Hacker News: dado3212

The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

dado3212 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:04:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/the-footgun-of-right-to-left-decorative-characters

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48813246

Points: 44

# Comments: 21

Extracting sound effects from a Switch game

dado3212 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:27:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/extracting-sound-effects-from-a-switch-game

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714803

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dado3212 in "The three lines of CSS that saved me 40kb and might do the same for you"

dado3212 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:58:53 +0000

You can also strip unused characters from fonts! I use Prism to render code blocks on my blog, which pulls in FontAwesome for only two characters. Stripping all but those two characters reduced the font file size from 160kb to 680 bytes.[0]

[0]. https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/remove-unused-characters-fo...

New comment by dado3212 in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

dado3212 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:33:57 +0000

Isn’t this offline? Where do you see that it’s online?

New comment by dado3212 in "The sigmoids won't save you"

dado3212 — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:23:24 +0000

But if you met an alien who said they'd been alive for 100 years you wouldn't assume they're on the verge of dropping dead: you would assume they live longer. It's a rough rule for when you don't have other information, and if you're arguing against it you need to specify what other information you're using to make that argument.

New comment by dado3212 in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

dado3212 — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:28:34 +0000

This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

New comment by dado3212 in "US debt is now bigger than the economy for first time since World War II"

dado3212 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:26:19 +0000

I feel like economists have drawn so many lines in the sand for “it all goes downhill here” that we blow through and keep chugging that the public’s inured to debt news. We won’t solve this until it’s already unsolvable.

Why my macOS Messages badge lied to me (and the one-line fix)

dado3212 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:24:36 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/macos-broken-messages-notification-badge

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976602

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Parental Controls

dado3212 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:02:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tumblr.com/luminousalicorn/814990078758830080/parental-controls

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916604

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dado3212 in "Metatextual Literacy"

dado3212 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:09:52 +0000

She’s describing something much more specific than subliteracy.

New comment by dado3212 in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

dado3212 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:37:42 +0000

I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.

Metatextual Literacy

dado3212 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:18:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jenn.site/metatextual-literacy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783890

Points: 56

# Comments: 13

Turning a Chinese IoT camera into an owl livestream

dado3212 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:17:34 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/owl-cam

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783878

Points: 26

# Comments: 0

New comment by dado3212 in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

dado3212 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:18:41 +0000

https://blog.alexbeals.com

New comment by dado3212 in "Adding insular script like it's 1626"

dado3212 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:38:49 +0000

Love this and was my first introduction to the HTML element (this feels like a great expanded use case). Also couldn't agree more re: your point on the resurrection of "old internet" blogs, it's a trend I'm very much enjoying.

New comment by dado3212 in "Novo Nordisk launches Wegovy weight-loss pill in US, triggering price war"

dado3212 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:01:06 +0000

I would've expected that uptake was only beginning in 2022 and still vastly increasing through 2023 (plus the compounding loophole that allowed telehealth companies like Ro to really expand the target audience). 2024 and 2025 data are likely to be better telltales of the impacts of GLP-1s.

New comment by dado3212 in "Beating myself at chess"

dado3212 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 20:35:35 +0000

Would maybe benefit from a "Checkmate!" or other finish screen, but cool project! Though I agree that it beating you may be more based on your skill level than its, given how it keeps pushing pawns.

New comment by dado3212 in "Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations"

dado3212 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:14:02 +0000

What makes you say that? This didn't read like AI slop to me.

New comment by dado3212 in "Creating custom yellow handshake emojis with zero-width joiners"

dado3212 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 01:35:35 +0000

Unfortunately most of the benefit of this was undone by Apple's rollback of their family emoji rendering to just be shapes :/. Cool UX though!

New comment by dado3212 in "The last product to get cancelled"

dado3212 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:45:36 +0000

The font is rendering as nearly invisible. I'm guessing due to some incorrect dark mode styling?