Hacker News: clifdweller

New comment by clifdweller in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

clifdweller — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:10:03 +0000

That has proven not to be the case with sports betting. Otherwise every major league pitcher would be needing armed guards to stop all the people with pipes trying to disable them. Seems there is at least some morality to not harm people but no issue in harming temperature sensors so where is the split line? Some really annoying ones like trains being on time can impact thousands yet i could see someone stepping out on tracks to make a train break to delay it to win a bet

New comment by clifdweller in "Ask HN: Apple terminated our dev account over a rogue employee"

clifdweller — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:27:13 +0000

Apple is pretty vague on their security practices purposefully so people don't try to game them. They are transparent though in that they are pretty strict 8000 dev account appeals and only 225 reinstatement in 2024 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256187336?sortBy=rank Since you fired someone that would suggest you had something more than just a cert leak to a public GitHub. Did your appeal include an rca covering what actions the employee did that you identified then action plan to prevent in future. In Banking security at least and probably pretty similar we would see a lot of scapegoating in submitted rca which was frowned upon. It is failure of process that allowed an employee to do something undetected so identify action, and how it went undetected and your action plan should cover both. Don't rush into spamming them until you are confident in your plan. How is the cert stored on NAS / machine and what access controls on that machine and data loss prevention strategy for your cert. what monitoring to usage of cert do you have/submissions to app store sent to email all have access to or to company lead?

New comment by clifdweller in "Honda is killing its EVs"

clifdweller — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:07:01 +0000

The key word there is disappeared which means engineering effort was put into vehicle design to make it a non issue. more robust/new starter design, more expensive battery tech required, simulations to validate no carbon buildup and real world testing, software calibration to make sure if engine is too cold or turbo too hot doesn't auto stop. All driving up costs to consumer thus consumers would liek to have something for that added cost. For many rural drivers a typical commute may be 15 miles with 2-3 stoplights and 1-2 lights. this effectively negates the fuel benefitsand often is annoying when coming to a stop at a stopsign to have car turn off momentarily for no benefit and possibly detriment to fuel economy if the ratio of stop sign initiated auto stops is higher than stop and sit at a stop light. I do appreciate personally the moments of quiet when not moving but is it worth it the added cost to my vehicle ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by clifdweller in "Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]"

clifdweller — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:23:09 +0000

They do use keyframes most likely captured from a human controller. you can see this after they do the backflip at :29s they land a bit differently and recover in slightly different ways but all end up in a static pose for a moment before moving on to next movement. The advancement here is the dynamics to go between those frames. Looking at last years performance you can see they pretty much go from frame a to b then stabilize then to c then stabilize. This is what makes this years look much more lifelike there seems to be some active stabilization going on during the movements. It also seems to let them chain movements that can take advantage of momentum much better rather than needing to be at rest between frames.

New comment by clifdweller in "Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy"

clifdweller — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 15:33:26 +0000

More akin to something like the twitter verified program where companies can bid for relevance in the training set to buy a greater weight so the model will be trained to prefer them. Would be especially applicable for software if azure and aws start bidding on whose platform it should recommend. Or something like when Convex just came out to compete with depth of supabase/firebase training in current model they could be offered to retrain the model giving a higher weight to their personally selected code bases given extra weight for a mere $Xb.

New comment by clifdweller in "Show HN: Free noise evidence generator for tenant complaints"

clifdweller — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:16:29 +0000

That is the crux you always need a calibrated sound to calibrate the mic. Best I think this app could hope to do is establish a relative reading. perhaps it could play a set of repeatable tones on the device(assuming being executed from a device that does not have external speakers that can be adjusted/ validate that sound was played from phone speaker and not headphone jack to a dac?) and record those then could replay sounds later to a calibrated device to establish reference. or start recording with some other regular repeatable sound like a vacuum cleaner with video showing how it was positioned for recording.

New comment by clifdweller in "Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update"

clifdweller — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:46:12 +0000

for commercial there are 2 options chemical and temp sanitization. From fda food code has to reach 171F to sanitize. most use a inline OnDemand heater with a couple taps so constant temp is close to 170 but will also pipe off steam to do a final sanitize. restaurants will also hand wash their plastics in a 3 sink setup water only needs to be 110F

New comment by clifdweller in "Roc Camera"

clifdweller — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 14:17:38 +0000

The idea isn't a bad one in some cases like travel photography. Between background people removal and lightroom a good chunk of travel pictures are not a good representation of what you can expect. on Instagram there are plenty of pictures of people standing alone in front of the Eifel tower or at inari gates in afternoon lighting that is unrealistic outside the pandemic or a 6am shot. Or take cherry blossom viewing in tokyo. More trees are white or very light pink but you would not know that looking at what people post often the camera auto balancing to make them more pink because if it doesn't people think there is a problem with the camera; that incentivizes sony, canon etc to build that in.

New comment by clifdweller in "It's Time to License Software Engineering"

clifdweller — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:56:47 +0000

that is basically the point the author missed. The PE license is to grant an individual a license for them to certify theirs and others works meets established guidelines. Now over time this may become true that something like level 2,3,4 are vague guidelines now but in future they will become more concrete. At that point it might become necessary to certify that a companies system meets those guidelines for the algorithms used.

New comment by clifdweller in "iPhone Air"

clifdweller — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:30:23 +0000

I think that could be the killer feature of this use that space for thin batteries maybe only 2500mah. i can carry 3-4 in my bag and have as much battery life as i care to carry around. and rather than push the charging to 30+ watts that turns my phone into a hotplate can recharge 3 batteries at once at 10w in same time. Bonus to apple on accessories sales

New comment by clifdweller in "Paper Apps"

clifdweller — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 17:17:32 +0000

the pdf are all seed 0 for each game so a static pdf same thing you would get if buying a printed book but set to seed 0

New comment by clifdweller in "Nevada Court Shuts Down Police Use of Federal Loophole for Civil Forfeiture"

clifdweller — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:25:46 +0000

not necessarily; If the police recently busted a paying for goods with that same style necklace(or any mental gymnastics to link the item type to a crime) then they could seize it as surely it is part of illegal activity.

New comment by clifdweller in "W4 Games announces pricing model for console ports"

clifdweller — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:02:48 +0000

I don't think that is their intention but yeah they need to clarify publish as sell or the start of sale. Later in that answer would suggest continued sale without license is ok.

New comment by clifdweller in "Commander X16 2023 update [video]"

clifdweller — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 18:15:02 +0000

the main technical side is as he has exploded on youtube he has basically became the defacto keynote speaker at most of the retro computing events. now he is quite knowledgeable in the commodore/vic/pet programming scene however a lot of his other presentations/ videos are collections of community knowledge that he has gathered . that comes part of the issue in the community freely shares tons of info for it to be greatly profited by a few. there is also many cringe at some of his videos where he is given access to rather rare items and doesn't follow 'sane' practices before applying power going as far as saying in one video he is constrained on time to release the video so with a high probability blows up a prototype pc power supply basically for purpose of providing closure to a video.

New comment by clifdweller in "Ask HN: Why not have reverse life insurance that rewards longevity?"

clifdweller — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 21:02:39 +0000

it was mostly because of fraud. if you are a banker seems quite a nice premise to sell your rich friends a tontine with them and a bunch of Bering sea crab fishermen in it.

New comment by clifdweller in "Meta bans staff from open discussion of Roe vs. Wade"

clifdweller — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:42:46 +0000

i think that will be the major test to strike down any ban law that does not have triage protected. it's a tough one cause both physical and mental conditions need to be considered and thus will have different medical opinions of which politicians opinions should play no part.

New comment by clifdweller in "US Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade [pdf]"

clifdweller — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 17:02:01 +0000

It is possible they could without a direct vote. FDA just banned juul for not having adequate studies on effects of their products and how they market them. No vote, not much public discourse. Looking at that in another way they banned a drug/substance that damages cells in your body. Abortions drugs/procedures damage cells in your body. I'm sure if if someone really wanted to at fda they could start requesting abortions federally stopped until they can prove some unprovable concept.

New comment by clifdweller in "US Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade [pdf]"

clifdweller — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 16:55:24 +0000

If the assumption is made that abortion supporting companies were already donating to the left that would have opposite effect by empowering the right. To be effective would need to change positions/donations of right donating businesses

New comment by clifdweller in "SpaceX firings likely violate US labor law, experts say"

clifdweller — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 21:26:43 +0000

it really has less to do what they did than how it can be listed in their firing. if they sent an email to all spacex employees non work related during company hours they can mark that as 5 minutes wasted across whole company and grounds for firing. now it falls into the realm of cases that have been heard for union voting during company hours to the opposite end of spectrum of traveling to rallies and completely skipping out on work. so battle of who has the best lawyers/ if they choose easier to settle or make an example of them

New comment by clifdweller in "Ask HN-Beginner Arduino Kits"

clifdweller — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:06:22 +0000

One great thing is it was designed to be used in primary school for kids in the uk so has a large amount of lessons to follow along with https://microbit.org/teach/lessons/