Hacker News: jojobas

New comment by jojobas in "Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem (2017)"

jojobas — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:56:32 +0000

Almost as if the fonts, rendering systems and that all has a vanishingly low percentage of Arabic native-speakers. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.

New comment by jojobas in "Egyptian Fractions (2006)"

jojobas — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 05:24:16 +0000

We take so much of modern math notation for granted, for centuries people were encumbered by various inefficiencies of what was agreed before them and couldn't be easily broken.

New comment by jojobas in "The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion"

jojobas — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:27:37 +0000

A legitimate company registering an local number, routing its Philippines call centre through it and accountable for outbound calls is not really comparable with a random scammer faking whatever number.

New comment by jojobas in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?"

jojobas — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:46:28 +0000

There is also the practice of "deferred interest paid in kind", where vacancy is considered temporary, and the bank agrees that the interest for the term of vacancy will be paid at loan maturity. Not sure how/if it applies to multi-tenant buildings, but plenty of them aren't multi-tenant.

New comment by jojobas in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

jojobas — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:05:21 +0000

Never stop your enemy from making a mistake.

New comment by jojobas in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

jojobas — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:36:50 +0000

What do you mean, of course everyone in the first world, including babies and the elderly, is eager to pay Elon some $20k/year.

New comment by jojobas in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

jojobas — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:22:24 +0000

Banks don't want the headache of supporting multiple weird phone OSes and it's understandable. As long as they don't require running an apple/google-certified device and OS I don't care.

New comment by jojobas in "TinyWind: A pixel pirate sailing game with real wind physics (380k+ kms sailed)"

jojobas — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:03:42 +0000

The sidekick ramming into you all the time and killing all speed is pretty annoying.

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:44:08 +0000

You're making a case for stricter laws on dubious moral issues, not for startups as such.

Even then, has say Databricks or Canva been guilty of unethical conduct?

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:57:10 +0000

The founders typically don't get to choose, they have the obligation to respect minority investors' interests and sell to the highest bidder. Also the gold standard is going public, which would make figuring out who's "bad" pretty hard.

Then again, they don't get rich by cheating, abusing or whatever, they build a legal thing and sell it. You wouldn't go after a knife maker if someone used his knife to stab someone.

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:02:05 +0000

The distinction is if Mr. Kempf tried to charge all these people 1 dollar a year he would have gotten maybe a few million, and probably wouldn't have gotten much of the annual ~100 people to contribute to his product so the product wouldn't have been so awesome in the first place. There's just no money in being somewhat better than your OS's built-in player.

One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:40:52 +0000

Billionaire founders make some millionaire employees. Why are they (or rather us?) entitled to more? They are working market jobs for market pay.

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:37:58 +0000

It created another monopoly to collect more rent, and some would say it's a worse one to boot.

New comment by jojobas in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jojobas — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:20:52 +0000

His core premise is that one's not required to cheat, use immoral loopholes or abuse anyone to become filthy rich, as a prominent US politician has claimed. That stands unchallenged.

New comment by jojobas in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

jojobas — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:40:46 +0000

You'll like Spintires.

New comment by jojobas in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jojobas — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:13:33 +0000

Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.

New comment by jojobas in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jojobas — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:55:30 +0000

It is a dessicant dehumidifier, useless for the same reason as this MIT/Berkley thing from 9 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns

New comment by jojobas in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jojobas — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:02:32 +0000

You can wear silica gel since about 1918 - only needs some heat to get the water out and cold to condense it.

Then again, why would you want to wear your dehumidifier (ok ok water harvester)? Is it for excursions into damp areas, so that you can then return to your dry home to extract water?

Then, I believe everything in this video still applies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns

New comment by jojobas in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jojobas — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:00:08 +0000

So a dehumidifier with extra steps.

New comment by jojobas in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jojobas — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:32:55 +0000

This sort of thing can't work as it would break basic laws of thermodynamics. Best case it's a dehumidifier with extra steps.