Hacker News: rgovostes

New comment by rgovostes in "TreasuryDirect: Prepare for ID.me – Your New Way to Log In"

rgovostes — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:19:18 +0000

A young relative of mine is having a miserable time cashing Treasury bonds that were gifted to her through TreasuryDirect for her tuition.

Treasury is requiring she get a medallion signature guarantee from a bank to access her funds but, like 40%+ of her generation, she uses online banking with no accessible branch. Treasury insists she can get this from any bank, but as the guarantor is liable for a loss, there's no way they will provide this to a non-client. They generally won't even make their ordinary notary public available.

So she is now switching financial institutions simply to access a modest amount in her TreasuryDirect account. If you are thinking about gifting saving bonds to someone: do them a favor and don't.

New comment by rgovostes in "Show HN: A Handwritten Blogging Platform"

rgovostes — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:39:40 +0000

Ironically, "No feeds. No algorithms. No likes." reads like copy that is, well, not handwritten.

New comment by rgovostes in "Folding Paper Globes"

rgovostes — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:08:47 +0000

Flexify (http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-2.html) is an incredible decades-old Photoshop plugin for making these. I made a mobile for a grade school math project using Flexify and NASA's equirectangular planetary maps, turning Mercury into a tetrahedron, Venus a pentahedron, etc.

The gallery of output projections is neat: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-output-modes.html

New comment by rgovostes in "Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room"

rgovostes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:22:01 +0000

See also: Black Hole Vision for iOS from Vanderbilt University. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/black-hole-vision/id6737292448

European Commission: 'Guidance to Google for AI Interoperability'

rgovostes — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:36:55 +0000

Article URL: https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ec_google_guidance_android_ai_and_search_sharing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017682

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by rgovostes in "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team"

rgovostes — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:28:39 +0000

Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.

This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.

New comment by rgovostes in "98% isn't much"

rgovostes — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:59:55 +0000

A website dedicated to promoting LASIK says the surgery “boasts a success rate of at least 96%”, and a satisfaction rate of 95%. “Long-term or chronic dry eye affects only a small minority (about 4%)” while cases requiring follow-up treatments are “typically under 5%”.

These numbers have never been particularly reassuring to me.

New comment by rgovostes in "OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router"

rgovostes — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:11:28 +0000

I've recently been test driving SPR[1] which is a security-oriented distro for Wi-Fi routers. The team behind it are serious about Wi-Fi security and have a research lab[2] that has been credited with several CVEs in the likes of Apple's network stack. The headline feature is strong device isolation for semi-trusted guest and home automation devices, and the software stack is based around containerized and audited Go daemons.

It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi.

1: https://www.supernetworks.org 2: https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html

New comment by rgovostes in "Podman v6.0.0"

rgovostes — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:02:24 +0000

I've been using Podman on Mac and Linux for 3 years, and unfortunately, I have found this to be perennially true. I am willing to doggedly pursue the root cause and file bugs, but for many people it will just seem broken.

Most recently: Netavark doesn't match Docker's behavior with accepting broadcast traffic on a published port.

New comment by rgovostes in "macOS Container Machines"

rgovostes — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:46:53 +0000

I've successfully tinkered with USB/IP with Apple containers, but it does require loading a custom kernel (which they make pretty easy, thankfully). On the host side, macOS also doesn't make it easy to unload a driver that attaches automatically.

New comment by rgovostes in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

rgovostes — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:25:33 +0000

Related: Gus Mueller (of the excellent macOS image editor Acorn) has a parametric pizza dough calculator: https://maybepizza.com/calc/

New comment by rgovostes in "Dumbphone 2"

rgovostes — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:17:09 +0000

Once upon a time, or perhaps in an alternative universe in which the iPhone did not take over the world, there was Peek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device)

New comment by rgovostes in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

rgovostes — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:14:10 +0000

Great comment, thank you.

I have only seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) once, but fifteen years on I distinctly remember a scene where Daniel Craig is trying to use a Mac and accidentally drags Safari off the Dock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W84AhBMRNOY#t=1m25s

New comment by rgovostes in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

rgovostes — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:09:51 +0000

Apple Vision Pro's hand tracking was first alluded to in a section of their first machine learning research publication. It was about using GANs to add realistic sensor noise to synthetic datasets. The bulk of the article is about eye tracking.

New comment by rgovostes in "Human typing habits and token counts"

rgovostes — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:42:17 +0000

I appreciate that the post was short and to the point, but it is, like so much content submitted to HN now, heavily filtered through an LLM's voice, if not completely written by one.

Here is how the author used to write: https://pankajpipada.com/posts/2022-07-09-voraciousness/

> Writing things down generally helps me build my own clarity and I hope to get the same out of this particular write up. Hopefully I achieve this clarity sooner rather than later.

New comment by rgovostes in "A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings"

rgovostes — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:25:17 +0000

This article uses every one of Claude's cliches, e.g., "No SGD, no epochs, no hyperparameter search." It's hard to tell if this is real research.

New comment by rgovostes in "AI slop is killing online communities"

rgovostes — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:21:20 +0000

So you ran an "experiment" where you deliberately made someone else's community worse to see what would happen? Cool project.

New comment by rgovostes in "Underwater robot tracks sperm whale conversations in real time"

rgovostes — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:50:13 +0000

There exist many underwater vehicles that can withstand ocean pressures. The REMUS 6000 for example can reach depths of 6000m.

As the article describes, these are gliders:

> A glider is a small robot that slowly changes its buoyancy, becoming slightly heavier to sink and lighter to rise.

It doesn’t need battery power to endlessly spin a prop. With little energy expenditure it can inflate or deflate a bladder; changing volume changes buoyancy and therefore vertical motion in the water column. The vehicle’s design allows it to “soar” as it does so. The tradeoff is control.

It seems the vehicle they are using is the Alseamar SEAEXPLORER: https://www.alseamar-alcen.com/ocean-science-sector/seaexplo...

New comment by rgovostes in "Southwest Headquarters Tour"

rgovostes — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:28:35 +0000

There was a charming reality TV show in the 2000s called "Airline"[0] in which a camera crew followed around Southwest ground operations, cabin crew, and passengers. There was a British series that aired around the same time about Heathrow, unsurprisingly called "Airport".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_%28American_TV_series%...

New comment by rgovostes in "Ti-84 Evo"

rgovostes — Sat, 02 May 2026 05:31:50 +0000

In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0].

One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.)

I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints.

0: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-co...