Hacker News: gallerytungsten

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Mac Pro 2 Concept Design"

gallerytungsten — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 14:13:21 +0000

Only 24GB of RAM?

The current Mac Pro officially supports 64GB and 3rd parties offer upgrades to 128GB.

Even the 2006 models can be upgraded to 32GB.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "'All I wanted to do is build a house' (2010)"

gallerytungsten — Sun, 25 Dec 2016 23:18:29 +0000

You build your house in an area that is not governed by a building code. No permits, no inspections, do your own thing at your own risk. This generally means a rural area.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "How I Wrote the Screenplay for “Arrival” and What I Learned Doing It"

gallerytungsten — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 21:11:11 +0000

In addition to the other replies, Final Draft gives you "industry standard" formatting; and easy file interchange within the industry.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’"

gallerytungsten — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 15:29:58 +0000

It appears Hotz will now deploy his system in China, where the regulations on such devices are surely more lax. Looks like a good move for extended testing without pesky government scrutiny.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Inside the Development of Light, the Tiny Digital Camera That Outperforms DSLRs"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 17:36:54 +0000

re: what's the big deal with a DSLR?

1. Full manual control. I can dial in exactly the combination of f-stop and exposure that I want.

2. Manual focus. With a split-ring screen in the viewfinder, focus can be very precise and exactly where I want it. Both for getting the right part of the image sharp, and controlling depth of field.

3. Interchangeable prime lenses. Changing lenses makes a big difference in the results. Different lenses do different things: a fisheye, a wide-angle, a macro lense; each is really great in one particular area.

4. Lots of accessories. You can turn a DSLR into a decent rig for shooting pro quality videos or a low budget film, if that's your thing. You can add extra batteries, extra storage, and so on.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 13:22:37 +0000

You know what word doesn't appear in that story?

Spam.

Mailchimp is a company that provides lots of unsolicited commercial emails. In other words, spam. You can dress it up and call it "marketing software for small businesses" but that doesn't change the essential fact: Mailchamp is a spammer. Is it any surprise that spamming is profitable?

I've received hundreds of Mailchimp emails. Not once did I sign up for any of those lists.

Does Mailchimp make it easy to unsubscribe? Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that they are spammers, and that if you want to send spam with some semi-plausible deniability that you're a spammer, Mailchimp is probably a good choice.

Of course, this story, like nearly all "business news" stories, is very likely the work of a highly paid public relations agency. That is one more reason that the word "spam" does not appear in this story.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Apple's Relationship with Pro Music Needs Mending"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 04:23:47 +0000

An article from the recording world, with a similar perspective:

http://tapeop.com/columns/end-rant/115/

New comment by gallerytungsten in "An OS 9 odyssey: Why some Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software"

gallerytungsten — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 23:55:18 +0000

I have a Powerbook G3, running Word 5.1 on OS 9. The sole function is "writing machine." It's around 20 years old, and still runs just fine. It's a lot more convenient than an IBM Selectric, although not quite as fast. The Selectric never lagged.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "FreeBSD Myths"

gallerytungsten — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 02:39:55 +0000

re: FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

The "good bits" are things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark.

Sure, I'm aware there are alternatives like Gimp and [whatever]. But the alternatives are kludges for edge case experts; and not for people who need to Get Stuff Done.

PS. I operate a FreeBSD server. It's great for that.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Why Did Google Erase Cooper's Beloved Literary Blog?"

gallerytungsten — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 02:03:14 +0000

We see these stories over and over.

The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups.

Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry"

gallerytungsten — Tue, 31 May 2016 00:04:43 +0000

It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

If academics got organized to the point of establishing new journals, with legit peer review, they could make all of the information free. Which it wants to be, right?

Obviously, there is the problem of establishing the credibility of these new "free journals," which is a serious obstacle for the reputation-based "publish or perish" pecking order of academia.

But once such a movement is established, it could eventually crush the paid journals and their rent-seeking profits. The captive journals would also eventually emancipate themselves and come around to this free information model.

Since such free journal articles would also be available on sites like Sci-Hub, the transition to (almost) totally free academic publishing could be unstoppable.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year"

gallerytungsten — Sat, 16 Apr 2016 13:35:51 +0000

Gold is found on printed circuit boards and components, typically used to electroplate connectors, so that they won't fail due to corrosion.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism"

gallerytungsten — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 16:18:35 +0000

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it."

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

New comment by gallerytungsten in "As US Passports for Domestic Flights Loom, IRS Can Now Revoke Passports"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 14:18:02 +0000

Shades of the Soviet Union, which required passports for internal travel.

SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’

gallerytungsten — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:24:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/18/s-f-tech-bro-writes-open-letter-to-mayor-i-shouldnt-have-to-see-the-pain-struggle-and-despair-of-homeless-people/?hpid=hp_no-name_morning-mix-story-f-duplicate%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896

Points: 305

# Comments: 499

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Startup Sues a Domain Name Owner to Grab a 16-Year-Old URL"

gallerytungsten — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 16:25:00 +0000

Is it society that would be benefiting from Harsh taking away Keen's domain? Or is it Harsh? By defining the benefit as being to "society" one might sound noble while masking the reality: Harsh is attempting to steal Keen's domain name in a sleazy and opportunistic fashion. Defining this kind of hijacking as a benefit to society is misdirection at best.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Startup Ranking"

gallerytungsten — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 13:31:09 +0000

I was about to post the exact same thought. Obviously, there is a gem of an idea here. Who will MVP the Startup Pranking website first?

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Man Says He Can Make 20-Year-Old Rum in 6 Days"

gallerytungsten — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 02:13:33 +0000

>USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s.

Sorry, but this is not close to being correct. Thujone is largely left behind by the distillation process as it's a heavy compound. Tests of decades-old pre-ban absinthes gave the same results. Modern tests by GC-MS (required by the Feds for US absinthe approval) prove the same thing. The idea of heavy thujone content is largely a marketing tactic, used to hype some Euro absinthes. The quality of US absinthes is very high. There are some one hundred of them distilled in the USA, and many are based on traditional French recipes from the 1800s.

Source: I distill absinthe.

List of USA absinthes: http://realabsinthe.blogspot.com/2008/07/list-of-absinthes-a...

TTB Circular regarding absinthe: http://www.ttb.gov/industry_circulars/archives/2007/07-05.ht...

New comment by gallerytungsten in "Magic: The Story of an Accidentally Founded, Wildly Viral Startup"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 18:08:57 +0000

Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary.

To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by people who actually know the local area.

Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-end service for local operators.

New comment by gallerytungsten in "This Guy Found a Way to Block Robocalls When Phone Companies Wouldn’t"

gallerytungsten — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 14:17:40 +0000

I used to have this great little compact cell phone made by Sony. At some point, it just stopped making calls, and Sprint's explanation was that their network no longer supported this phone.