Hacker News: grandchild

New comment by grandchild in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

grandchild — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:40:54 +0000

You're forgetting that the 20$ are not a sustainable price point. Would your backburner personal app thingy be worth 200$?

New comment by grandchild in "Why Selling WhatsApp to Facebook Would Be the Biggest Mistake (2012)"

grandchild — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:03:11 +0000

Brian Acton may regret it, but I sure don't, seeing that he went on to bankroll Signal, arguably with money from the sale. Thanks for that!

New comment by grandchild in "Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud"

grandchild — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:43:10 +0000

SAP runs its own cloud/IaaS in addition to running its workloads on the hyperscalers. It's been doing that for years internally, and that SAP cloud is now being extended to be open for direct consumption by other companies:

https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/exploring-sap-con...

New comment by grandchild in "The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme"

grandchild — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:20:28 +0000

As a kid I actually used the theme on my first hand-me-down. As the regular theme. And I remember chosing it because it was fun! It made my computer more fun.

At the end of the day, usability shouldn't trump fun. If I find it's less usable, I can switch back.

New comment by grandchild in "Winamp clone in Swift for macOS"

grandchild — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 11:45:04 +0000

Also, I'm working on AVS still, from time to time: https://github.com/grandchild/vis_avs/tree/dev

New comment by grandchild in "Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from c. 1300"

grandchild — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 07:19:45 +0000

Once you know that _usually_ people use white cotton gloves when handling museum artifacts, I find it a bit distressing that the person halfway down the article is not wearing any while holding the priceless 700-year-old pages.

New comment by grandchild in "Encode any text into one emoji"

grandchild — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:57:08 +0000

Funky! Round trip through Signal worked. But you can tell, because a regular single emoji gets "jumbo sized", these ones don't.

New comment by grandchild in "CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops"

grandchild — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:27:45 +0000

There is also `ts` from moreutils[0]. One of a few gems there. And moreutils is (probably) already in "your" distro.

[0] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

New comment by grandchild in "Intel SGX Fuse Key0, a.k.a. Root Provisioning Key Was Extracted by Researchers"

grandchild — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:38:37 +0000

I think you're misunderstanding what SGX is used for in the Signal context: It's only used server-side. The clients have no real use for it, because they don't have to attest the software they're running, only the keys they possess.

The server however is inherently untrusted, and the users of the server can benefit from some form of attestation of the software it's running. SGX tries to provide this, as the siblings in this thread explain.

New comment by grandchild in "Radio Garden"

grandchild — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 14:23:43 +0000

It's a bit like the radio version of http://astronaut.io :)

New comment by grandchild in "Summary of Major Changes Between Python Versions"

grandchild — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 12:12:06 +0000

If nothing else, do adopt f-strings. It really makes the code cleaner!

New comment by grandchild in "Will we have a negative leap second? [pdf] (2022)"

grandchild — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 07:18:11 +0000

I think it's not answered in the slides. Instead they offer two hypotheses for the _characteristic_ of the observation of the declining length-of-day in the last 20 years, with all known effects removed such as the Metonic Cycle: Random walk & Linear.

They present the consequences of adopting one or the other prediction model, but only because one has to be adopted for practical decisions. Not because we necessarily know what's going on.

We can't know now which is the correct model. As always, only time and observation will tell.

New comment by grandchild in "Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure"

grandchild — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:52:15 +0000

As of a few weeks ago, you can hide your phone number on Signal, and it's even the default, even for existing accounts. You can even opt in to disable discovery by someone who already knows your number.[0]

> To me Telegram is going after WhatsApp, not Signal.

They mention Signal by name in the referenced post.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

New comment by grandchild in "Destruction of nuclear bombs using ultra-high energy neutrino beam (2003) [pdf]"

grandchild — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 07:17:15 +0000

the interesting thing is, the device may have to be built but possibly never operated. the existence of this device would make all nuclear-bomb-holders scramble to disarm them. OTOH we'd also have to know where the bombs are pretty precisely, if i understand correctly. i'd put the bombs on a nuclear airport luggage belt and have them go around in circles. makes a moving target out of them.

New comment by grandchild in "Desalination system could produce fresh water that is cheaper than tap water"

grandchild — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 16:22:09 +0000

further down the article:

> if each stage were scaled up to a square meter, it would produce up to 5 liters of drinking water per hour

so 1m², times the number of layers.

New comment by grandchild in "Nothing Phone (1)"

grandchild — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 19:14:21 +0000

This stunned me a bit. Which iphone-specific "connections" can’t you replace?

If the answer is messages, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have Whatsapp or some other messenger installed. If they don’t, may I ask which country you’re from?

Or is it facetime? Most other messengers have similar features. Or maybe I don’t really know what facetime is capable of beyond video chat.

New comment by grandchild in "Music for Programming"

grandchild — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 13:33:33 +0000

> Sleep: Jerusalem

Look for "Sleep - Dopesmoker". It’s the re-release of the same thing.

New comment by grandchild in "Explaining Code Using ASCII Art"

grandchild — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 18:21:13 +0000

maybe add https://asciiflow.com ?

New comment by grandchild in "Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info"

grandchild — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 18:02:25 +0000

`lstopo` is cool too for bigger servers

New comment by grandchild in "Show HN: Offline voice messages transcription in Signal Desktop"

grandchild — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:06:33 +0000

While I love the project linked here, "voice" messages allow you to do more than talk. I've sent messages where I'm singing, or also where I'm reading a book chapter. It'd be sad if those things weren't possible anymore.