Hacker News: papercrane

New comment by papercrane in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

papercrane — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:43:19 +0000

> I'd love to see pledge/unveil on (upstream) Linux - but I'm not holding my breath

There is Landlock now, I believe it would be possible to implement unveil and pledge on top of that.

New comment by papercrane in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

papercrane — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:45:53 +0000

There are a number of licenses that are named MIT that are all similar, but not identical.

The "Expat" here is the MIT license variant. It is referring to the Expat XML parsing library that first used this license.

Usually when projects these days use an MIT license this is the version they use.

New comment by papercrane in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

papercrane — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:39:51 +0000

The letter also said it was conditional on the combined entity maintaining investment-grade credit rating, which seems unlikely if the combined entity was saddled with $20B in debt.

New comment by papercrane in "GeoJSON"

papercrane — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:53:05 +0000

> It works great as long as you squint just a bit, ignoring that it generally calls for long,lat and is designed with the assumption of a world CRS.

I thought the spec allowed you to specify the CRS, but I just checked the RFC and they removed that from the 2016 specification and WGS84 is specified. It does allow for alternative CRS with prior arrangement, but like you said that does require a lot of care.

New comment by papercrane in "I want to live like Costco people"

papercrane — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:23:05 +0000

The hot dogs are 1/4 lb, with the bun it's probably 500-600 calories.

New comment by papercrane in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

papercrane — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:06:23 +0000

Yes, they have a number of domain names, archive.is and archive.today are the most well known ones.

New comment by papercrane in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

papercrane — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:47:15 +0000

It's almost a certainty that you can't copyright code that was generated entirely by an AI.

Copyright requires some amount of human originality. You could copyright the prompt, and if you modify the generated code you can claim copyright on your modifications.

The closest applicable case would be the monkey selfie.

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

New comment by papercrane in "Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket"

papercrane — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:23:45 +0000

You're using too much! Its commonly used to improve meat texture, especially in Chinese cuisine. It's called "velveting".

New comment by papercrane in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

papercrane — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:11:26 +0000

The thermal gradient in space is meaningless because there is hardly any matter to dump the energy into. This means you are entirely reliant on thermal radiation. If you look at the numbers given by Stefan-Boltzmann law you'd see that means to radiate a significant amount of energy you need a combination of a lot of surface area and high temperatures.

This means you need some sort of heat pump. For a practical example you can look at the ISS, which has what they call the "External Active Thermal Control System" (EATCS), it's a complicated system and it provides 70kW of heat rejection. A datacenter in space would need to massively scale up such a system in order to cool itself.

New comment by papercrane in "xAI joins SpaceX"

papercrane — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:44:52 +0000

Is there a credible way to cool a space-based data center on that scale?

New comment by papercrane in "Crafting Interpreters"

papercrane — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:13:54 +0000

I love this book! I do wish there was a new edition that updated the version of Java used in the tree-walk interpreter. There's been some additions to the language, like sealed classes and exhaustive switches, that could really benefit the implementation.

New comment by papercrane in "FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub"

papercrane — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:47:59 +0000

The DMCA notice is available here: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...

The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.

New comment by papercrane in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

papercrane — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:28:47 +0000

The memo at the time said the serifs can cause OCR issues.

https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232

New comment by papercrane in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

papercrane — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:41:13 +0000

One of the reasons Calibri was selected over Times New Roman was it has a lower rate of OCR transcription errors, making documents using it easier for people using screen readers.

New comment by papercrane in "Japanese four-cylinder engine is so reliable still in production after 25 years"

papercrane — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:01:52 +0000

It could've been, but it was probably a turbocharged L-series engine.

New comment by papercrane in "Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes"

papercrane — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:30:02 +0000

When Doyle wrote most of the Holmes stories cocaine was a popular and novel new drug, it wasn't until later that it's risks became widely known. In one of his later stories, "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter", Doyle portrays it as an addiction that Watson weaned him of, but is still concerned that his friend may fall back into.

"For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug-mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’ ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton, whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life."

- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Sherlock_Holmes...

New comment by papercrane in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

papercrane — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 18:25:26 +0000

In the US copyright just requires a level of originality. The bar isn't very high, but for example simple logos, like IBMs blue lines logo is not copyrightable.

There are examples of software code that is probably not copyrightable, but that's limited to very simple code that has only obvious implementations.

New comment by papercrane in "Reverse engineering a 27MHz RC toy communication using RTL SDR"

papercrane — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:08:53 +0000

I believe the RTL in RTL-SDR is "Realtek Limited", the manufacturer of the chips used in the early days of SDR. I don't think the chips these days are exclusively Realtek, but the name has persisted.

New comment by papercrane in "Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ"

papercrane — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 01:50:44 +0000

For clarity, they're requiring apps to be signed by a verified developer on certified Android devices. You can still side load, but the verification is still required for the side loaded apps.

New comment by papercrane in "US Gov acknowledges that 100K fee does not apply to existing H-1B visas holders [pdf]"

papercrane — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 23:24:47 +0000

It's 100k a year. H1B are normally valid for 3 years, so that's where the 300k comes from. The $1M figure is for the "Trump Gold Card" visa, which is unrelated to the H1B program.