Hacker News: cdr

New comment by cdr in "Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro"

cdr — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:45:59 +0000

It is indeed a common weakness of TTS models.

Unfortunately it makes it unsuited for my use case, which is almost entirely single words, as I don't particularly want to deal with stitching/segmenting input/output.

New comment by cdr in "I hacked my washing machine"

cdr — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 19:21:44 +0000

I tried that, and found dryers actually vibrate so little that most sensors have a hard time reliably detecting it.

New comment by cdr in "I hacked my washing machine"

cdr — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:46:51 +0000

It's actually really, really easy to get the state of a "dumb" washing machine (or any other electric machine) into Home Assistant using a smart plug. You can use something really basic like "power draw for > n seconds followed by no power for > m seconds" to detect when a cycle is finished. You can get way fancier and look at power draw curves to determine what part of a cycle it's in, or which cycle, if you really want to. You can add a door sensor (recommend Samsung) if you want to know if the door's been opened.

Unfortunately it's much harder to do the same for an electric dryer, since there's no inexpensive or good smart plugs for 240V last I checked.

New comment by cdr in "By default, Signal doesn't recall"

cdr — Thu, 22 May 2025 01:01:02 +0000

All major online game companies are moving towards kernel-level anticheat, as it's almost pointless to attempt anticheat otherwise.

New comment by cdr in "How Copyover MUD Servers Worked"

cdr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 03:00:27 +0000

I played on a fantastic MUD as a kid. It was based on the code for some other MUD, and the admins were unhappy about some things, so they decided to write their own MUD engine from scratch. They got as far as establishing a network connection to a client - all network code written in scratch from C - before they burned themselves out and quit, which pretty much killed the MUD too.

New comment by cdr in "Don't fuck with paste"

cdr — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:02:14 +0000

Even worse, some will simply arbitrarily silently truncate the password. But not everywhere! The sign up page might silently truncate and then the actual login page might not.

New comment by cdr in "3 Men Convicted of Harassing Family on Behalf of China’s Government"

cdr — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 19:45:18 +0000

And Hasbro: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-rai...

New comment by cdr in "Pinball is booming in America"

cdr — Wed, 17 May 2023 05:33:57 +0000

Unfortunately, traditional pinsetters are well on their way out. All of the chains now use new models with strings that are much cheaper to operate. Non-chain bowling alleys with traditional pinsetters almost all get displaced by competition from chains and other issues.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-bowling-is-in-a-knock-...

New comment by cdr in "Windows 11 KB5023778 update adds promotions to the Start menu"

cdr — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:19:48 +0000

You can get a technically-legal Professional license from shady websites for $20.

Retail price is ~$140 for Home.

New comment by cdr in "Justice Department announces takedown of catalytic converter theft ring"

cdr — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 07:32:35 +0000

The kingpin at the top of the food chain sold the metals to a refinery. There were many levels below him of catalytic converters being bought and sold before they got to the kingpin.

New comment by cdr in "Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)"

cdr — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 09:00:01 +0000

There absolutely exist fungi that feeds on writable discs. Supposedly more common in tropical, humid areas.

New comment by cdr in "Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)"

cdr — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:51:23 +0000

I've always only bought Taiyo Yuden media since ~2000. Every CD-R and DVD-R I still have that I've tried is still readable.

Taiyo Yuden at least used to be white labeled sometimes, so you'd just look up online what white-label media at Best Buy or CompUSA at the time was Taiyo Yuden.

I haven't burned a disc in probably close to a decade at this point though. SpiderOak is my backup.

New comment by cdr in "Disabling /all chat in matchmade queues"

cdr — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 07:12:32 +0000

You've had the ability to turn off team chat in settings for quite awhile. I also turn it off, both all and team.

New comment by cdr in "How OpenVSCode Server turns VS Code into a web IDE"

cdr — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 09:31:10 +0000

Oh hey, I sold them that github account name for 0.11 BTC. They obviously had deep pockets but I wondered whether they'd end up having any success.

New comment by cdr in "Smartphone cradle used to cheat “10k steps/day” health insurance discounts"

cdr — Tue, 01 May 2018 01:30:09 +0000

There's no shortage of adwall sites, which is pretty much the evolution. Outsourcing of ad fraud is their bread and butter.

New comment by cdr in "Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison"

cdr — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 20:57:31 +0000

That's quite disingenuous. Entirely different circumstances and facts.

You're using the absolute maximum prosecutors were threatening Swartz with in order to extract a plea deal. They would not have brought anything near that to trial had it gone to trial, much less convicted him on it. In fact, in your link, this is what he was offered: "During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison".

The statute Swartz was charged under has also widely been recognized as flawed. Not the case with what Shkreli was charged with.

New comment by cdr in "Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison"

cdr — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 19:47:08 +0000

You do when you also commit fraud with a 7 year sentence.

New comment by cdr in "Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition"

cdr — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:55:21 +0000

Also, if you have a Windows Update pending that requires a reboot, attempting to install anything from the Windows Store will fail, sometimes with a cryptic error code and sometimes not even that.

New comment by cdr in "Houzz raising $400M at $4B valuation"

cdr — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 09:02:59 +0000

Uber deals with a commodity - the variance in someone driving you from point to point is pretty low, and the qualitative parts are basically all consumer visible.

The market for contractors is basically a market for lemons. There's 10 bad to downright criminal contractors for every good one, and most customers have no way to judge the actual quality of the work until it's months later and something falls apart.

New comment by cdr in "How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game"

cdr — Tue, 23 May 2017 03:35:24 +0000

ShopRunner is also free, forever, if you ever sign up for one of their free trials - I think they tend to happen around Black Friday.

I signed up for a free 1 year trial 5+ years ago, and it's still active. I don't know if they're desperate to goose their user numbers or what, but I've never heard of anyone's trial expiring.