Hacker News: foodevl

New comment by foodevl in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

foodevl — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:17:43 +0000

It is not a tricky problem because it has a simple and obvious solution: do not filter or block usage just because the input includes a word like "gun".

New comment by foodevl in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"

foodevl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:01:38 +0000

My dad wears smart glasses because he's nearly deaf and the classes show captions for the person he's talking to. They're great. He doesn't use or care at all about the camera. Having the captions would be very useful to him in a courtroom setting. Collateral damage I guess.

New comment by foodevl in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

foodevl — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 06:34:33 +0000

It's not enclosed in the final product. It is used during manufacturing. For example, you mechanically compress helium to get liquid helium, then when it depressurizes back to ambient pressure, it's -269 C, which is pretty close to "as cold as possible", and colder than any alternatives.

New comment by foodevl in "Microgpt"

foodevl — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:54:13 +0000

Yeah, everyone learns differently, but for me this is a perfect way to better understand how GPTs work.

New comment by foodevl in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

foodevl — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 15:06:52 +0000

> > some folks want to use lossless cut > In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are:

You may have misunderstood the comment: "lossless cut" is the name of an ffmpeg GUI front end. They're not discussing which exact command line gives lossless results.

New comment by foodevl in "A year without caffeine (2013)"

foodevl — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 05:53:11 +0000

200mg/day is not a "very very small dose". FDA recommended maximum safe amount is 400mg/day.

New comment by foodevl in "SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think"

foodevl — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 18:32:14 +0000

I was curious what the protein picture was showing: "Figure 1 Example predictions of SimpleFold on targets ... with ground truth shown in light aqua and prediction in deep teal."

and now I'm even more curious why they thought "light aqua" vs "deep teal" would be a good choice

New comment by foodevl in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

foodevl — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:29:14 +0000

Zuck owns 13% of Meta shares and 61% of the voting power

Jensen Huang owns 3.8% of Nvidia and 3.8% of the voting power

Tim Cook owns 0.021% of Apple and 0.021% of the voting power

Previously, Steve Jobs owned 0.6% of Apple and 0.6% of the voting power

So yeah, there's a structural difference here and Meta is much closer to being owned, managed, and controlled by Zuck alone

New comment by foodevl in "Sequence and first differences together list all positive numbers exactly once"

foodevl — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:35:48 +0000

I don't know (and don't need you to elaborate on) exactly what you're referring to in that last sentence, but I suspect you are confusing Eric W. Weisstein with Eric Weisstein.

New comment by foodevl in "What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)"

foodevl — Mon, 19 May 2025 20:39:53 +0000

Lazy, or more efficient? If you type a time and hit start, you're not microwaving until you're done with all the buttons. If you hit "QS" a bunch to reach the duration instead, the microwave starts cooking immediately on the first press. Your nuggets get done a whole second earlier!

New comment by foodevl in "A Scientific American bolt puzzle"

foodevl — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:26:45 +0000

Relative to the handedness, one bolt is always moving with it, one bolt is always moving against it. Switching direction doesn't change that. So switching direction can't change whether it moves inward or outward.

New comment by foodevl in "A Scientific American bolt puzzle"

foodevl — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 15:34:57 +0000

Switching the direction that you're twiddling the bolts would have to change the direction of any movement. But by symmetry, clockwise and counterclockwise twiddling are identical (looking down on the head of each bolt, one is always moving clockwise and one is always moving counterclockwise). So there must be no in/out movement at all.

New comment by foodevl in "Perpetual stew"

foodevl — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 21:33:42 +0000

some math because I'm curious: If you draw down and replace 50% of the water every day, each molecule has a 1/2 chance of sticking around. After 3 months that's 1/(2^90). A 5 gallon pot contains around 2^87 water molecules. So after 3 months there's basically none of the original liquid left.

New comment by foodevl in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"

foodevl — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:32:02 +0000

They were screwed from the start...

The Xbox came out when the PS2 did. When it came time for the next generation, Sony went with the obvious PS3. Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3", and they couldn't skip right to "Xbox 3", so they called it the "Xbox 360", which was frankly genius because it had the 3 there anyway and put it on the same level in consumers' eyes.

But after that it all fell apart -- they had no good options. They still couldn't jump to "Xbox 4". Maybe "720" would have worked. Someone decided to have a clean break and restart at "One" but of course that fell apart immediately at "Two". So another clean break to "Series..". And by that point it's so screwy they've lost any chance of fixing it...

New comment by foodevl in "SpaceX Super Heavy splashes down in the gulf, canceling chopsticks landing"

foodevl — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 06:08:11 +0000

If the earth were a point mass than almost any trajectory at all would be orbital.

New comment by foodevl in "The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown"

foodevl — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 15:34:42 +0000

> This is no good. Let me just try reverting to a version from a month ago. Nothing. Three months ago? Nothing. Still failing. A year ago? Zilch.

Reverting your own code, but still using a broken PostHog update from that same day? For me, the lesson is to make sure that I can revert everything, including dependencies.

New comment by foodevl in "Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)"

foodevl — Sun, 26 May 2024 04:41:44 +0000

> This reminds me of some experiment (that I will never be able to find again)

That was from Richard Feynman.

New comment by foodevl in "How I replaced deadly garage door torsion springs (2002)"

foodevl — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:37:34 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop

"An oscillator generates a 12-volt, 200-kilohertz (kHz) pulsed electrical signal, which is applied to a small plate on one side of the blade. The signal is transferred to the blade by capacitive coupling. A plate on the other side of the blade picks up the signal and sends it to a threshold detector. If a human contacts the blade, the signal will fall below the threshold. After signal loss for 25 micro seconds (µs), the detector will fire. A tooth on a 10-inch circular blade rotating at 4000 RPM will stay in contact with the approximate width of a fingertip for 100 µs. The 200-kHz signal will have up to 10 pulses during that time, and should be able to detect contact with just one tooth.[4] When the brake activates, a spring pushes an aluminum block into the blade. The block is normally held away from the blade by a wire, but during braking an electric current instantly melts the wire, similar to a fuse blowing."

New comment by foodevl in "As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code"

foodevl — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 12:23:49 +0000

The Arduino build system does this (preprocesses your source code to pull out prototypes and put them at the top). To make things easier for beginners.

New comment by foodevl in "Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)"

foodevl — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 04:38:05 +0000

Yes and yes