doxin in "Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools"

Doxin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:47:54 +0000

Reduced test cases make it way easier to figure out what the actual bug is. E.g. a real world example is when I tested a "slugify" function with hypothesis. It almost immediately spat out this failing test case:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaẞ

Boy I sure do wonder what character could possibly be causing issues there. whereas without shrinking it might instead spit out something like

ЁЂЃЄЅІЇЈЉЊЋЌЍЎЏАБВГДẞЕЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯабвгдежзийклмноп

Which makes finding the offending character a lot harder.

New comment by Doxin in "Embryos shape their limbs: a key discovery of "genetic brakes""

Doxin — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:26:53 +0000

It's automatic. If you post and the title gets mangled you can go back and edit the title and it won't get re-mangled, but you kinda have to be paying attention and be aware of that.

New comment by Doxin in "IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake"

Doxin — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:11:30 +0000

It's also just sort of generally used as easily spotted value in a hex editor. similar to DEADBEEF, ABADBABE, CAFED00D, and probably a bunch more variations on the concept. CAFEBABE seems especially prolific, getting used for -- among other things -- poison value for memory pools in plan9 and MACH-O universal object files magic number[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

New comment by Doxin in "Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores"

Doxin — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:09:06 +0000

There's playing the game as intended and playing to the rules. People who insist on doing the latter even after being asked not to are infuriating. I've got one friend who got himself permanently uninvited from board game night for these sorts of shenanigans.

New comment by Doxin in "Self-Driving bus in Sweden crashes with tram on first day of passenger service"

Doxin — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:45:24 +0000

Except trams have, as far as I know without exception, specific traffic rules around them. A tram simply does not and cannot stop as quickly as a car (or indeed a bus) can. The reason that that's largely accepted is because the tradeoff is also that a tram can't really make any sudden unexpected motions at all.

If you get hit by a tram it is because you are in a place where you should have known the tram would hit you. The things are on tracks.

New comment by Doxin in "The User Is Visibly Frustrated"

Doxin — Tue, 26 May 2026 06:59:30 +0000

I find this also heavily depends on which LLM you're using. I've found chatGPT is completely awful at getting corrected, it'll double down until the cows come home. Meanwhile claude will generally adjust its behavior without too much nagging.

New comment by Doxin in "A nicer voltmeter clock"

Doxin — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:42:19 +0000

A linear ramp would work, but you can probably get to the end-point quicker if you're not going linearly. Something like

needle_position = needle_position * 0.9 + desired_needle_position * 0.1

is very easy to implement, easier than linear if you ask me, and should give it a nice damped movement. The constants can be tuned to go as quick or as slow as you like of course.

New comment by Doxin in "dBase: 1979-2026"

Doxin — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:12:20 +0000

except if := was the default then accidentally typing ":=" instead of "==" would be the easy bug to make.

:= was bolted on after of course, and I think that was a mistake, but no one asked me, nor do I expect anyone to ;P

New comment by Doxin in "I hate soldering"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:12:36 +0000

Maybe not. I don't know. I'm not a scientist. I have to err on the side of caution with these things because I don't know.

New comment by Doxin in "I hate soldering"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:59:29 +0000

not really? I have a habit of using the wrongest solder for my projects. The stuff I use currently was formulated for wave soldering, no clue why it comes in spools but it was cheap.

In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.

New comment by Doxin in "dBase: 1979-2026"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:26:02 +0000

Splitting = and := in python is very intentional though, It makes writing bugs like this impossible:

    if is_logged_in=True:
        allow_access()

I've got... opinions on the way python separates statements and expressions, but there's some real benefits to it too.

New comment by Doxin in "I hate soldering"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:13:06 +0000

> Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects

it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.

New comment by Doxin in "I hate soldering"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:11:56 +0000

A glass fiber pen is my go-to for cleaning groddy pads and pins and the like. Works a treat.

New comment by Doxin in "I hate soldering"

Doxin — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:10:06 +0000

I can make no claims as to the brands mentioned in the parent post, but a 3 second heating time isn't all that fast for a real nice soldering iron. Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.