Hacker News: alden5

New comment by alden5 in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

alden5 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:06:24 +0000

God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.

New comment by alden5 in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

alden5 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 05:56:17 +0000

Having public investors forces companies to try their best to make a profit with the threat that you could get sued if you don’t. Sacrificing short term gains for long term goals is something public companies aren’t really good at. One good example where not having public investors has drastically helped a company is spacex. Almost every one of their programs has had really bad failures that public investors could’ve investigated and shut down. As someone who worked for them I really don’t want them to become public, forcing a company to do that seems crazy.

New comment by alden5 in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

alden5 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:15:34 +0000

on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia

New comment by alden5 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

alden5 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:29:03 +0000

This talk was given at crowd supply’s 2025 teardown convention which after going for the first time last year I highly recommend it to anyone interested in hardware development. Met a lot of super cool people and managed to get my ticket price back 4x in the amount of free dev boards I got lol

New comment by alden5 in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

alden5 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:55:59 +0000

The app isn't accurate at all, magic 8-ball of scales, anything you put on the trackpad it'll settle on a weight and give you a number but it'll be random. The app will accurately tell you how much force you're applying with a finger but when putting something else on it'll settle on a random number

New comment by alden5 in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

alden5 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:44:57 +0000

It goes in gram increments and my laptop was able to read 7300g pressing as hard as i could, which I was surprised it would be designed to read that high, might go up to 10kg but I don't want to crack my trackpad lol. The actual measurements though are extremely unreliable. I've found it can't reliably measure anything, measuring a roll of tape gave me measurements from 70g to 700g, it always settled on a number but was different every time. Maybe the underlying data is more accurate but this API is definitely just designed for outputting the force of a finger. M1 MBP for reference

New comment by alden5 in "Ads chew through half of mobile data"

alden5 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:47:55 +0000

That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains

New comment by alden5 in "FDA Authorizes First Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Software"

alden5 — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 06:01:19 +0000

apple actually didn't release any 'pro' airpods at this event, the feature is for the pro 2's which have been out for over two years now, was glad it wasn't made a feature only for a new version

New comment by alden5 in "Brazil blocks Starlink bank accounts"

alden5 — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:32:54 +0000

that's not a source, could you link the report?

New comment by alden5 in "Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'"

alden5 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 23:37:53 +0000

apple already sells a device for taking care of kids, just get them an ipad and it'll keep them entertained all day long! /s

New comment by alden5 in "Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores"

alden5 — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 21:56:12 +0000

What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about

Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

alden5 — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:31:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming-42-million-gb-of-data-per-day

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200323

Points: 526

# Comments: 447

New comment by alden5 in "Earth Just Received A Laser-Beamed Message From 16 Million Kilometers Away"

alden5 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 06:09:19 +0000

the trick is lots of amplification on both ends is able to compensate for a wide beam spread, edfa's allow you to optically amplify the sent signal and allows the faint received signal to also be amplified

New comment by alden5 in "SheepIt Render Farm"

alden5 — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:35:28 +0000

Years ago when gpu power was basically free through google colab I used that to my advantage by racking up sheepit credits rendering other people's projects on google's dime. I still have about 10 million credits right now and I don't think I'll be able to use them all.

New comment by alden5 in "Raspberry Pi 5"

alden5 — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 03:58:37 +0000

If you're using a pi you're already in a pinch, putting a dac on a pi seems alot like putting lipstick on a pig, the only scenario where it wouldn't be overkill is music streaming and i highly doubt thats even a majority of pi projects with audio

New comment by alden5 in "Procreate Dreams"

alden5 — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 04:44:10 +0000

procreate doesn't have any in app purchases, there is alot of 3rd parties that sell brushes for procreate

New comment by alden5 in "Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features"

alden5 — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 06:00:52 +0000

It really depends on your definition, pretty much every car for the past 50 years has been computerized. If what you're really after is an ev with no lockouts there are plenty of ev's where the only lockouts are to ensure you don't do anything stupid (no over-discharge destroying the battery for slightly more range, etc) But if you're after complete control you'll find that in ev conversions with dedicated speed controllers will give you complete control, so you can shoot yourself in the foot if need be.

New comment by alden5 in "Apple Pencils don’t draw straight on replaced iPad screens"

alden5 — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 01:14:13 +0000

A while ago there was an issue that when replacing a camera on an iphone 12 it would cause the camera to become unresponsive. The problem was later solved with a software update without much fanfare; Backing up the fact that it was a glitch, the problem never occurred on the 12 pro. but yea i definitely hate the serialization, especially considering it looks like their hardware design is becoming more repairable with the 14's back glass becoming removable, it makes their software lockdowns make even less sense.

New comment by alden5 in "SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere"

alden5 — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 06:31:33 +0000

Starlink satellites only last about 5 years before they run out of gas and are decommissioned with an end of life maneuver which sets them on course to burn up in the earth's atmosphere. I doubt many others besides maybe amazon will want to launch satellites at the same height as spacex's, especially considering how insanely expensive and complicated launching something like the starlink network is. Another point to consider is how small they are compared to the area they occupy, they have plenty of room to spread out and they're constantly monitored to calculate the probability that they might collide.

New comment by alden5 in "Bank of America fined $150M for consumer abuses: fake accounts, bogus fees"

alden5 — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 07:16:05 +0000

My local credit union did the same exact thing, after the class action lawsuit i got a $20 settlement for about $120 they stole from me. Absolutely insane how they were still able to keep some of the stolen money, meanwhile there are people behind bars for using counterfeit 20$ bills.