Hacker News: ectopod

New comment by ectopod in "Of regrets"

ectopod — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:43:33 +0000

He is plainly a vexatious litigant. Can you get him declared as one? It's a very high bar though and I've no idea what the process is.

New comment by ectopod in "HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)"

ectopod — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 16:01:51 +0000

Wachovia laundered more and received a much smaller fine. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

New comment by ectopod in "The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M"

ectopod — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 14:39:41 +0000

According to an article in The Times years ago (early 2000s?) the money was used notes from the Bank of England that was going to be burned anyway. With insurance, security, and a BoE employee to supervise it was expensive, but not a million pounds expensive. That said, I could imagine the KLF inventing this story too, so I don't know what the truth is.

New comment by ectopod in "U.S. credit card debt jumps 18.5% and hits a record $930.6B"

ectopod — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 20:02:10 +0000

A bus ticket is something "that confers value or benefit to its owners".

New comment by ectopod in "Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now"

ectopod — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:30:09 +0000

On your second point the History menu has a Restore Last Session option (or something like that) when you reopen the browser after inadvertently closing a bunch of tabs.

New comment by ectopod in "High-Earning Men Are Cutting Back on Their Working Hours"

ectopod — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 16:38:55 +0000

Scientifically speaking, the human death rate is a surprisingly low 93%. This is the obvious calculation: the number of people who died divided by the number who were born.

New comment by ectopod in "BuzzFeed says it will use AI to help create content, stock jumps 150%"

ectopod — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:06:40 +0000

Sure, but you still don't know who or what actually wrote the text that got posted.

New comment by ectopod in "Show HN: I'm a doctor and made a responsive breathing app for stress and anxiety"

ectopod — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:48:21 +0000

My understanding from the book was that CO2 is an essential part of the mechanism that transfers oxygen to your muscles. If you breathe too much you have too little CO2, your muscles can't get enough oxygen and they don't work efficiently. I've no idea if this is true, but since I read the book I breathe less when exercising and it seems to help. Edited to add: I'd forgotten, when I first started breathing less during exercise it made a huge difference, like coming down from altitude. I recommend it.

New comment by ectopod in "Fun with Gentoo: Why don't we just shuffle those ROP gadgets away?"

ectopod — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:25:57 +0000

Many years ago I wrote a C compiler in assembly language. It wasn't hard, and C hasn't changed that much. The complexity in modern compilers is in the optimisation, which you don't need if you're bootstrapping. It's not impossible.

New comment by ectopod in "An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down"

ectopod — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 17:33:12 +0000

An example in the UK yesterday. Climate protesters glued themselves to a petrol tanker and were charged with tampering with a motor vehicle. The protesters argued that the bit with the petrol was a trailer, not a motor vehicle. The judge agreed and acquitted them. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64403074

New comment by ectopod in "Fun with Gentoo: Why don't we just shuffle those ROP gadgets away?"

ectopod — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 17:27:39 +0000

You can bootstrap the compiler. It's a chore but not impossible. More usefully, you can check that your builds are identical to other people's, so at least your compiler isn't uniquely compromised.

New comment by ectopod in "The contagious visual blandness of Netflix"

ectopod — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 19:06:14 +0000

Also botox.

New comment by ectopod in "How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way"

ectopod — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:14:05 +0000

The whole point of pronouns is to reduce cognitive overhead. If pronouns become something you have to remember for each person then you might as well drop them from the language and use names all the time.

New comment by ectopod in "What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)"

ectopod — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 15:51:21 +0000

Medical forms tend to ask for sex, not gender.

New comment by ectopod in "UK lawmakers vote to jail tech execs who fail to protect kids online"

ectopod — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 19:54:54 +0000

Yes. The identity verification seems like the point of this nonsense.

New comment by ectopod in "Faster than the filesystem (2021)"

ectopod — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 13:36:41 +0000

The design choices make a bit of a difference but most of the overhead is Defender. When you try to read thousands of files your computer spends most of its time running Defender. Turn it off and the problem goes away.

New comment by ectopod in "Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping"

ectopod — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 17:52:36 +0000

ddrescue works with blocks and bytes. Audio cds are different. They contain a single physical bit stream interpreted as several interleaved logical bit streams representing e.g. audio, position, metadata, error correction. They are not a sequence of bytes. Cdroms and dvds put a block and byte abstraction on top of this so ddrescue can do something with them.

New comment by ectopod in "British Motorway Database"

ectopod — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 14:10:55 +0000

An automatic driving ban for passing under (being generous) the second red cross on a lane would weed out the arseholes. Just enforcing the existing law would help. The cameras and anpr are in place so it should be cheap to implement. But whenever such a thing is suggested motorists claim it's a conspiracy to empty their pockets.

New comment by ectopod in "OpenAI starts testing ChatGPT premium"

ectopod — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 15:20:17 +0000

I attended a prestigious university. You could pretty much do what you liked (including nothing) for the three years and the degree was awarded for 30 hours of exams in a single week. In the exam room you couldn't copy work or pay someone else to do it or consult a chatbot. You knew the subject or you didn't. So you don't have to change the teaching. You could change the examining.

New comment by ectopod in "The gas industry is paying Instagram influencers to gush over gas stoves (2020)"

ectopod — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 14:10:29 +0000

Gas stoves might be constantly leaking, but they only produce particulates when they are alight. Assuming you don't have an ancient appliance with a pilot light.