Hacker News: ginko

New comment by ginko in "An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story"

ginko — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:13:22 +0000

There's lack of security theater and there's:

> All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one curl command away from anyone who looked.

They are not the same thing.

New comment by ginko in "The Seasons Are Wrong"

ginko — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:44:45 +0000

I've been thinking of this but I figured the start/end of seasons make a lot of sense if you think about the effect the length of days has on temperature. Essentially the length of days effects the rate of energy added by the system. For instance days are longest on June 21st but temperatures will generally keep increasing until August.

It's a bit like taking that sinusoid and integrating it resulting in a cosine shifted by a quarter of a phase.

New comment by ginko in "Kagi Product Tips – Customize Your Search Results with URL Redirects"

ginko — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:13:08 +0000

I do redirects like that in my browser using Redirector. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

New comment by ginko in "Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?"

ginko — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:22:55 +0000

I guess the moment has passed by now but I wish there were a USB HID protocol for keyboards to identify their layout, or even better yet make the keyboard protocol layout agnostic so that keyboards send the high-level unicode character / modifier instead of a physical key code.

New comment by ginko in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

ginko — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:42:50 +0000

There's only two countries with over 500 million people and they're complete freak outliers.

New comment by ginko in "When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems"

ginko — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:19:27 +0000

> For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling

Does that include the Christmas lottery? If so then that’s not really comparable.

New comment by ginko in "Which European countries have the best salaries after taxes?"

ginko — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:07:06 +0000

The numbers for Norway aren't plausible at all. Full time 45€ after tax would be a yearly net income of 95000 euros. At a ~50% marginal tax rate that's be a yearly income of over 2 million kroner. No way that's the average.

According to Statistics Norway the monthly average salary in Norway was 62070kr in 2025, so 744840kr per year.

https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/lonn-og-arbeidskraftkos...

New comment by ginko in "The story of Britain's oldest sweet, the Pontefract Cake (2019)"

ginko — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:07:48 +0000

Where do you take the "rotten" part from? I assume it's made out of regular dried liquorice roots.

New comment by ginko in "Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs"

ginko — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:59:12 +0000

Who do you think caused that mass immigration?

New comment by ginko in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

ginko — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:06:29 +0000

>Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run.

Not sure about Applecare but Lenovo has support packages where if your thinkpad breaks they'll send a technician over to your place to fix it within 24 hours. That's definitely worth it for a work device IMO.

New comment by ginko in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

ginko — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:19:43 +0000

>You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.

That's not exactly a new phenomenon and doesn't require AI. If anything that was worse in the 90s with Microsoft starving out pretty much any would-be competitor they could find.

And it wasn't just Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...

New comment by ginko in "LibreOffice and the art of overreacting"

ginko — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:32:10 +0000

Yeah, having Jimbo staring creepily in my face made me never want to donate to Wikipedia ever.

New comment by ginko in "Migrating to the EU"

ginko — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:15:00 +0000

I do think you're cynical and wrong if you think you can't influence any political decisions on the EU level.

New comment by ginko in "Migrating to the EU"

ginko — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:37:30 +0000

The European commission are appointed by the Council of the EU which is composed by elected individual member countries' heads of government. Commissioners also need to be individually approved by the European Parliament which is directly elected.

Representative democracy is democracy. Basically all nation level democratic governments are representative democracies.

Being a cynic doesn't make you look clever.

New comment by ginko in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

ginko — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:20:34 +0000

So is the message here that demining the strait of Hormuz will be fairly easy?

I was expecting some curve balls at the end with undecidable constellations but it was all quite straightforward.

New comment by ginko in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

ginko — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:27:05 +0000

Just ban children from using the internet.

New comment by ginko in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

ginko — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:39:30 +0000

How is expecting readers to not understand what a kelvin is respecting the audience?

New comment by ginko in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

ginko — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:10:23 +0000

Not to be a stickler (ok I like being a stickler) but temperature delta, especially deltas between degrees celsius, should be given in kelvin. A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!

New comment by ginko in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

ginko — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:22:59 +0000

During that peak Vienna’s housing situation was infamously bad though. You’d have single rooms shared by multiple families and beds being used by multiple people on a timetable.

New comment by ginko in "Slicing Bezier Surfaces"

ginko — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:36:07 +0000

>The math for Bezier curves is usually a bit beyond me, but this seems to use a simple lerp (linear interpolation) to split. Why is that valid?

This can be explained through the bezier's polar form (aka blossom). There's plenty of literature on this. (For instance see slide 40 here[0])

I generally find it interesting that articles on Bezier curves/surfaces usually get upvoted on HN even though they tend to be extremely surface level. Any introductory applied geometry course or textbook will go much deeper within the first chapter or two.

[0] https://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d4/teaching/ss2...