Hacker News: anigbrowl

New comment by anigbrowl in "South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access"

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:56:57 +0000

I am using an 8 year old phone that was mid when I bought it for ~$300 or so new. It's only in the last year that I've begun to find it annoyingly slow. Now I prefer using an actual computer for most things and only rely on the phone for messaging and maps when I'm out and about (plus some lightweight web browsing) but my point is that mediocre actually works fine. I have hardly any apps on it, if there isn't a web interface I don't need to interact with it.

New comment by anigbrowl in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:49:41 +0000

I am about the same age and tarted loading programs off cassette tapes. The fact that I can get a terabyte of storage in a micro SD card the size of my pinkie nail for under $200 still impresses me.

New comment by anigbrowl in "France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk"

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:19:56 +0000

Rome wasn't built in a day, and its computing and networking technology wasn't replaced in a day either.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet"

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:00:47 +0000

How could it be? The US has won the war against them many times over, to the point that they no longer exist.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet"

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:58:58 +0000

You can rationalize anything by only considering the upside relative to alternatives' downsides.

New synthesis of astronomical measurements shows Hubble tension is real

anigbrowl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:55:43 +0000

Article URL: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2611/?nocache=true&lang=en

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733066

Points: 53

# Comments: 10

New comment by anigbrowl in "Chimpanzees' bloody 'civil war' may offer insight into human conflict"

anigbrowl — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:26:24 +0000

The study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944

Haven't read all the materials yet, but I predict a Zachary's Karate Club situation.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture"

anigbrowl — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:46:37 +0000

I was thinking specifically of political pundits who are doing a roaring trade (in opinion columns, TV hits, book promotions etc) talking about authoritarianism and its many causal factors. They're curiously mute when it comes to discussing solutions, with very generic advice like 'go to a protest' or 'vote for the opposition' despite the abundant evidence from authoritarian regimes around the world of these tactics not being very effective. You never hear them talk about things like general strikes or mass civil disobedience campaigns for some reason.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:02:38 +0000

There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.

New comment by anigbrowl in "EFF is leaving X"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:57:32 +0000

Not if you're shadowbanned

New comment by anigbrowl in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:44:05 +0000

This is actually a reprint of a 1997 article, rather than being from 2019.

New comment by anigbrowl in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:42:16 +0000

I installed Thunderbird for the first time in a couple of decades recently. My impression was that it's very feature rich but also quite ugly and not friendly to new users. It comes with a lot of assumptions about what the user wants to do and how, and I found myself having to use cheats and workarounds from the outset. I wanted to import a batch of disparate .eml files that had been seperately exported, and after 15 minutes I was starting to think it might have been easier to just do it in Python.

I also didn't care for the tabbed panels, which make it feel as if the entire thing was just ported from a browser. It really needs some fresh design and user interface work.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:30:32 +0000

https://www.war.gov/About/Biographies/Biography/article/1230...

I fully agree that only Congress can change the official title of the Department of Defense to Department of War, but the vast majority of Americans are so authority-slavish that they just accept the administration wiping its ass with the Constitution.

New comment by anigbrowl in "The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy"

anigbrowl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:24:30 +0000

Agreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.

New comment by anigbrowl in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:13:57 +0000

Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz.

Building an entire product around EQ crossover frequencies (which are not standardized or regulated in any way) seems a bit risky to me. Those are things that could change at any time, as could the shapes of the EQ curves themselves. there are fads in engineering design like anything else and in this wholly digital era they tend to cycle and proliferate faster because increased performance (or at least hte temporary consumer perception of such ) is only a software update away. People are extraordinarily susceptible to placebo effects in the audio realm (probably because most people prioritize their visual sense), so just moving EQ crossovers around or making them dynamically adjustable is an easy path to consumer buzz. You see this all the time with pro audio plugins.

New comment by anigbrowl in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:55:57 +0000

Kinda off topic but I wonder why they picked this name, knowing of Nvidia's Spark. They're different products, obviously, but the potential for confusion is real as both brands are competing for mindshare in the AI space. I opened this story expecting to read they'd deployed on a cluster made of Spark machines or somesuch.

New comment by anigbrowl in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:14:44 +0000

I already did, 2 comments above.

New comment by anigbrowl in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:13:29 +0000

I haven't flagged you at all. You're just trolling...poorly.

New comment by anigbrowl in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:34:39 +0000

It only requires reading your refusal to give a straight answer, eg your deflection to a passive-voice observation of the Roman Empire's collapse while avoiding the actual question of how you characterize an explicit threat to terminate a civilization.

New comment by anigbrowl in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

anigbrowl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:27:05 +0000

Air power alone does not win any conflict. This is well known and proven over and over. Iran is not giving up its nuclear material for the asking, and there is no way for the US to secure without committing ground forces. Iran would love th US to commit ground forces, because it has a massive defensive advantage due to its terrain and decades of preparation for asymmetric conflict.