Hacker News: esterna

New comment by esterna in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

esterna — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:24:32 +0000

Of course, what they charge $39.95 for is in the public domain. So it's a sort of double scam.

New comment by esterna in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

esterna — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:22:01 +0000

You can also buy licenses to use AV1, a royalty-free codec.

New comment by esterna in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

esterna — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:42:55 +0000

While I won't dispute that 6 months is outrageous, OP has not spent them to "please the bureaucracy", they spent them to escape personal liability should the company go bankrupt. The rest of the post is bemoaning the fact the German government won't let them also permanently reduce the company liability below 25k.

New comment by esterna in "Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards"

esterna — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:24:23 +0000

Debit cards usually also use the Mastercard or Visa payment networks.

Even though I and the supermarket I go to are both part of SEPA and I can issue a bank transfer that will clear ~instantly, today cashless payments still involve EMV for various reasons.

New comment by esterna in "My Mathematical Regression"

esterna — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:22:20 +0000

The sequence numbers of problems on Project Euler only represent the order of publication. They aren't deliberately connected except for a few problems that have one or two follow-ups.

Most of the first 100 problems can be solved without any understanding of the problem, should you so desire.

New comment by esterna in "Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures"

esterna — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:36:23 +0000

This hinges on two misunderstandings:

- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:

- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.

New comment by esterna in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

esterna — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:36:51 +0000

There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.

If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.

New comment by esterna in "A new way to build chips: Sequentially stacking silicon to extend Moore's Law"

esterna — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:50:16 +0000

Capillaries cannot defeat the divergence theorem: If you have a volume where heat is produced but the temperature does not increase, the heat has to leave via the surface. It is true that the surface area available to diffusion can scale at any rate (eg. Menger sponge), but the heat still has to leave the volume via its boundary. In the case of capillaries, this is by convection which means that the product of coolant temperature differential and flow speed has to scale.

New comment by esterna in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

esterna — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:05:45 +0000

On the one hand, you can set up a proxy that supplements secrets for API calls. On the other hand, you can whitelist what you need, in the simplest case with iptables (The devcontainer in the claude code repo is an example of the latter).

New comment by esterna in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

esterna — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:26:17 +0000

And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.

Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).

You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.

New comment by esterna in "Generating All 32-Bit Primes (Part I)"

esterna — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:24:17 +0000

Very nice! One small note: In an Eratosthenes sieve, you can start crossing out numbers from p^2, since i*p for i

  for (size_t i=2; i <= 0xFFFFFFFF / p; i++) {

  for (size_t i=p; i <= 0xFFFFFFFF / p; i++) {

New comment by esterna in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

esterna — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:10:45 +0000

I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law.

Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.

I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.

There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.

New comment by esterna in "Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch"

esterna — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:10:52 +0000

Do you have advice how I could get someone to do a (possibly paid) review of PCBs for small hobby projects?

Being new to this space, it's hard to learn quickly when the feedback cycle involves having PCBs manufactured, shipped, soldering them and then finding out what could have been better. (Or it works and you never find out what you did wasn't the right way to do it)

New comment by esterna in "It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change"

esterna — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:51:39 +0000

Isn't that in violation of GDPR?