Hacker News: duckqlz

New comment by duckqlz in "The Most Powerful Server Embiggens a Bit with Power11"

duckqlz — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:49:36 +0000

Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word!

New comment by duckqlz in "WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight"

duckqlz — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 12:39:00 +0000

If any lawyers or FAA employees are reading this I’m genuinely interested in what, if any, legal implications there would be for running nmap mid flight on an airline. Surely once you have spoofed the MAC address and IP of another passenger to gain unauthorized access to the planes LAN you have committed a crime but what about passively scanning?

New comment by duckqlz in "Fancy Parking"

duckqlz — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 10:48:30 +0000

Op was talking about the front wheels pivoting. Rear wheels do not pivot. Furthermore, the quality is sometimes better on rear tires in a rear wheel drive car if the owner is trying to be frugal and save money when changing their tires. Similarly with front wheel drive drive train, owners will often opt to replace only their front tires as they will wear quicker. This is all due to the traction needed to start the car moving. Now, back to the crux of the question, why fancy park? Reversing and turning creates a wider turn radius, reduced control and greatly increases the size of the cars “blind spot”. A driver can opt to have their driving ability impacted while they safely enter an empty spot by reversing in or deal with the hustle and bustle of reversing into a busy parking lot. Despite the efficiency and obvious gains from “fancy parking” some people have parked forward their entire life and have honed their spacial sense around a certain car or truck making the switch impractical, at least until the purchase of their next vehicle!

New comment by duckqlz in "Paris to bring back swimming in Seine after 100 years"

duckqlz — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:29:16 +0000

€6000 to look inside of your walls for bats?!

Quitting my job today to move to the Netherlands to start a bat inspection business.

New comment by duckqlz in "LazyVim"

duckqlz — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 13:07:05 +0000

I vehemently disagree with this. I find managing vs code extensions a nightmare and having to download them based on rating alone when there are 300 extensions for every query is untenable in a production environment.

Furthermore if you want to customize a vsc extension to do something unique for your set up you have a whole new set of issues like finding the settings, documentation etc.

Now if you can get over all of that it’s still a bulky, slow and cluttered IDE that is constantly sending telemetry data and other nonsense around the web

While I haven’t tried LazyVim I would strongly recommend LunarVim to anyone new to the vim ecosystem. It installs fast, needs minimal set up and packages can be installed with a single line in the config or through packer. Most things work out if the box. But if they don’t vim is so mature you can just ask chatGPT.

Seems like ease of use is also the aim of lazyvim so I would not discourage anyone from trying this flavour as well.

In the end it is whatever works for you.

New comment by duckqlz in "Matrices and Graph"

duckqlz — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:52:39 +0000

Does anyone know how the graph illustrations were created? I have driven myself mad with tikz and dot .

New comment by duckqlz in "Simpsons Hit and Run source code (2003)"

duckqlz — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 10:23:06 +0000

I love how the comments in the code keep the same tone as the game and the Simpson itself.

“”” // Synopsis: Blahblahblah “””

I want to work in a place that allows this or encourages it.

New comment by duckqlz in "Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?"

duckqlz — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 15:56:59 +0000

https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/cube-clock Or buy the same clock?

New comment by duckqlz in "32“ E Ink screen that displays daily newspapers on your wall (2021)"

duckqlz — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 10:33:47 +0000

What an amazing project. I will be copying or becoming a customer in the coming weeks. Lots of comments about the high price, I do wish large e-ink displays would come down in price the but for ~$3k this will look good on my office wall , how could I resist. It’s art it is not just tech.

New comment by duckqlz in "Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction"

duckqlz — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 12:12:59 +0000

In the quote the author is speaking about students handing in an assignment and using ChatGPT to write it. He says:

> This may not count as plagiarism, but it won’t produce anything new.

First, it is plagiarism by definition. Any time one presents work as their own which they did not create themselves is plagiarism .

Second, and vastly more importantly going forward, students were never handing in “new” ideas on an assignment. Using an LLM to generate a “pastiche” that is then read by the student (hopefully) before being handed in is still a win in my book. Having students ask their questions to an LLM can be an amazing tool to further learning but when students and educators are terrified of this new tool they will hide their usage of it and then it becomes a tool for copying rather than learning and plagiarism is the only consequence.

New comment by duckqlz in "A ‘lost world’ of early microbes thrived one billion years ago"

duckqlz — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 13:41:21 +0000

“Professor Jochen Brocks inspecting the 1.6-billion-year-old rocks in Australia’s Northern Territory. The rocks contained a primordial chemical structure that hinted at the existence of the Protosterol Biota.”

Not sure where this sentiment is coming from… Considering it’s fat traces of a primordial species that is a common ancestor of all complex life on earth, which went extinct over 800 million years ago, and is found in ancient rocks around waterways literally all over the world; I think we are fine to touch it.

New comment by duckqlz in "A new line drawing method for the cycle savvy"

duckqlz — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 13:05:39 +0000

This was my first introduction to the “demoscene”. I would really like to get into this type of programming, it is so beautiful. The efficiency and creativeness of the programmers who make these c64 demos is jaw dropping when looking at any of the top submissions.

I will be investigating further but to anyone else interested in this specific rabbit hole:

https://csdb.dk/event/?id=3187

New comment by duckqlz in "Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)"

duckqlz — Fri, 26 May 2023 13:05:47 +0000

From the first chapter:

“The first two chapters of this book are friendly non-technical intro- ductions to key topics and skills. For readers curious to learn more about behind-the-scenes details, chapters 3 and 4 contain conceptual non-mathematical explanations of Monero's privacy features and blockchain. Later chapters dive into complex technical details for understanding, developing, and integrating Monero.”

New comment by duckqlz in "The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021)"

duckqlz — Tue, 23 May 2023 11:07:20 +0000

Actually it was shipped. “Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it, so that it could have become reactivated later by the change of a single byte in an installed system.” [1]

[1] Schulman, Andrew; Brown, Ralf D.; Maxey, David; Michels, Raymond J.; Kyle, Jim (1994) [November 1993]. Undocumented DOS: A programmer's guide to reserved MS-DOS functions and data structures - expanded to include MS-DOS 6, Novell DOS and Windows 3.1 (2 ed.). Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-63287-X.

New comment by duckqlz in "Rooms.xyz"

duckqlz — Sat, 20 May 2023 12:28:20 +0000

Really interesting concept. The most intriguing part is the ability to add LLM functionality directly in your code. From the documentation:

```

local PRIMER =

  "You are a sushi chef in a sushi restaurant. " ..

  "You are kind and cheerful and excited about offering " ..
  
  "different kinds of sushi to the customer."

function onClick()

  aiCharacter(PRIMER)

end

```

This opens up a world of possibilities for a casual game developer and there are many other interesting features. I would love to read more about how they are controlling cost on their api searches with the LLM. I look forward to seeing more from rooms.xyz.

[1] - https://rooms.xyz/docs#aiCharacter

New comment by duckqlz in "Distrobox: Use any Linux distribution inside your terminal"

duckqlz — Mon, 15 May 2023 11:30:27 +0000

From the first line of the README:

"Simply put it's a fancy wrapper around podman or docker to create and start containers highly integrated with the hosts"

New comment by duckqlz in "The .zip TLD sucks"

duckqlz — Fri, 12 May 2023 21:33:25 +0000

I absolutely agree. If it were a ‘.html’ extension that opened a self extracting zip we would have an issue but I struggle to see the danger with this. If someone, technical or not, is already accepting the risk of opening a ‘.zip’ file from an unknown source the attack vector doesn’t grow by opening a webpage unexpectedly. Furthermore I can rename a malware.exe to malware.zip and send it out by email and the implications are obvious. Maybe the .zip TLD will dissuade technical users from accessing the domain but I hardly see it as a new danger that could be described as “evil” or “malicious” on googles part. I could be wrong and would love to hear a clever person think of a feasible attack but imo this does not warrant any panic.

New comment by duckqlz in "Unrelated Words Puzzle"

duckqlz — Fri, 12 May 2023 14:30:43 +0000

Comparing the first example against a similar guess based on intuition:

zuckerberg => investor(21%), mark(20%)

cuban => investor(3%), mark(%4)

Using google as a general guide to how often these words appear together

mark cuban => About 40,500,000 results on google

"mark cuban" => About 13,200,000 results on google

"mark" "cuban" => About 33,500,000 results on google

investor cuban => About 80,800,000 results on google

"investor cuban" => About 945 results on google

"investor" "cuban" => About 9,810,000 results on google

mark zuckerberg => About 41,700,000 results on google

"mark zuckerberg" => About 29,400,000 results on google

"mark" "zuckerberg" => About 35,700,000 results on google

investor zuckerberg => About 11,100,000 results on google

"investor zuckerberg" => About 479 results on google

"investor" "zuckerberg" => About 3,160,000 results on google

Considering the above results of how often the base words appear together and the added knowledge that Mark Cuban is more recognized for his investment activity than Zuckerberg I wonder how the relational scores are calculated by the game.

(Note: I realize this is nit-picking in an extreme sense but I found myself very interested in the underlying tech behind the game and this was part of my exploration so I thought I would share it with everyone else. Feel free to tear apart my methods I am still very interested in how the OP coded their solution)

New comment by duckqlz in "A team of sleuths quietly hunting cyberattack-for-hire services"

duckqlz — Thu, 11 May 2023 10:26:51 +0000

Your assumption that you need to develop or even use malware to commit these attacks is incorrect. As the article eludes to, most "script kiddies" would be using simple reflection attacks like those utilized by anonymous. This would equate to changing a few lines in a TCP or UDP packet and mass spamming 3rd party site to elicit a flood of responses. This is pretty simple for any 13+ year old with visual basic and some time. Large bot nets rented out for attacks are clearly more dangerous and I would assume (hope) the FBI does target the malware creators and distributors.

New comment by duckqlz in "Firesky – The Bluesky Firehose"

duckqlz — Sun, 07 May 2023 12:09:20 +0000

Skeets

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23701551/bluesky-skeets-n...