Hacker News: pippy

New comment by pippy in "Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers"

pippy — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:58:30 +0000

I built a bit torrent extension for Cockpit. it was pretty fun building software for it

New comment by pippy in "Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated"

pippy — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:38:23 +0000

The Unicode can be ridiculous at times. It contains a character used once in a single manuscript in a extinct language, but not a standardized glyph for an external URL link.

New comment by pippy in "The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)"

pippy — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 22:07:45 +0000

Also would the world be a better place if they gave it back to some third party, so it can be sold to a private collection and be locked in a vault somewhere?

Where it is now has a lot of historical and cultural significance. It is currently being admired publicly by thousands of people, sitting on the coffin of Queen Elisabeth.

New comment by pippy in "WebP is such a goated format"

pippy — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 04:09:11 +0000

Webp is something you can push into production today: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF%2CWEBP

however AVIF only has about 65% market penetration.

If you ran a serious webserver, it would make more sense to do automatic on the fly conversion using mod_pagespeed. This way it handles browser support for you.

New comment by pippy in "What's the most efficient language?"

pippy — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 22:35:41 +0000

I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.

New comment by pippy in "CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”"

pippy — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 22:40:59 +0000

It seems the article you're talking about is the opponent color process, which here's some great articles about it: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html https://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html

I had some fun modeling the color space in 3d on codepen: https://codepen.io/torleifw/pen/jOwjPxp

(or a more boring slider option here: https://codepen.io/torleifw/pen/OJgdyPJ)

One of latest papers I've read recommended using a matrix to transform color spaces, which i've also done a codepen for.

Interestingly the opponent process mirrors the LAB color space, which is soon going to be available in Safari. This is pretty cool and can enable developers to color coordinate easier.

I'm going to give the webpage you linked a good read, looks very interesting.

New comment by pippy in "CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”"

pippy — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 20:48:56 +0000

I highly recommend reading Human color vision / Peter K. Kaiser and Robert M. Boynton. It's a great read if you've gone down the color vision rabbit hole as it has nearly every single topic in regards to human color perception. The biggest surprise for me was that there's still a bit of debate about how exactly neurons in the eye are wired together to produce the color signals that go to the brain.

New comment by pippy in "Old CSS, New CSS (2020)"

pippy — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:56:03 +0000

Tailwind is great, but ironically it is full circle in regards to OP's post. You describe the page structure in HTML using classes, much the same before CSS was a thing. This is ideologically opposed to semantic HTML where you describe what the structure is, and not how it is. Using server side frameworks hides this, as long as you don't need to write static HTML. Tailwind has plenty of hype behind it and it's good, but it also has plenty of downsides too. As long as you're aware of where it's be suited for. I think Tailwind is a CSS framework for people who don't want to do CSS.

New comment by pippy in "NASA returns Hubble to full science operations"

pippy — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 22:54:59 +0000

NASA could have built two or more as backups, as most of the cost was in R&D it would have been (comparably) cost effective to do so.

New comment by pippy in "100 years of whatever this will be"

pippy — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 21:51:39 +0000

  People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.

I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.

New comment by pippy in "Japanese Dome House"

pippy — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 01:43:05 +0000

Kitset houses are cheaper and better.

These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.

it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.

New comment by pippy in "First confirmed hatchings of two California condor chicks from unfertilized eggs"

pippy — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 21:46:35 +0000

There's a great passage about this in Genome by Matt Ridley, which is a great book for anyone interested. In mammals both the male and female gametes imprint their DNA in their sex cells to repress certain genes, if you combine two generic sequences from two males (with no modification) the zygote forms with no brain and too much placenta and dies soon after. If you do the reverse with females, you wind up with a oversized head and no placenta. The working theory is embryonic development is a competitive environment, where males want the best for their offspring at the expense of the female host, and the females 'fight' back by limiting the amount of resources the child has. it's only been recently we've had the technology to remove the epigenetic markers from DNA sequences to allow combinations of same sex strands.

New comment by pippy in "Single sign-on: What we learned during our identity alpha"

pippy — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 01:09:01 +0000

The NZ govt did a good job with their version: realme.govt.nz

While proving your identity was easy, they've had trouble achieving the next step of information sharing. Traditionally government departments under law were not able to share information. This has only recently changed and they're struggling to reach the next step.

New comment by pippy in "Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord"

pippy — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 03:35:17 +0000

The verify email process has a link to go to your email provider. that's slick.

New comment by pippy in "The open calendar, task and note space is a mess"

pippy — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 01:53:07 +0000

I wish them luck with the rewrite, but those sorts of rewrites are usually just replications of Apple's Copland. I suspect these sorts of rewrites are attempts at capturing the zeitgeist of younger developers.

OP is going to be in for a world of hurt trying to find a solution, there's a reason why all these libraries are in 'old PHP'. Most of the big companies have 'Appified' their APIs with calendars, and the old .ical etc formats are there for legacy support. So you need to create an app, delegate it permissions and then you've got a REST API to play with. If you've got the skill to do this, you'll have the skill to write a syncing script.

New comment by pippy in "The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus"

pippy — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:54:06 +0000

Immunor & St Georges University of London released a paper outlining evidence that SARS-CoV-2 Spike was artificial. The paper was criticised for going against the popular narrative. While I hope they're wrong, many researches dance around the topic. https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNat...

New comment by pippy in "Stop Using Icon Fonts"

pippy — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:20:50 +0000

with tools like this: https://github.com/tancredi/fantasticon using font icons is pretty easy to use. The biggest issue I found with font icons was getting upskilling new devs. online tools are clunky and explaining how to use it was always a pain. sometimes i'd wind up just saying 'use an svg'.

New comment by pippy in "Kenyan recycles plastic waste into bricks stronger than concrete"

pippy — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 02:00:45 +0000

Plastic recycling by and large is a farce. The majority of all "recycled" plastics in western countries winds up being exported to developing nations who then extract a tiny percent that can be melted down and reused. The rest winds up in rivers, or the ocean, or being burnt. It's horrific that countries like his is being used as a global rubbish dump.

If western countries actually want to make a difference, we need to take a hard line and ban all single use plastic.

New comment by pippy in "RNA Memory Hypothesis"

pippy — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 22:54:05 +0000

There's clear evidence of epigenetics playing a role in brain activity, though these are more linked to hormonal responses such as stress. It's also been proven that RNA transcripts are used to trigger maternal instincts when a zygote is present in a mother: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

Scientists have already modeled memory retrieval using current neural network models. There's literally videos on youtube demonstrating this. I'd be surprised if RNA was used to encode memories to the extent OP is suggesting: there would have to be a mechanism for storing this RNA inside cells or there would be evidence of random strands of RNA floating around in the body. We would have been found it a long time ago, and scientists would also be able to decode it if these strands of RNA were standardized and could be transferred person to person.

Though the way evolution works and how complicated the body is, it could be occurring in a small sub process in a neurons somewhere in the body. though this would likely be tied to hormonal responses or something equally boring.

New comment by pippy in "Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA"

pippy — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 20:19:24 +0000

>France has 70% nuclear

Not for long sadly :( Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.