Hacker News: oldherl

New comment by oldherl in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

oldherl — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:19:55 +0000

Wechat (Weixin; 微信) from Tencent has been doing this for years. Now Google is becoming the new Tencent and the US is becoming the new China

New comment by oldherl in "Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%"

oldherl — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:08:16 +0000

Hetzner should not be compared to AWS or GCP for pricing. It should be compared to Vultr, Linode or DigitalOcean.

New comment by oldherl in "Hosting a website on a disposable vape"

oldherl — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 07:32:19 +0000

But the essential resources for website hosting are public IP address and link bandwidth. Not a tiny computer.

New comment by oldherl in "People are just as bad as my LLMs"

oldherl — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:24:36 +0000

It's just because people tend to put the "original" result in the first place and the "improved" result in the second place in many scientific studies. LLM and humans are learning that and assume that the second one is the better one.

New comment by oldherl in "Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads"

oldherl — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:29:16 +0000

You can't. Because the creation is done in some proprietary software either bundled in the App or (worse) in the server somewhere.

New comment by oldherl in "Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads"

oldherl — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:18:19 +0000

I thought this was common knowledge among (at least) IT industry workers. It's been like this for a long time.

New comment by oldherl in "Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads"

oldherl — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:16:51 +0000

You are very lucky. In China, virtually all websites are required by law to use your phone number (verified by SMS) to register and/or to use. And all numbers must be linked to your ID.

New comment by oldherl in "World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject"

oldherl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 08:05:59 +0000

The word "local" is strange. There are almost no real "local" people as to local to that region. As to the other Chilean people, they can go to any other major Chilean city and build whatever they want there instead of building it right at Atacama. Nobody is stopping that.

New comment by oldherl in "World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject"

oldherl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 08:00:35 +0000

The best solution is to reduce the global population. Don't call me crazy. It's already happening in almost all developed countries. It's reasonable to predict that the remaining countries will follow in like 50 years. With a decline of population, the places that need to be lit up would also gradually reduce. More space for nature, for astronomy, for everything.

New comment by oldherl in "World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject"

oldherl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 07:57:10 +0000

The problem is that the industrial project will attract more people to the site, and a new town would be built with families living there. So even in the imagined best scenario, when you shut down this project, lots of people would lose their jobs. They would have to do some other businesses to support themselves. The light pollution won't be eliminated.

New comment by oldherl in "Engineering for Slow Internet"

oldherl — Fri, 31 May 2024 07:05:43 +0000

Please understand that Chinese government wants to block "outside" web services to Chinese residents, and Chinese residents want to access those services. So if the service itself decides to deny access from China, it's actually helping the Chinese government.

New comment by oldherl in "Every map of China is wrong"

oldherl — Fri, 03 May 2024 09:32:37 +0000

Wrong. There are Google offices in Beijing and Shanghai, where local software engineers are employed to work there. They develop software for global usage for Google. Google just stopped providing services in China.

New comment by oldherl in "Linux TTY font for Chinese, but treat it as a syllabic writing"

oldherl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 03:30:30 +0000

1. You still have to squeeze three Zhuyin symbols into one cell for syllables like "chuang", due to the limitation of psfu fonts. And no tones can be added.

2. I'm not a Zhuyin native user, so it's better to be done by someone else.

You're welcome to develop a Zhuyin version if you like.

New comment by oldherl in "Linux TTY font for Chinese, but treat it as a syllabic writing"

oldherl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:32:55 +0000

You are right. This assumes Mandarin. Given the constraints and so many compromises I've taken, this isn't too bad a stretch. After all, all other dialects in Mainland China are seldom used in written text, especially in the field of technology. Mandarin is the one and only go-to option. I am not judging whether this is good or not, but it is the current situation of Chinese languages.

New comment by oldherl in "Linux TTY font for Chinese, but treat it as a syllabic writing"

oldherl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:23:33 +0000

Author here. Fair point for using pinyin directly, but the TTY font requires the glyphs to be of the same size. Squashing the longest syllables like "chuang" into one cell doesn't look nice.