Hacker News: hunter2_

New comment by hunter2_ in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

hunter2_ — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:16:55 +0000

Ethernet drop for the freezer shouldn't get installed until this question has an answer.

Wait, it has its own cellular modem? Nevermind, then.

New comment by hunter2_ in "Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app"

hunter2_ — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:17:42 +0000

Might need to be careful: there's actually a URL-safe variant of base64 [0] that might be better, although the problematic + and / characters are probably not actually problematic within a fragment (+ only means space within the query, and / only means folder within a path and if a server wants it to) in which case standard base64 could be fine.

The example with the coffee bean background image already uses base64 for the image data, so I guess that would get double-encoded.

[0] https://medium.com/@bagdasaryanaleksandr97/understanding-bas...

New comment by hunter2_ in "Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app"

hunter2_ — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 03:43:51 +0000

Not unlike how in the trades, a tee is T-shaped, a wye is Y-shaped, a delta is Δ-shaped. Spelled-out letters aren't always geometric metaphors, but it's a thing.

Then you've got the first syllable of Ω (omega) being a homophone of Ohm, for what that's worth. From there we have ℧ (mho) for conductance... It's all quite clever. But I digress; I'll get back to emceeing and deejaying, cueing these elpees after a quick pee, okay?

New comment by hunter2_ in "Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI"

hunter2_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:06:42 +0000

> you'd still have to pay your electricity bill.

I should only have to pay 1/3 of what it adds to my bill, given that it's 1/3 as efficient as a heat pump. And that coefficient is to be adjusted as outside temp changes (assuming air source heat pump; water source would have a stable COP).

New comment by hunter2_ in "Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI"

hunter2_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:57:02 +0000

Easier said than done, but if you water-cool the GPU just upstream of your domestic water heater, it wouldn't be a bad thing. Perhaps using coolant and a counterflow heat exchanger, rather than the potable water, but the point stands. Would just need a secondary tank as a buffer (able to soak up heat from the GPU at all times, even when there's no demand for hot water) which then flushes in when demand exists.

New comment by hunter2_ in "Code Is Crap"

hunter2_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:50:25 +0000

"repeated use" seems to be doing the mitigation work here, though it does seem unusual that someone offended by the repetition would be unoffended by a one-off.

New comment by hunter2_ in "Code Is CRAP [2011]"

hunter2_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:46:52 +0000

What is the "good" when considering the lack of aggressive truncation/overflow concerns here?

New comment by hunter2_ in "Code Is Crap"

hunter2_ — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:45:18 +0000

While that might be the case, best to normalize that: Title Normalizers are Crap.

New comment by hunter2_ in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

hunter2_ — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:23:19 +0000

So long as the "getting" doesn't consist of circumventing something that is ostensibly a security mechanism, such as a URL that had never been presented to you by the server but is fairly easily guessed.

New comment by hunter2_ in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

hunter2_ — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:49:04 +0000

In a place where recording audio requires consent from all parties, I don't think it matters whether "all the processing is on-device" given that the law was probably written with tape recorders in mind. If I buy a device that can record audio, and place it in my home where unsuspecting guests are recorded by it, whether that recording is transmitted to the manufacturer or stays within my home seems irrelevant.

New comment by hunter2_ in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

hunter2_ — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:44:37 +0000

On the one hand, I wouldn't expect too many variations here (the vast majority of devices probably use 48 kHz and 24-bit output, a few use 44.1 kHz and/or 16-bit, etc.) but just like DPR and all the other properties with a very small set of popular values in practice, you only need a bit or two from each measurement to eventually have a high quality fingerprint.

New comment by hunter2_ in "AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint"

hunter2_ — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:39:11 +0000

This is a huge stretch, but if this problem exists in not only the PC versions of Chrome/Firefox but also the Android/iOS versions, then theoretically the app store reviewers could flag the browsers for facilitating this behavior against app store guidelines. In practice, apps of such caliber as popular browsers might be a bit above such reviewers' pay grade, so to speak.

New comment by hunter2_ in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

hunter2_ — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:29:41 +0000

Does anyone else get tripped up by the word "avoid" being positioned to apply to each item in the series, but then logically it must only apply to some (the first and second out of 3) items?

{ avoid meanings, avoid affiliations, avoid fitting }

My solution is generally to repeat the word for each item that needs it, but I can see how the repetitiveness isn't great either.

New comment by hunter2_ in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

hunter2_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:33:19 +0000

No, I've never seen Google Photos reflected in any Google Drive interface (web, OS integration, etc.) which on the one hand makes sense (think of Google Photos more like a database-driven black box app than a hierarchical filesystem) but on the other hand Google Drive does show gdocs, gsheets, etc. (which is also sort of a black box app, as the "files" seen in GDrive are merely lightweight stubs).

Only in storage quota views do Photos and Drive (and Gmail, etc.) commingle.

New comment by hunter2_ in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

hunter2_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:33:33 +0000

> the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this

They minimize it but don't take it away. A content creator must personally place their creation into multiple storage solutions, regardless of whether those solutions are cloud apps or local disks or anything else. In a world where disk failure is the only failure mode, sure, you can outsource the work of disk redundancy to a company, but it's not. The person you outsource to could decide to deny you access! Losing your cloud account (credential theft, alleged ToS violation, bankruptcy, etc.) is also a very real failure mode, albeit far less frequent than disk issues I suppose.

The creator must be the fork in the road.

New comment by hunter2_ in "An image can overflow"

hunter2_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:33:51 +0000

Your 4th hypothesis is equivalent, not "other," to mine. But I agree that it could be anything you mentioned, as all of them have crossed my mind as possible reasons why I experience "verifying you are human" and "find the motorcycles / busses / traffic lights" more often on my residential ISP than on my cellular or work ISPs, and the unknown botnet/exit node seems most probable (by far) when considering my own traffic. I never have the 403 problem discussed here, luckily.

New comment by hunter2_ in "An image can overflow"

hunter2_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:08:29 +0000

Perhaps the bad behavior is failure to remove a compromised (botnet) device on your network that has been attacking one or more sites that use a popular security solution.

"Broken link" is not an accurate way to describe this situation.

New comment by hunter2_ in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

hunter2_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:27:04 +0000

This reminds me of the pregnant man emoji [0] but it turns out they decided to handle that in an unusual way [1] so not really.

[0] https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/u7x3l9/comment/...

New comment by hunter2_ in "GenRec: Towards LLM-Native Recommendation at Netflix"

hunter2_ — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:42:18 +0000

When the Pandora music service launched, I remember reading about how it worked (predicting what you might like next) and it explained how they don't need to know anything about the songs at all (such as genre, tempo, instrumentation, place of origin, year of release, language, etc.) to predict what else you'll like. They simply identify other users with a similar history to you, and deliver to you some of the stuff that those other users had listened to that you hadn't listened to yet. If you abandon a song (suggesting that you don't like it much) then you become a bit less associated with the users who play that song a lot.

New comment by hunter2_ in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

hunter2_ — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:59:52 +0000

At least nobody has figured out my password yet.