Hacker News: louky

New comment by louky in "Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin"

louky — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:37:15 +0000

Old trade beads can sometimes be found, old stashes and caches. Pony beads, seed beads, and others. They were traded/used as "money". The Hudson's Bay Company brought millions of them to this continent.

https://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol2/iss1/6/

New comment by louky in "My journey to the microwave alternate timeline"

louky — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:35:01 +0000

My Grandfather was around in the early days, had a ham call sign from the early 1930s and was involved in the Manhattan Project as a senior non-scientific engineer.

He was also involved in the development of radar/microwave comms after the war.

He and colleagues did the same - warming their hands in front of microwave antennae.

He developed and later died of some unknown neurological issues related to nerve transmission in the early 1990s. He had been exposed to so many different possible dangers that it's impossible to tell.

After he died I helped clean out and save/donate the double-garage full of ham equipment and home-built telescopes - one was ~.75metre diameter and ~3 metres long, just huge - I was just a teen and let most of it go as my grandmother didn't care by then.

There were also many containers of classified documents, related to WWII and after. Those were appropriately dealt with.

I've always HAD microwaves but have been aware of the issues. I'm a ham as well and still occasionally use the morse key he gave me when I was 7. Still miss him, he taught me so much.

72s

New comment by louky in "Asterisk AI Voice Agent"

louky — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:25:07 +0000

I don't mind music-on-hold as much except when they break with a human voice at intervals saying inane things such as "your call is important to us. Thank you for holding" Which makes me think the call has been answered. If there's not actual call queue information, just play music so I can ignore it and continue working without that NOP interrupt.

New comment by louky in "Pomodoro Flow"

louky — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:28:36 +0000

An interesting alternative "reverse" take on the Pomodoro technique.

Pomodoro Flow

louky — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:28:36 +0000

Article URL: https://indarktrees.com/misc/pomodoro/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483305

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by louky in "N-Back – A Minimal, Adaptive Dual N-Back Game for Brain Training"

louky — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:36:14 +0000

the buttons jumping up and down when correct or incorrect is jarring on my smaller screen, forcing a constant space there or moving the message would be a smoother UX, in my opinion.

New comment by louky in "Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge"

louky — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 21:06:05 +0000

So does Time Team, and they're back making new episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpbubYLW2fdf9ySyCS0f...

New comment by louky in "How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully"

louky — Tue, 27 May 2025 17:35:32 +0000

>> As of 2025, he also teaches mathematics at Rudgers University.

In the second sentence.

Not even run through an AI grammar-checker?

New comment by louky in "Firefox tab groups are here"

louky — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:17:10 +0000

I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

New comment by louky in "Forgeries, Fakes, and Phantom Time"

louky — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:46:38 +0000

Dendrochronology (dating cut trees via counting rings/size/ratios) has its own subjective interpretations, and different databases that don't always line up.

New comment by louky in "Windows 11 turns the tide against Windows 10"

louky — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 11:39:10 +0000

I ended up on Debian/XFCE. Lightweight enough and I've worked out how everything works and have it customized 100% to my workflow.

New comment by louky in "The South Vietnamese pilot who landed a Cessna on a carrier to save his family (2019)"

louky — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 04:31:31 +0000

I remember seeing women on the sides of the highway in one part of town gathering plants to eat, there's plenty of edible stuff out there, and my parents telling me they were refugees. Must have been in '74/'75 and I was a wee lad. In a Southern state. My parents were PhDs from Berkley and UCLA who got positions in the south so it was a weird time and place. For everyone.

New comment by louky in "Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction"

louky — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 04:05:27 +0000

I think I saw some of your work at a few Dead shows in ~1992

New comment by louky in "Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In"

louky — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 21:05:31 +0000

The hate for the GDPR I read of is actually about the "allow cookie" popups that aren't needed at all are are just a form of protest by those individual sites because they are storing and selling personal information including IP addresses.

If you aren't engaged in those practices then there's no need for any GDPR annoyances for users.

I may misunderstand, I'm in America currently.

New comment by louky in "XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support"

louky — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 01:14:30 +0000

Absolutely! It was a game changer for me. No more OOM with 16GB RAM

New comment by louky in "A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)"

louky — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 15:05:48 +0000

I worked in a place where the waitresses tipped out to the kitchen, and everyone got some of the money - including the dishdogs. It was a union (UFCW) restaurant. Cheap health insurance and 2 weeks paid vacation after 2 years, 4 weeks paid after 7 years. Not bad benefits for restaurant work. This was a while back though.

New comment by louky in "Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox"

louky — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:04:11 +0000

Glad I saw this - I thought it was some local issue. Amazingly laggy for me with firefox/Debian 12. I restarted firefox thinking it was the problem, apparently not. Very high CPU usage as well.

New comment by louky in "A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily"

louky — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 20:15:20 +0000

In this particular case they seem to pull from https://www.maxmind.com/en/home

There's a bunch of IP/GPS and physical address lookup sites, services, and databases out there.

New comment by louky in "In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality"

louky — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:48:47 +0000

Thanks for those book recommendations. I'm always interested in discussion or reactions to Heinlein.

>particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book

Interesting statement, I'm grabbing those books now.

New comment by louky in "The Ridgeway: The 5k-year-old pathway that's Britain's oldest road"

louky — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:09:00 +0000

Presenter Tony Robinson, from Time Team, Blackadder, and others has a whole series on hiking ancient Britain.

Here's a playlist, it's got the ridgeway and many other interesting places. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72jhKwankOhU9PaMnSMA...