Hacker News: miahi

New comment by miahi in "The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app"

miahi — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:20:18 +0000

There are "simple" hardware tokens that allow for that - you have to enter the amount and part of the destination IBAN and they generate a 2FA number based on that + probably the same number generator it uses for logins.

New comment by miahi in "JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet"

miahi — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 08:21:08 +0000

ADSB is not mandatory in the US below FL100 or FL180 (10000/18000 feet), that covers most helicopter flights.

It depends also on the website you are using to track. I have an ADSB receiver that publishes to multiple tracking websites (the same data, unfiltered), and not all of them publish all the data. Flightradar24 doesn't show most of the military aircraft - I can see them on my local tracking interface but they are not shown on their website.

New comment by miahi in "Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?"

miahi — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:00:17 +0000

Also, batteries will degrade faster over time when they start to degrade, because they need more frequent charging. Their internal resistance increase and that promotes heat buildup during fast charging/discharging, another thing that promotes degradation. Slow charge/discharge cycles also help with heat management.

New comment by miahi in "PuTTY has a new website"

miahi — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 06:48:23 +0000

Having a Windows 11 corporate laptop with a domain/Entra login, I actually trust it more than a home Windows 11 with a Microsoft account. Because if I lock myself out, I have a contact (corporate support) that is actually interested in helping me recover everything. With a Microsoft account it's a mess. I had so many problems with Microsoft accounts that I lost count of how many I have, and most are broken in some way, because of different issues and different service integrations over time. The Skype account is now useless. I never recovered my paid Minecraft account after one event. With a machine with a local account, now I have to be very careful on what I click related to MS accounts, because trying to solve various issues with Teams, I managed to get the local account linked with that MS account. I spent hours trying to recover a different account after I randomly filled one nagging question about birth date - who wants to give the real birth date to Microsoft - and then I got locked out because I said was underage :). So yes, one of the big issues is the push to have a linked OS account where you have to rely on MS support to solve your issues, otherwise you basically get locked out of your machine and other things you paid for.

Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).

New comment by miahi in "Canon EF and RF Lenses – All Autofocus Motors"

miahi — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:21:02 +0000

With mirrorless cameras the focus switched from specialized sensors to on-CMOS contiuous exposure sensors, so movement is easy to detect. At this point the cameras have specialized AI hardware to run the models, and they also accept user input (on R5 MkII you can register up to ten people to prioritize focus on[1]). The focusing options are now very complex[2][3], and combined with lots of customization options on the camera's buttons you can have very specialized/personalized setups for different types of photography.

[1] https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-04_AF-Drive_0... [2] https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-04_AF-Drive_0... [3] https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-04_AF-Drive_0...

New comment by miahi in "Tesla sales in Europe down 45% in January"

miahi — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 11:25:38 +0000

The usual problems with this approach are 1) the roof is not big enough for solar panels to power multiple chargers and 2) the power is generated when people are not at home (and probably using their car to go to work).

New comment by miahi in "iText PDF Library turns 25"

miahi — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:35:23 +0000

Yeah, it's basically dying and living on old fame. We had to buy a license a few years ago for a customer who needed support for some things that PDFBox did not support, Of course it's not just a license, you have to buy multiple licenses for production, development and so on. It was okay until we hit a bug, iText could not read some form fields correctly and was basically changing the PDF contents on save. We opened a support ticket with all the details, sample files and code to reproduce. The ticket stayed open for a year. After a year they asked us to pay for more support. We showed them the open ticket and never heard from them again.

New comment by miahi in "My first Thunderbolt 5 experience has been a bust"

miahi — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 05:50:16 +0000

The problem is that a cable saying that it's something does not mean that it actually conforms to the standard and can deliver that speed/power. And proper testing requires complex hardware.

New comment by miahi in "M4 MacBook Pro"

miahi — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:28:25 +0000

I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that the higher numbers of that benchmark result do not translate directly to better performance for all software you run. Deep learning as it is right now is probably the main application that benefits from this extension (and probably the reason why it was added in hardware at this point in time).

New comment by miahi in "M4 MacBook Pro"

miahi — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:42:35 +0000

It will be faster only for code that uses/is optimized for that specific extension. And the examples you give are not really correct.

If you add a supercharger you will get more power, but if the car's transmission is not upgraded, you might just get some broken gears and shafts.

If you add more solar panels to your roof, you might exceed the inverter power, and the panels will not bring benefits.

It's true that you will benefit from the changes above, but not just by themselves - something else needs to change so you can benefit. And in the case of the M4 and these extensions, the software needs do be changed and also to have an use case for these extensions.

New comment by miahi in "TDK claims solid state battery breakthrough"

miahi — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:26:39 +0000

"But look how thin it is!"

New comment by miahi in "TDK claims solid state battery breakthrough"

miahi — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:22:40 +0000

The article says "100 times greater than TDK’s current battery in mass production" but they are not referring to the current LiIon/LiPo batteries, but the current _solid state_ battery. The capacity per liter of the new solid state battery is less than 2x of the current phone batteries (1000Wh/liter vs 5-700Wh/liter for LiPo). So no, you cannot replace one phone battery with a coin cell with the same battery life.

New comment by miahi in "'The big problem is water': UK ebike owners plagued by failing motors"

miahi — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 07:18:24 +0000

That seems to be a modified bike, with a head tube extension plus lots of random spacers, and lots of accessories. It's probably used as a very comfortable road/gravel bike.

New comment by miahi in "Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life"

miahi — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 19:28:38 +0000

I (as a non-mac user, but impulse buyer of odd camera gear) appreciate the "exclusively for Mac" label put just after the fold. I usually have to read pages (about software) on HN for minutes before finding out (in a footer or "get it here" link) that it's Mac-only. This way I just know it's not for me and I can continue with my boring life.

New comment by miahi in "Group buys up large tracts of land in Romania to create 'European Yellowstone'"

miahi — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 17:33:36 +0000

Unfortunately, Romanian bears are brown bears (Ursus arctos), not black (Ursus americanus). They are not easily scared by people and encounters with them can be very dangerous.

New comment by miahi in "Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G12 laptop review: First major refresh in three years"

miahi — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:03:33 +0000

In the 'olden days', when external displays and projectors were scarce, we used this feature for collaboration/presentations in non text-heavy interactions. Four people can sit at a table around it and they can all see the screen when it's flat on the table, albeit one of them would see it upside down.

Now I mostly use it for comfortable position in bed, as many others say.

New comment by miahi in "Upstart retrofits an Nvidia GH200 server into a workstation"

miahi — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 07:27:01 +0000

It's not a video card, it does not have video outputs.

New comment by miahi in "Is ORM still an anti-pattern?"

miahi — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:29:31 +0000

They mean database agnostic - that you can easily/magically migrate your application from a DBMS to another and the ORM will handle it for you. That usually works only for trivial databases and does not include data migration.

New comment by miahi in "SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing–firmware fix for only some promised"

miahi — Sun, 21 May 2023 08:40:49 +0000

Yeah, the sleep is a mess with new hardware (and MS also does not help, with the new OS sleep). I have a "creator"-targeted MB from Gigabyte and it does sleep, but if it wakes up immediately after I put it to sleep (because of a mouse move), it does a series of 7-8 BIOS initalizations/restarts and it resets the full BIOS in the process.

New comment by miahi in "Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules"

miahi — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 05:52:03 +0000

MS is still "the best" in this case. Searching for Firefox on a fresh Windows install (with Edge) will show Chrome and Opera as first two options (keyword ads), then Firefox. And then, when you download the Firefox installer, you are announced that it could harm your device.