Hacker News: calfuris

New comment by calfuris in "Police Have Used License Plate Readers at Least 14x to Stalk Romantic Interests"

calfuris — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:09:43 +0000

A "review of media reports" is not going to capture any incidents that the media didn't report on. That doesn't strike me as likely to capture every incident, or even a majority of incidents.

New comment by calfuris in "Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight"

calfuris — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:58:28 +0000

Florida got rid of that department in 2002.

New comment by calfuris in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

calfuris — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:42:31 +0000

"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation. Pull up a list of words that start with "gh": none of them (unless "ghoti" itself is on the list) start with an /f/ sound. You'll find the same for words ending in "ti" and the /ʃ/ sound.

I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!

New comment by calfuris in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

calfuris — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:57:07 +0000

> What are you talking about re: space shuttle and tens of millions?

GP was almost certainly referring to "They Write the Right Stuff," an old article that is pretty well known in spaces like this. It discusses a process that (a) works extremely well (the engine control software was ~420 kLoC with a total of 17 bugs found in a window of 11 versions) and (b) is extremely expensive (the on-board shuttle software group had a budget of ~35 million per year in mid-90s dollars).

New comment by calfuris in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

calfuris — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:55:04 +0000

The Natrol liquid isn't usually too hard to track down. They advertise it as 1 mg or 2.5 mg, but it's the same stuff, the bottle just direct you to take 4 or 10 mL respectively.

New comment by calfuris in "“Are you the one?” is free money"

calfuris — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:20:37 +0000

It's not actually optimal. Each check should account for all previous feedback, but it may be optimal to make a known-incorrect guess and trade the chance of winning with that guess for additional information.

For example, if your first guess on wordle is BOUND and you learn that the word is _OUND, you know the answer is one of FOUND, HOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND, WOUND. Satisfying all previous feedback leaves you checking those one at a time and losing with probability 2/7. Or you could give up the 1-in-7 chance of winning in 2 and trade it for certainly winning in either 3 or 4: HARMS checks four of those options, and WHOOP identifies the remaining three.

New comment by calfuris in "Building the mouse Logitech won't make"

calfuris — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 20:36:14 +0000

I don't see wires as a problem. Wireless accessories are slightly more convenient when you're moving the computer around, which is why my work laptop has a wired keyboard plugged into the dock and a wireless mouse with the receiver plugged into the laptop directly, but that's not a concern with my desktop so I go wired there.

New comment by calfuris in "Building the mouse Logitech won't make"

calfuris — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 18:35:43 +0000

Why would I want to worry about a battery even every other month when I could just not worry about it ever?

New comment by calfuris in "OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification"

calfuris — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:29:59 +0000

If a malicious actor found a gay person in such a job, they could easily extort them with the threat of getting them fired! So obviously you had to fire gay people, lest they get extorted by someone threatening to expose them and thus get them fired.

New comment by calfuris in "Chrome's hidden X-Browser-Validation header reverse engineered"

calfuris — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:46:10 +0000

I don't know exactly where to draw the line on "the vast majority," but surely it must be higher than the bar for a simple majority, which is "more than half." If you want to describe something in the lead but under the 50% mark, the word you're looking for is "plurality."

New comment by calfuris in "Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation"

calfuris — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 22:57:20 +0000

In the end, identifying where you can usefully take action to reduce the chances of something similar happen in the future is far more useful than assigning blame.

New comment by calfuris in "Does Earth have two high-tide bulges on opposite sides? (2014)"

calfuris — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:26:45 +0000

The Moon's gravity isn't just pulling on the water, it's pulling on the Earth as a whole. It's pulling more on the Earth as a whole than on the water on the far side. In the Earth's frame of reference, that looks like it is pushing the water on the far side away a little bit.

New comment by calfuris in "The missteps that led to a fatal plane crash at Reagan National Airport"

calfuris — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:12:49 +0000

By this standard, the US has not been at war since WWII. This is an absurd result, so I conclude that the standard is wrong. Official declarations of war have become decoupled from actually being at war.

New comment by calfuris in "How to quickly charge your smartphone: fast charging technologies in detail"

calfuris — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 23:34:48 +0000

I do it for the purpose of preserving the battery for myself down the line. I'll go for a full charge if I expect to need it, but 80% is usually more than enough so why put unnecessary wear on the battery?

New comment by calfuris in "Python’s new t-strings"

calfuris — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:36:18 +0000

I'd rephrase the sell as "now people who are used to doing the wrong thing and risking vulnerabilities can do the right thing without any extra effort," with a footnote about the difference in types allowing libraries to force the change.

New comment by calfuris in "How University Students Use Claude"

calfuris — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:19:43 +0000

My favorite math professor said "your homework is as many of the odd-numbered problems as you feel like you need to do to understand the material" and set a five minute quiz at the start of each lecture which counted as the homework grade. I can't speak for the other students, but I did more homework in his classes than any of the other math classes I took.

New comment by calfuris in "A love letter to the CSV format"

calfuris — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:44:59 +0000

Even in that case I'd be hesitant to open a CSV file in excel. The problem is that it will automatically apply whatever transformation it thinks is appropriate the moment you open the file. Have a digit string that isn't semantically a number? Too bad, it's a number now, and we're gonna go ahead and round it. You didn't really need _all_ of the digits of that insurance policy number, did you?

They did finally add options to turn off the common offenders, but I have a deeply ingrained distrust at this point.

New comment by calfuris in "Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)"

calfuris — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:51:46 +0000

If something was caused by pilot error, there's nothing you can really do except shrug and hope it doesn't happen again. It's an intuitively appealing explanation, and usually wrong. The aviation community has spent decades rejecting that instinct and looking for contributing factors that can be addressed. Those other factors are almost always present, and improvements can then be made. The net result of this process is that aviation has become incredibly safe, which would not have happened if people were content to say "eh, it was probably pilot error."

New comment by calfuris in "Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users"

calfuris — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:36:28 +0000

All else being equal, two access methods are strictly less secure than a single access method. But is all else equal? I suspect that there are quite a few people who are willing to use a long, complicated password occasionally but who won't put up with that for passwords that are used frequently. If those people use better passwords when they can use a PIN to make routine access easy, that's a win.

New comment by calfuris in "Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz"

calfuris — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 18:51:48 +0000

No, the statement was that ".net and .com are still pulling 80% of their weight when it comes to cybercrime." I read that as saying that .net and .com domains show up in cybercrime 80% as often as would be expected if all TLDs were equally likely to be used for cybercrime.