Hacker News: PBnFlash

New comment by PBnFlash in "Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app"

PBnFlash — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:45:42 +0000

I use to try and coordinate game nights across the world, and a url with the Unix timestamp of the event and a countdown showing how many days and hours worked quite well.

New comment by PBnFlash in "Trick users and bypass warnings – Modern SVG Clickjacking attacks"

PBnFlash — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 06:50:38 +0000

Reminds me of the flash player hack that would trick people into enabling system storage while hiding the menus. Vectors just can't help themselves

New comment by PBnFlash in "Meshtastic"

PBnFlash — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 04:17:57 +0000

It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable.

It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.

New comment by PBnFlash in "PG&E reports profit of more than $2B for 2024"

PBnFlash — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 06:26:31 +0000

Because they killed dozens of people and destroyed a town though lack of re-investment and monitoring their infrastructure.

New comment by PBnFlash in "Storing Times for Human Events"

PBnFlash — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 02:23:20 +0000

I had a little page that would encode Unix time of the event in the url, then just count down.

Super reliable.

New comment by PBnFlash in "YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious"

PBnFlash — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 21:17:07 +0000

They are artificially suppressing the api value by banning uses people want. If people want to opt out of the recommendation engine and ads that makes hosting cheaper and easier for YouTube. They only do it to leverage market position and imo that's bad.

New comment by PBnFlash in "Boom announces successful flight of XB-1 demonstrator aircraft"

PBnFlash — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:09:31 +0000

What is with the sudden surge of hypersonics? Surely this is military funding on some level?

New comment by PBnFlash in "New jet engine enables efficiency at every speed for cheaper orbital launches"

PBnFlash — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:57:53 +0000

This seems to not have consideration for hypersonic air flow. If this is just a lifting engine it can only provide a small fraction of delta v.

New comment by PBnFlash in "SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle"

PBnFlash — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 22:09:44 +0000

Worth noting that flying to the equator can provide a pretty significant increase of payload mass. Just a quick layover to orbit.

Electron Beam Plastic Crosslinking

PBnFlash — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 05:46:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dZdBmc-tUo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39450558

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by PBnFlash in "A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap"

PBnFlash — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 02:49:06 +0000

The 1980s chip Doc Brown made on the hood of a car in Back to the Future 2 was about 6 square feet, modern chip would need to be the size of the Pentagon.

New comment by PBnFlash in "Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed"

PBnFlash — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 17:15:16 +0000

If we ignore the law of universal gravitation the ambulance can hover over the park.

Rules are a part of how the world works as is the violation of them. Thought problems that deviate so far from reality are more a test of abstract thinking.

Rules implicitly exist for terminal goals (don't kill the grass in the park so people can enjoy it) but get abstracted into actionable decrees that are not necessarily aligned (Becky can't enjoy the grass if she's dead.)

New comment by PBnFlash in "Permutation City (1994)"

PBnFlash — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 15:40:37 +0000

If you can handle the science changing since publication in the 1930s(!!!) Olaf Stapledon is simply remarkable. "Last and first men" is one of my favorite books for just how unique it is, but "star maker" has some interesting parallels

New comment by PBnFlash in "Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI"

PBnFlash — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 04:48:48 +0000

There are probably a lot of optimizations in the silicone and software to find. It's not necessarily obvious what corners can get cut or where, the tradeoffs of tapping out new chips is worth it. Yet Another Matrix Multiplication Chip is not going to set the world on fire. Nvidia has that market pretty well captured.

But perhaps it turns out that subnets can be trained independently or swapped with semantically equivalent but qualitatively different ones. The routing network would effectively "Standardize" and could in principle be well enough understood to "hand optimize" the routing network into hardware. Or maybe back propagation has some novel physical analogue that can be exploited in scales we can access. The real question is if Altman is capable of finding the right path in the notoriously dead end filled field of chip design. His backing of helion [1] didn't bode well in my view. But with enough R&D maybe he will flail into something useful trillions is enough for a lot of flailing.

[1] https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw Edit: more derisive link

New comment by PBnFlash in "Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago"

PBnFlash — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:44:26 +0000

With their bigger brains larger lungs and stronger bodies too expensive in the ice and snow. We the budget model had an advantage but in this time of plenty some neanderthal clones would give us a run for our money.

New comment by PBnFlash in "Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness"

PBnFlash — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 22:20:18 +0000

One upside of minimum wage is lots of places have competitive salaries

New comment by PBnFlash in "A Modern Web for Hacker News – Open-Source and Seeking Feedback"

PBnFlash — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 17:38:42 +0000

I don't want this

New comment by PBnFlash in "Double-mirror illusion"

PBnFlash — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:18:31 +0000

This seems like a version of the ambiguous cylinder illusion https://youtu.be/yupxceBjDa0

New comment by PBnFlash in "Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?"

PBnFlash — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:10:03 +0000

Scheduling events with lots of people and timezones was always a pain. Stick an epoch time into a url for a static portable timer.

https://aisle99.com/cd/?d=s5ub7o&t=Game%20Night!

New comment by PBnFlash in "Transparent wood could soon find uses in smartphone screens, insulated windows"

PBnFlash — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 18:50:55 +0000

I hesitate to wade into this but he does not do interesting chemistry. I am deep into chemistry YouTube and followed Nile red since literally his first year on the site. He has wonderful presentation, clean videography, and great presentation. But his chemistry is some of the most rudimentary in the scene.

On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and borderline unwatchable.