Hacker News: merryocha

New comment by merryocha in "GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet"

merryocha — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:14:23 +0000

I'm an Amazon driver and we heavily rely on GPS for delivering. We don't just use it for navigating, we also make each delivery inside of a geofence, and the delivery location is recorded and used for future routing. When the GPS says you're a block away from where you are, you're unable to make the delivery without contacting support. I've had days where GPS problems wasted a lot of my time, so I imagine it would be expensive if it happened across an entire region. On the other hand, these kinds of disruptions are already factored into the business model and planned for, so saying it cost an industry X amount of dollars is assuming that the industry was planning for ideal conditions in the first place.

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

merryocha — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:18:38 +0000

I personally use Fossify Gallery to browse my photos and I just manually back up my photos from time to time by plugging my phone into my PC and copying the entire folder into an Archive folder which I keep organized by year and back up in multiple places. It's an oldschool solution to the problem but it works great for me.

New comment by merryocha in "The lost joy of music piracy"

merryocha — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:23:42 +0000

I miss the What.CD forums as well. I learned so much there. What.CD felt like attending a conference full of people from all over, full of ideas and willing to put effort into posts. The successor sites are much smaller and less active and it feels more like visiting a bar full of regulars who all know each other. I still love those sites for the music discovery and I still collect music as a hobby but What.CD's forum was the best forum I've ever been on. I wish someone archived it so I could go back and read some of the old threads.

New comment by merryocha in "The lost joy of music piracy"

merryocha — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:25:37 +0000

The problem with platforms like YouTube etc is that the audio is transcoded to a lossy format. Repeatedly transcoding the audio from lossy to lossy degrades the quality. Music needs to be preserved in a lossless format like FLAC which keeps all of the original audio information intact.

New comment by merryocha in "A Love Letter to Flashcards"

merryocha — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:22:27 +0000

When I was a kid I used flashcards to memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 and it allowed me to do very rapid mental math from that point on, and I still can to this day. It was useful for math quizzes and tests in school but it's also useful for life in general. Going up to 16 might be even better.

I use the Livio English Dictionary to look up words when I read on my tablet and I noticed one day that it keeps a search history, and I got an idea to make an Anki flashcard collection consisting of all the words I've needed to look up while reading. Despite being an obsessive reader my entire life I still regularly encounter words I'm not 100% certain about. Reading itself has spaced repetition built right in, assuming you quiz yourself and then follow up with a dictionary.

New comment by merryocha in "Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?"

merryocha — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:28:22 +0000

If you're interested in ants (and even if you're not) I highly recommend the book Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.

New comment by merryocha in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

merryocha — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:54:34 +0000

I don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!

New comment by merryocha in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

merryocha — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:51:41 +0000

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.

New comment by merryocha in "Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica"

merryocha — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:43:43 +0000

A book in my collection that I love is The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a greatest hits collection from Britannica over the years. It has articles written by many famous names like James Maxwell, T.E. Lawrence, Einstein, JFK, Arthur Koestler, and many more. I love how Britannica articles are written by a single expert, giving the articles a bit of bias, humor, and character.

New comment by merryocha in "Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything"

merryocha — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:42:55 +0000

I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.

New comment by merryocha in "The Xkcd thing, now interactive"

merryocha — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:09:50 +0000

I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!

New comment by merryocha in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

merryocha — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:04:23 +0000

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

New comment by merryocha in "Why do Americans hate A.I.?"

merryocha — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:14:43 +0000

The problem is that it's being used for things it shouldn't be used for. Everyone these days knows that you shouldn't use a microwave to cook a steak, but I'm sure when it was first invented there were many chefs who tried.

New comment by merryocha in "High air pollution could diminish exercise benefits by half – study"

merryocha — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:23:24 +0000

I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.

New comment by merryocha in "Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites"

merryocha — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:17:51 +0000

uBlock Origin can block these if you check the "Annoyances" filter in the filter list. I think it's disabled by default because it has a higher risk of breaking sites, but I never have a problem. I haven't seen a cookie banner in a long time!

New comment by merryocha in "The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press"

merryocha — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 16:47:14 +0000

This is what I use and it works great. I mainly use it to download things like 3-hour music playlists ahead of long drives to avoid wasting mobile bandwidth.

New comment by merryocha in "The loneliest people (and places) in America"

merryocha — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:24:11 +0000

The color shading on those maps seems deceptive to me. It suggests a starker contrast than what the numbers tell.

New comment by merryocha in "F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025"

merryocha — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:19:31 +0000

Others have mentioned many good apps, but I'll add this one:

Forkyz: Crossword puzzle app, a fork of the Shortyz app. If you like crossword puzzles, this pulls from a bunch of daily crosswords.

New comment by merryocha in "Why is the American diet so deadly?"

merryocha — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 16:38:31 +0000

One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility of contaminants like machine grease, spray lubricants, and dust getting into food. When the process for making food is automated, it seems much more likely to me that some of the moving parts in the process end up getting coated with small amounts of machine grease or lubricants. Maybe a moving machine part was sticking, so a technician used some spray lubricant on it, some of which found its way to the conveyor belt that was transporting the food to the next stage of the process. Maybe a metal part that is used in the process was coated in some kind of oil to protect it during storage. Someone may install it without cleaning it off with a solvent. Maybe something is being stored in an open-air vat, and work is being done nearby that generates dust. The more processed a food is, the more opportunities there are for contaminants to find their way into the food.

I think of these things because I worked in a kitchen that made dough, and our dough mixer always needed to be lubricated. I once found grease that had dripped from above into the mixing bowl. Luckily I am someone who takes such things seriously, but there are a lot of careless people out there. Even if you wipe off grease, an invisible trace amount will remain on the surface unless you clean it with a solvent. I also worked in a warehouse that stored machine parts used in food packaging equipment. There was drywall work being done at the time and the whole place was coated in gypsum dust. I remember handling "food grade" lubricant and looking up its safety data sheet (SDS) out of curiosity, and my takeaway from reading it was that it's still probably not something you would want to eat.

New comment by merryocha in "Mitochondria Are Alive"

merryocha — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 13:30:56 +0000

If you want a fun scifi horror novel to read related to this topic, check out Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena. It's the novel that inspired the PSX game. The whole plot revolves around mitochondria and was inspired by the author's time as a grad student. I read it a few months ago and really enjoyed it.