Hacker News: liversage

New comment by liversage in "A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)"

liversage — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:14:23 +0000

Maestri's claimed first ascent and his compressor route made the history of Cerro Torre controversial, and the later removal of the bolts added to this controversy. However, the unfortunately now deceased climbing prodigy David Lama also had his own scandal on the compressor route while sponsored by Red Bull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lama#Cerro_Torre

New comment by liversage in "A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)"

liversage — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:59:31 +0000

I've heard a variation of the story where the police took them away (i.e., "arrested" them) to protect them from what was becoming an angry mob.

New comment by liversage in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

liversage — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:03:08 +0000

My understanding is that there are three mobile networks in North Korea: the normal one used by the citizens (they have smartphones made specifically for North Korea), one used by the government/military and one for tourists (requires a local SIM card only available in a specific hotel in Pyongyang).

The last one is connected to the internet and this is why you can see (or at least before the pandemic could see) Instagram posts from North Korea.

I have no idea if this information is still or ever was completely true though.

There's a somewhat dated but very interesting AMA on Reddit by an American teaching computer science in Pyongyang:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ucl11/iama_american_...

Reading about the internet knowledge possessed by North Korean students, I'm always surprised how they supposedly also manage to be some of the most cunning and evil actors when it comes to hacking.

New comment by liversage in "Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why"

liversage — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:32:13 +0000

I get the impression that you think VW is Chinese, or am I misunderstanding your comment?

VW is the world's largest auto maker and it's German.

New comment by liversage in "Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms"

liversage — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:41:38 +0000

In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc.

Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...

New comment by liversage in "10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023"

liversage — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 10:39:28 +0000

This is a very controversial topic in Europe where Florence Bergeaud-Blackler's book about how the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate European institutions is seen either as a conspiracy theory fueling Islamophobia or a dangerous problem that has to be dealt with to protect society.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-french-academic-payi...

New comment by liversage in "LINQPad – The .NET Programmer's Playground"

liversage — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:36:18 +0000

One of many useful features of LINQPad is the output visualizer ("Dump"). Granted, there are now NuGet packages (very likely inspired by LINQPad) that can do something similar in a console app but LINQPad is interactive, allows drill-down and can export to formats like Excel. It's such a productivity boost.

The database integration is also great and allows me to write ad-hoc SQL queries using LINQ.

New comment by liversage in "Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming""

liversage — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:47:52 +0000

Brian Harry did something similar in 2018 when he was a corporate vice president at Microsoft: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brharry

New comment by liversage in "Voyager 1 is back online: NASA spacecraft returns data from all 4 instruments"

liversage — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 15:40:33 +0000

The asteroid belt is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter so the Voyagers traveled through this before reaching their first mission goal, Jupiter.

New comment by liversage in "Password may not contain: select, insert, update, delete, drop"

liversage — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:38:31 +0000

The SRP Authentication and Key Exchange System does not send the password from the client to the server. This scheme is supposedly used by Blizzard when authenticating users in some of their online games.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2945

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/18461/how-secur...

New comment by liversage in "Three American climbers solve the 'last great problem in the Himalayas'"

liversage — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 23:25:43 +0000

The brand name 'The North Face' is inspired by mountaineering where the north face of a mountain often is the most interesting but also difficult side as it's always in the shade (in the northern hemisphere). E.g., the Alps have the famous classical north faces of Eiger, Matterhorn and Grandes Jorasses which are climbed by only the most accomplished mountaineers.

New comment by liversage in "Three American climbers solve the 'last great problem in the Himalayas'"

liversage — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 23:17:27 +0000

It always irks me when 'Mount' is added as a prefix to a proper mountain name like 'Mount Annapurna', 'Mount Ama Dablam'. Should it then be 'Mount Mt. Everest'?

New comment by liversage in "New ancient ape from Türkiye challenges the story of human origins"

liversage — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 17:51:30 +0000

There are early finds of Homo in China but these do not predate the finds in Africa.

Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis are not early ancestors and they lived at the same time as modern humans emerged. I believe that Neanderthals are a subspecies of Homo sapiens so they were able to interbreed with modern humans.

New comment by liversage in "Deutschlandticket: Germany’s €49 ticket pushes passenger numbers up 25%"

liversage — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 06:22:31 +0000

The Danish bespoke train IC4 has entered the chat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC4

New comment by liversage in "Illustrations of Japan’s “unseen” workforce of trains that work at night (2019)"

liversage — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 07:46:17 +0000

The Copenhagen metro runs 24×7×365. It's also a driverless system.

New comment by liversage in "Triple-dip La Niña confirmed as BoM makes declaration"

liversage — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 15:42:07 +0000

Previous year (presumably the second consecutive La Niña event) the winter was exceptionally dry in the Alps leading to the current unprecedented snow and ice situation in that area so at least that year the snowfall was very limited.

The article states that the predictions should't be regarded as forecasts so obviously some years might not have the expected changes, but in addition the only expected effect of La Niña in Europe seems to be a drier autumn on the Iberian peninsula so I'm not sure how you arrived at your statements.

New comment by liversage in "Day ahead electricity prices for EU"

liversage — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 18:23:05 +0000

In Denmark electric power consumption of homes have decreased by 10% in 2022. Apps that provide the variable hourly rate today and tomorrow are increasingly popular, and they are used to plan the best time to perform tasks that require electricity.

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/danskernes-stroemforbrug-er-...

New comment by liversage in "FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores"

liversage — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 07:08:08 +0000

In the article the TikTok spokesperson explains this:

“It’s not logging what you’re typing. It’s an anti-fraud measure that checks the rhythm of the way people are typing to ensure it’s not a bot or some other malicious activity.”

New comment by liversage in "Ask HN: Why are the FAANG tech support forums often useless?"

liversage — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 22:28:11 +0000

I believe that the duplicated post you see in the dreadful forum is the accepted answer. It's displayed right after the question but also on the timeline of all the posts. For a long time this confused me a lot and I still find it jarring.

New comment by liversage in "A project with a single 11,000-line code file"

liversage — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 21:26:03 +0000

It's originally written in LISP and this is why it's a single C++ file. However, I believe that it's now being maintained in its C++ form.