Hacker News: Tor3

New comment by Tor3 in "Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm"

Tor3 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:13:38 +0000

Tech worker here.. well, IT. One example from here (not in the US): The union took care of getting travel hours compensated, and removing the non-paid forced weekend travels, and lots of other stuff which would be impossible for an individual to negotiate. That was a huge issue and took a long time. And lots of other things which individuals have no chance of doing.

New comment by Tor3 in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

Tor3 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:45:07 +0000

There are still connect-and-use ones, like the one I mentioned, and the rest of them (fortunately there aren't that many which requires an email address anymore, though some exist) are just uselessly annoying. Airports, for example, always try to go through a 'connect' phase, and on Android that's sent through some Android-tool which often don't even work for some of those networks. And for no reason - TOS is useless, and sometimes there's not even a TOS - it's just a "connect' button. All of that makes it hard, sometimes impossible to connect, for absolutely zero reason. :-(

New comment by Tor3 in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

Tor3 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:14:49 +0000

I haven't seen that many actually. In our neighborhood in Japan the area is crowded with home networks, they're all encrypted.

And when I've tried navigating in large cities (Tokyo included) and found that my stupid tablet's GPS relied on getting the ephemeris data from the internet, and never through the GPS itself, I couldn't start navigating until I connected to something.. and I spent hours trying to find an open network, unsuccessfully. Happened twice, the second time in Nagoya. No open networks. Well, Starbucks have that, but then you need to find one.

New comment by Tor3 in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

Tor3 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:10:44 +0000

Way less than before, but, as an example, the supermarket very close to my home (in my home country - my other comment elsewhere is about our home in Japan) has an open network. It's presumably so that when customers are there then the supermarket's app, on customers phones, will have access to coupons and the like. My own phone utilizes that (I don't use a data plan with that phone, as I mostly use it for calls and not having a data plan saves me a ton of money - it's basically free).

New comment by Tor3 in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

Tor3 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:08:10 +0000

Huh? Open networks are open. You don't go to prison for that. Anyway, as the next comment said, there aren't many open networks anymore, though you'll still find some (see other comment)

New comment by Tor3 in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

Tor3 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:09:16 +0000

From previous discussions there are apparently TVs which will connect to any open network nearby, if it can find one.

I got myself a normal, non-smart Philips 49" TV some ten years ago, it's good, but I don't expect to be able to find something similar anymore.

New comment by Tor3 in "Mathematical texts from a Maya site in Guatemala identify an ancient astronomer"

Tor3 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:01:28 +0000

So then we can conclude that for the type of work they did, in the area they did, they did not find it practical to use anything wheeled to help out. They knew about wheels, as already mentioned, so they obviously would have utilized wheels if that would have been effective. And they didn't, so it wasn't.

New comment by Tor3 in "Mathematical texts from a Maya site in Guatemala identify an ancient astronomer"

Tor3 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:42:43 +0000

They knew about the wheel (as some of their children toys had them), so the explanation is easy: They did not find it effective. Completely understandable. I spent my youth walking (and carrying a lot) in nature, and not once would I have tried to use a wheeled wagon and definitely not a wheelbarrow during those excursions. If I had a draft animal I would have used it to carry stuff (as people do, with horses and dogs), not a wagon with wheels - that would have been totally impractical. And the terrain where I grew up is way easier, by several orders of magnitude, than what I could see when I visited Yucatan some years ago.

New comment by Tor3 in "A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese"

Tor3 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:16:08 +0000

I don't know why, but that was an extreme load on my computer/browser. The picture changed every ten-fifteen seconds, I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it wasn't something I wanted to watch. The computer fan ran at maximum and it was hard to get enough CPU to close the browser tab.

New comment by Tor3 in "Why jet engines aren't made in China"

Tor3 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:28:09 +0000

Indeed, a 10%-20% difference is so much that airliners would sell their grandmother (if they had one) for a leap like that. A 2% improvement is considered significant and is a massive economic incentive, even more so these days for long-haul flights which are now in some cases 50% longer due to conflicts, and at times extreme price hikes for jet fuel.

(This applies a bit less to military engines though, where performance is a more important factor. Fuel efficiency is still important though)

New comment by Tor3 in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

Tor3 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:14:48 +0000

Ah, 20kHz and CRT flybacks.. when I was a child I could of course hear that (in Europe that would be 15625 Hz), when I studied electronics and TV repair we could all hear that, and because we had the equipment we "tested" what we could hear using a function generator. The limit for conscious hearing for me was somewhere around 17kHz. Or not 18kHz for sure.

But I think I lost the ability to hear the flyback not long after I passed twenty. The world turned silent as far as that's concerned (before, you could hear it anywhere and everywhere, in shops, homes, some workplaces..)

The "20kHz" thing is kind of a myth for most people, at least that's what it looked to me after all the testing we did at school. I think it can influence what you hear, somehow, but in any case it's for very young people.

> Most people have no idea how much their high frequency hearing degrades as they age because it plays approximately no role in your life, but it's real, dramatic, and as far as I know happens to everyone.

I agree completely. I recall some discussions a long time ago on RMMGA (Usenet: rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic) where some distinguished and experienced, but middle-aged guitarists got practically angry when a young guy described the sound of a certain type of newly-introduced strings "harsh" and "like fingernails on a blackboard" when used on a particular guitar.

The difference was, of course, that what the young guy could hear is something which stopped existing at least when you had passed 30.. I was at an age where I too couldn't hear that kind of sound from strings, but it was still not that long ago and I remembered and had noticed the difference, i.e. that I could not hear what I could hear before. For example the huge difference between fresh strings and week-old strings (and that fact has, over the decades, saved me tons of money which I would otherwise have spent on replacing strings all the time..)

New comment by Tor3 in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

Tor3 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:23:40 +0000

It all depends on the country and the local rules, which can also change from year to year. Attendence didn't matter much, if at all, in my day, but right now it matters. Extremely so. Student's couldn't, until this year (when this was finally revised) even visit the school nurse without getting a "no attendance", which would count negatively with respect to the mandatory attendance requirement for advancing further. And even for receiving the common stipend.

New comment by Tor3 in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

Tor3 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:17:14 +0000

In college I one year had a physics teacher who refused to believe that you could hear the harmonics of a guitar string simply by lightly touching the string at the right place, e.g. in the middle (12th fret) to hear the octave. Nothing could convince him that this was possible. That year was when several of us spent a good part of the week bowling in a nearby bowling hall, either because we didn't have to take the class (the curriculum was years behind what we had already done before college), or the teachers were so incompetent that there was no point attending. Fortunately the other educational years (everything after middle school, that year excepted) were great though.

New comment by Tor3 in "Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian"

Tor3 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:48:23 +0000

I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka Debian without systemd) and I've had zero problems with that switch, which happened years ago.

New comment by Tor3 in "Japanese symbols that speak without words"

Tor3 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:07:34 +0000

The "Limited Express" logo existed only until the railway was privatized, if I read the article correctly. In any case I haven't noticed it, and you know when a train is a limited express - it's right there on the board announcing incoming trains (and if it's your train then you already have a limited express ticket and you know the exact time it arrives). And, finally, there's an audio announcement which says that it's a limited express. But I'll look for the logo the next time I'm at the station, it would be interesting if it's still there. I actually hope so.

New comment by Tor3 in "Japanese symbols that speak without words"

Tor3 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:00:33 +0000

That "L" wasn't used in my European country until recently, and when I saw it the first time I didn't really get what it was supposed to mean. I was guessing that it could be something indicating that the driver didn't have a license and was practicing with someone (something which you can do legally, if the other person is above 25 and has had a license for multiple years, and in areas which are not trafically complicated). But I was thinking it could also mean that the driver had just got the license, but that sounded strange to me as well.. having never heard about any license divisive system being introduced.

I realize I in fact still do not know what the "L" is supposed to mean, in my country.

New comment by Tor3 in "Japanese symbols that speak without words"

Tor3 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:53:58 +0000

The article is not about the Japanese language, and it's not about writing systems, Kanji or otherwise.

Toyota uses superconducting motor in race for first time

Tor3 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:41:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16626731

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460359

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Tor3 in "What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?"

Tor3 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:10:24 +0000

Japanese rice is not commonly produced in other countries. And even where they do, the rice is not the same. I eat rice made inside Japan and made outside of Japan, and the latter is a poor substitute.

New comment by Tor3 in "What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?"

Tor3 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 06:01:31 +0000

I specifically mentioned families where the economy is not a burden, and they still don't want many children. Very few will want more than two. Please note that in my country at least, as long as the economy is good enough that there aren't any real problems living, then it doesn't matter if it costs more with more children. That is not the reason.