Hacker News: contingencies

New comment by contingencies in "Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome"

contingencies — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:46:01 +0000

https://www.firefox.com/ + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... + https://www.xda-developers.com/switched-from-pi-hole-to-unbo...

New comment by contingencies in "Amazon acquires Apple's satellite partner"

contingencies — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:25:49 +0000

The immense political and economic inertia is to keep mobile phones as profitable federal.gov. surveillance-accessible tracking / identity / payment devices for the general population. Governments have seen Musk play in politics. Nobody political can trust commercial satellite networks to support them in conflict resolution or domestic enforcement. That means they'll regulate against them as a national security threat wherever possible.

Besides, satellite is generally slower/less economic/less feasible with a tiny portable handset due to technical reasons (eg. distance even @LEO, lack of a directional antenna) so IMHO emergency satellite SMS has to date generally been a fudge-feature (mobile phones use them to make sales since they're ~similar since ~2010, this one is perhaps targeting the 'concerned parent powered purchase').

New comment by contingencies in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

contingencies — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:51:19 +0000

I am formalizing as patents a series of developments in drone delivery which stand to massively alter the status quo with respect to retail deployments. This, and a portable demonstration, are targeting fundraising for go to market on our autonomous restaurants, which have approximately 10 years R&D. I'm looking for $100M with around $30M spoken for. On that main business we are objectively ahead of all of the early stage players in terms of technology on footprint, automation level, and per site capex, plus will have far greater scalability. In other words, we stand to have a real, venture-scale return while the early stage players don't. https://infinite-food.com/

New comment by contingencies in "Apple has removed most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from Apple maps?"

contingencies — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:42:33 +0000

Apple: 1984 as a service. "We know walled gardens."

Quick: someone do the graphic, you can sell merch. Mail a freebie and a purchase link to every makerspace on the planet.

Some interesting background to current hostilities: "The UN Security Council has voted to wind up the near 50 year UNIFIL [peace keeping] mission after lobbying from Israel pushed the United States to veto its renewal. The mission will end in 2027." https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2025/08/un...

New comment by contingencies in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

contingencies — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:35:03 +0000

Overall this list skews ridiculously to western classicism, and misses a great many more significant intellectual achievements. Here's some nobody's mentioned.

Mechanics: wheel, lever, screw, gear trains, cam/follower, crank‑slider, water/wind mills, mechanical clock, printing press, and the steam engine.

Every advance in basic metallurgy. Controlled smelting, casting, hot forging, alloying to make bronze, carburising to make early steel, blooms and bloomery furnaces, quenching/tempering, wrought‑iron forging, large‑scale iron production, advanced steels.

Coinage.

Sail.

Plumbing.

Refrigeration.

Plastics.

If you take the position these are not intellectual achievements, I think you under-appreciate how revolutionary they were at the time.

New comment by contingencies in "Now is the best time to write code by hand"

contingencies — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:23:56 +0000

Nice philosophical point. To iron-on more irony, zooming out a little, one could also argue much real historical experience was first erased when it was written down with the presumption of authority.

So is now the best time to write history by hand?

New comment by contingencies in "Now is the best time to write code by hand"

contingencies — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:40:52 +0000

You forgot locally sourced, single origin, fair trade, cholesterol free.

New comment by contingencies in "Penguin 'Toxicologists' Find PFAS Chemicals in Remote Patagonia"

contingencies — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:28:55 +0000

So avoid using dry teflon lubricant spray? Will do!

New comment by contingencies in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

contingencies — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:25:17 +0000

I can recommend the mono 'zoom tube' industrial cameras with live USB output. Very cheap in China, often expensive when resold overseas. I think a 4k one should be $100 or less. Maybe $150 including stand, ring light, etc. USB UVC control.

New comment by contingencies in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

contingencies — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:15:14 +0000

I did it once with an experienced pilot, tandem. An awesome experience. He explained the most dangerous time is when you get slightly confident. That's when most accidents occur, at the intermediate stage. He said you have to be religiously careful at all times, and stay paranoid.

New comment by contingencies in "Revision Demoparty 2026: Razor1911 [video]"

contingencies — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:44:54 +0000

Classic first comment on the Youtube video: Hey lft, I designed the RISC-V core you're using, and I had a ton of fun watching and re-watching this video and trying to guess some of the tricks you used. Awesome work and I'm looking forward to a write-up!

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

contingencies — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:54:46 +0000

Amen. Also, nature is awesome and we live in a period of technological plenty and instant global communication with arbitrary knowledge and decent translation available in seconds, so why are we still acting like lunatics and hating on groups?

Parents: stop teaching your children to identify with irrelevant concepts of ethno-nationalism, and instead teach them to be globalist scientists with empathy.

Nationalismus ist eine Kinderkrankheit. Die Masern der Menschheit. ("Nationalism is an infantile disease: the measles of mankind") - Albert Einstein, 1929. Who, incidentally, turned down the presidency of Israel.

"Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our two thousand years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us." - Einstein on Israel, late 1920s.

PLUR

New comment by contingencies in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

contingencies — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:28:05 +0000

No. What's 'other vermin'? We have plenty of native animals. I see a few of them feeding in the area I distribute organic matter, including (non-snake) reptiles, turkeys, possums, butterflies, native bees, spiders, etc. Lots of fungi too.

New comment by contingencies in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

contingencies — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:59:59 +0000

It's possible to approach composting form a more simplistic standpoint. The listed issues are mostly specific to high density (eg. in a fixed bin) composting. If you spread it out these problems basically go away, and so do the stinky compost labor and purchasing requirements.

New comment by contingencies in "John Coltrane illustrates the mathematics of jazz"

contingencies — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:44:49 +0000

Proto-supersaw! https://static1.squarespace.com/static/519a384ee4b0079d49c8a...

New comment by contingencies in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

contingencies — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:17:41 +0000

The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.

New comment by contingencies in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

contingencies — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:37:24 +0000

"Hidden" and "not taught" are two different things. I'm not claiming the knowledge is buried in a grand conspiracy, I'm just saying few know because it's not generally shared and this is policy. Source: 20 years of talking to people.

New comment by contingencies in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

contingencies — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:22:42 +0000

You seem to be conflating "someone taught it at a university" with the apparently well evidenced view that Lu Xun's overwhelming coverage in popular media and secondary schooling neglects to point out his anti-character stance.

New comment by contingencies in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

contingencies — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:33:26 +0000

Nice! Didn't know that. I wonder if they Romanized transliterated 'Vissarionovich' as a test case. Regardless, with pinyin they certainly did a better job than the Taiwanese!

Pretty chilling evidence for the emergence of post-revolution Mandarin as newspeak, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

New comment by contingencies in "LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation"

contingencies — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:29:03 +0000

I use and promote Libreoffice instead of cloud SaaS and M$ religiously and have been doing so for decades. While it does feel that 'peak office suite' is solidly in the rear-view mirror and the majority of tools are becoming ~irrelevant (nobody does physical meetings anymore, writer < LyX and spreadsheets are being supplanted by custom code with better visualization control and web integration), I still need Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors. Is there now a preferred fork we should follow?