Hacker News: jcynix

New comment by jcynix in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

jcynix — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:19:18 +0000

NAC taken before consuming alcohol has a positive effect apparently, but taken afterwards it's detrimental as mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine

New comment by jcynix in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

jcynix — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:13:16 +0000

You'll find a detailed description oft potential effects and uses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine (aka NAC)

New comment by jcynix in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

jcynix — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:36:18 +0000

> Didn't git pioneer this sub-command style?

No, various other tools used it before git, e.g. openssl.

New comment by jcynix in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

jcynix — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:47:23 +0000

Try Peter Cawdron's book "The Anatomy of Courage" which is a sci-fi retelling of a ww1 report.

Here's a revview: https://www.zeppjamiesonfiction.com/a-remarque-able-read-a-r...

New comment by jcynix in "Show HN: Ichinichi – One note per day, E2E encrypted, local-first"

jcynix — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:15:30 +0000

Nice, and I like the idea that the past is fixed, but ... is there a way to define the point of rollover to the next day? My "days" sometimes end at 0:50 for example and not at 23:59. So I might summarize the day a bit after midnight.

New comment by jcynix in "Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image"

jcynix — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:08:31 +0000

ImageMagick is a wonderful command line tool, IMO. You could use it to extract various information, e.g. the 5 most used colors of an image, as in

    convert $IMG -colors 5 -depth 8 -format "%c" histogram:info: | sort -nr

If needed you can easily remove colored borders first (trim subcommand with fuzz option) or sample only xy% from the image's center, or where the main subject might be.

New comment by jcynix in "Lil Finder Guy"

jcynix — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:02:29 +0000

My first thought: a rather strange copy of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillsbury_Doughboy

Google's Android robot has a much better design, IMHO. And I remember the Amazon box version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danbo_(character) and Arielle Nadel's photo stories "365 Days of Danbo" with it. Can't imagine that with the Apple Dough boy..

New comment by jcynix in "Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)"

jcynix — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:22:24 +0000

And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes. Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I guess that's because then the low light parts take over.

New comment by jcynix in "Show HN: ANSI-Saver – A macOS Screensaver"

jcynix — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:47:37 +0000

Ah, yes, After Dark, with the "Lunatic Fringe" module, which was fun (and was a time sink ;-0). And what I would like to see again is the "Stained Glass" module which produced phantastic visual effects when tuned a bit.

New comment by jcynix in "Little Free Library"

jcynix — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:55:43 +0000

Wikipedia lists them by country, and with pictures, for example

French: [Boîte à livres](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%AEte_%C3%A0_livres?wprov...)

German: [Öffentlicher Bücherschrank](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96ffentlicher_B%C3%BCchers...)

and many more countries. They all need a caretaker, or else they degenerate into rubbish.

In France I stumbled upon one during a holiday trip, it was located in an old phone booth. Hmm, I must have a picture somewhere in my photo collection, …

New comment by jcynix in "Just two days of oatmeal cut bad cholesterol by 10%"

jcynix — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:44:59 +0000

We heat up unskimmed milk, add oatmeal, let them soak for at least 10 minutes. Then serve them and pour a little bit of cold milk over the cooked oatmeal. Plain, or add some fresh fruit, nuts, berries to taste.

New comment by jcynix in "Compact disc story (1998)"

jcynix — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:18:14 +0000

> At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

History repeats itself: right now you can now buy loads of CDs for cheap on eBay.

New comment by jcynix in "I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye"

jcynix — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:58:03 +0000

Yes, some patterns of speech are recognizable … The "That's LLM generated" pattern is one of those. And while I can understand the motivation behind this, I find it more irritating now than LLM texts, if these contain useful information, which make me curious.

This text made me curious, I liked the approach the author has taken. And it made me think how I would do it. My first idea would be to use ImageMagick to render text and then use ImageMagick's https://imagemagick.org/script/compare.php to somehow calculate the risk of confounding glyphs.

So: Don't be snarky? Maybe we need another rule here, to limit comments on "LLM style" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by jcynix in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"

jcynix — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:47:44 +0000

>I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."

OK, so instead of educating stupid (or overly naive) people, we implement "protections" to limit any and all people to do useful things with their devices? And as a "side effect" force them to use "our" app store only? Something doesn't smell that good here …

How about a less drastic measure, like imposing a serious delay for "side loading" … let's say I'd to tell my phone that I want to install F-Droid and then would have to wait for some hours before the installation is possible? While using the device as usual, of course.

The count down could be combined with optional tutorials to teach people to contact their bank by phone meanwhile. Or whatever small printed tips might appear suitable.

New comment by jcynix in "I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer"

jcynix — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:23:48 +0000

> Such organizations don't know what to do.

Maybe they should simply use some common sense? If someone could and would steal valuables, it seems highly unlikely that he/she/it would notify you before doing it.

If they would want to extort you, they would possibly do so early on. And maybe encrypt some data as a "proof of concept" ...

But some organizations seem to think that their lawyers will remedy every failure and that's enough.

New comment by jcynix in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

jcynix — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:50:11 +0000

Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.

New comment by jcynix in "Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp"

jcynix — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:04:05 +0000

And here's some interesting background info on the late John Allen which I just stumbled upon:

John Allen (1937-2022) and Anatomy of LISP https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/

New comment by jcynix in "Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp"

jcynix — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:51:40 +0000

The bibliography contains a typo, namely entry 5 misses an "l" in Allegro.

And a book, which I'd call "an Oldie but Goldie" could be added: John Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (1978) which still is an excellent read for those who want to dive deep into Lisp's interna. One might also call it a precursor of SICP, as it covers a number of introductory topics too.

Abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865

New comment by jcynix in "Show HN: Knock-Knock.net – Visualizing the bots knocking on my server's door"

jcynix — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:41:35 +0000

When you get a "Permission denied (publickey)." if you try to connect to a server which requires a public key for authentication, it causes your 5 lines to wrongly raise an alarm ... you need to adapt your grep.

New comment by jcynix in "Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)"

jcynix — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:44:33 +0000

It's a fine movie, agreed. The movie's focus isn't on revenge, but on the interaction between the protagonists. Anyways, the story outline heavily reminds me of the classic "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas.

Disclaimer: I never read Stephen King's original short story, on which the movie is based, so I cannot say how this compares to Dumas' classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo