Hacker News: patentatt

New comment by patentatt in "Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall"

patentatt — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:57:29 +0000

I recently tried to install Samsung magician on Windows 11. Tried. It flat out doesn’t work, tried some basic remediation and internet searching to figure it out, but could not get it to run at all. Completely nonfunctional. Seems to be an issue with some electron configuration or command line args. I gave up because it wasn’t worth more effort, but I believe it when I read that the software is a dumpster fire.

New comment by patentatt in "US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]"

patentatt — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:54:13 +0000

Only if it’s in this district, it has almost no weight in another district. And being unpublished makes it a flimsy argument even in this district.

New comment by patentatt in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

patentatt — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:15:05 +0000

I find this humorous but I’m also genuinely curious what the analogy is between fiber and GLPs?

New comment by patentatt in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

patentatt — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:59:48 +0000

I’d argue that most if not all of the math that I learned in school could be distilled down to analyzing problems in the correct coordinate system or domain! The actual manipulation isn’t that esoteric once you get in the right paradigm. And those professors never explained things at that kind of higher theoretical level, all I remember was the nitty gritty of implementation. What a shame. I’m sure there’s higher levels of mathematics that go beyond my simplistic understanding, but I’d argue it’s enough to get one through the full sequence of undergraduate level (electrical) engineering, physics, and calculus.

New comment by patentatt in "Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams"

patentatt — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:21:59 +0000

Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?

New comment by patentatt in "Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium"

patentatt — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:52:39 +0000

I think there is value in having only one lossy encoding step on the way to my ears. And with all of the 4k video being streamed these days, lossless music bit rates are rather pedestrian, so I'm just not that concerned about the resources argument

New comment by patentatt in "uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari"

patentatt — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:18:12 +0000

Must depend on your block lists, I get a 98% using AdGuard on iOS. I'm using easy list, easy privacy, fanboy annoyances and social filters, and hagezi's light dns filter. I'm a big fan of ublock but I don't see much issue with AdGuard for now.

New comment by patentatt in "How we built Bluey’s world"

patentatt — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 13:42:31 +0000

I know this trope has been beaten to death elsewhere too, but it certainly seems like we haven't seen much really 'new' for like 20 years (as far as popular media that is)

New comment by patentatt in "How we built Bluey’s world"

patentatt — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 13:38:53 +0000

Peppa pig has little to no value though, whereas many people find Bluey wholesome and touching and sometimes really poignant. To each their own, but at least Bluey tries to encourage creativity and play and fun beyond jumping up and down in muddy puddles. The short episode length can be a natural disengage checkpoint with Bluey too, as long as auto play is turned off.

New comment by patentatt in "They used Xenon to climb Everest in days – is it the future of mountaineering?"

patentatt — Thu, 29 May 2025 13:31:05 +0000

What's the issue with carbon-plated shoes?

New comment by patentatt in "Ask HN: Why are there no no-name inkjet printers?"

patentatt — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 14:14:03 +0000

Not challenging you, but I'm curious what source you have for this stat? I'd be interested in a good source for profit margins for many products, and also in the process behind those numbers.

New comment by patentatt in "Apple is officially no longer selling the newest Apple Watch in America"

patentatt — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:03:53 +0000

I find this dubious. Google is not known for respecting privacy, and large corporations in general are not known for voluntarily passing on trillion dollar markets on moral grounds. Is there perhaps an alternative explanation that isn't as far fetched?

New comment by patentatt in "Ubuntu squeezes more performance than Windows 11 on new AMD Zen 4 Threadripper"

patentatt — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 14:22:44 +0000

Anecdotal, but I went 2000 -> 7 -> 10, skipping XP, Vista, and 8. Given that cadence, will hopefully be skipping 11 as well and waiting for whatever is next.

New comment by patentatt in "Millions of Homes Still Being Kept Vacant as Housing Costs Surge, Report Finds"

patentatt — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:48:38 +0000

Seems like they're trying to balance out the other end of the equation by punishing labor through very high interest rates. My personal pet theory is that the fed wanted to raise rates enough so that the static interest rates on student loan debt didn't look so absurd when student loan payments came back online. Otherwise people would be demanding student loan debt relief. That ~7% doesn't seem so silly now, it's about inline with mortgage rates. But when mortgages were approaching 2%, that same 7% looked usurious.

New comment by patentatt in "FTC sues Amazon over ‘deceptive’ Prime sign-up and cancellation process"

patentatt — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 16:54:07 +0000

Same here, cancelled prime and still receive packages in 1-2 days generally. I never really used any other of the services under prime like video or music, so I don't miss it one bit. Also shifted most of my online purchasing to target anyways, I find the products and experience to be far superior, and I have a local store to go to also. I spent my prime budget on a shipt subscription and get target items delivered in a couple hours.

New comment by patentatt in "Ken Griffin says the AI community is making a mistake by creating so much hype"

patentatt — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 18:04:32 +0000

Lawyers are already sufficiently good at "detecting patterns in texts, find inconsistencies and so on" in written legal texts, that's not really the hard part in practicing law. Even legal research, despite what non-lawyers may think, isn't all that big of a problem for wide swaths of lawyers. In any given field, there's going to be a short list of relevant cases to know, and everyone will know pretty quickly when a new one comes out. Experienced lawyers don't generally spend a lot of time doing legal research. The hard part is in fitting the facts of your case to the fact pattern of the cases you're relying on for your legal argument, and then fitting it all together so that its easy to read, understand, and agree with.

New comment by patentatt in "The tiny corp raised $5.1M"

patentatt — Wed, 24 May 2023 23:41:00 +0000

If they can achieve something competitive with CUDA for $5m, why hasn't AMD done it yet?

New comment by patentatt in "The world’s oldest ultramarathon runner is racing against death"

patentatt — Tue, 09 May 2023 22:53:46 +0000

I'm closing in on 40 and trying to run my first sub 4 hour marathon before then. I figure you don't really start running that fast after 40, so this is my last chance to ever be a 4 hour marathoner.

New comment by patentatt in "Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens"

patentatt — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 12:56:11 +0000

I guess that's what we get when a rotary encoder is much much less expensive than a 4-6 gang potentiometer. And I also feel your pain with the car "booting up" phenomenon. I don't even have a particularly tech-heavy vehicle and upon starting the car the entire infotainment system feels like booting up a packard bell in 1996.

New comment by patentatt in "Why are movies so dark these days?"

patentatt — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:27:55 +0000

I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.