Hacker News: rhplus

New comment by rhplus in "GitHub's Fake Star Economy"

rhplus — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:28:27 +0000

Yeah, exactly. The NFL is a closed system franchise. The same 32 teams play every season whether they win or lose. No team risks relegation to a lower revenue league. Every team gets a roughly equal share of the franchise revenue regardless of performance.

New comment by rhplus in "Cal.com is going closed source"

rhplus — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:10:20 +0000

It’s the classic asymmetric warfare problem:

Defenders have to find all the holes in all their systems, while attackers just need to find one hole in one system.

New comment by rhplus in "Urea prices"

rhplus — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:12:09 +0000

One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?

I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?

Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.

New comment by rhplus in "Artist who “paints” portraits on glass by hitting it with a hammer"

rhplus — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 03:05:11 +0000

Perhaps they find more acceptance due to the effects of pareidolia, where the viewer is more inclined to say, “Oh yeah, I see it - that’s a face!”

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

New comment by rhplus in "27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates"

rhplus — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:51:02 +0000

Look carefully at the screenshot. It’s definitely HTTP.

New comment by rhplus in "The Little Bool of Doom (2025)"

rhplus — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:40:31 +0000

Pedantic: the axioms of Boolean algebra don’t assign any natural numbers to the elements “top” and “bottom” of the set it operates on. The notation is usually “1” and “0” but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a convenience that many computer languages have named those elements “true” and “false”, and yes, it’s totally valid that in some representations, top = 0 = true and bottom = 1 = false.

New comment by rhplus in "Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version"

rhplus — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:12:12 +0000

Flashback to the days of Macromedia Flash.

New comment by rhplus in "How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)"

rhplus — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:49:01 +0000

Nutrition too. Not to paint everyone in the construction industry with the same brush, but there’s often a lot of cheap, high calorie, fast food and sugary drinks on site and in work trucks. This is manageable for younger workers, but by a certain age, the job responsibilities become less physically demanding, the metabolism slows down, and the eating habits remain.

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

rhplus — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:13:11 +0000

By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it’s financially viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on reentry.

New comment by rhplus in "The largest zip tie is nearly 4 feet long and $75"

rhplus — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:40:49 +0000

This would need quite a lot of force to overcome friction and cinch tight, no? Aside from some fun marketing, the problem is already solved by items like ratchet tie downs, Velcro straps or even just cord/rope with the right bundling knots.

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

New comment by rhplus in "A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words"

rhplus — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 01:29:50 +0000

EPEE is a common fill word from a lexicon informally known as crosswordese.

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

Really no harder than memorizing all the 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble and many players will pick most up in a few months.

New comment by rhplus in "We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)"

rhplus — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:36:23 +0000

I can hear Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, hooting and guffawing on Car Talk as I’m reading this Snopes article!

New comment by rhplus in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

rhplus — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:01:21 +0000

The S is simply too expensive. People in the market for $100K+ sedans/coupes are gonna perceive more curb appeal from a Mercedes, Audi, BMW or Porsche.

Tesla crashed the allure of its brand by lowering the price point of the Y and 3. The X and S aren’t different enough to attract $100K+ purchasers.

(It’s one reason why Toyota and other brands use different marks like Lexus for their high end offerings).

New comment by rhplus in "Television is 100 years old today"

rhplus — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:52:14 +0000

I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.

New comment by rhplus in "Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)"

rhplus — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:27:10 +0000

A microfiber cloth apparently so notable that it even has its own Wikipedia page:

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

New comment by rhplus in "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"

rhplus — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:29:12 +0000

We should probably all be glad that CloudFlare doesn't have the ability to update its entire global fleet any faster than 1h 28m, even if it’s a rollback operation.

Any change to a global service like that, even a rollback (or data deployment or config change), should be released to a subset of the fleet first, monitored, and then rolled out progressively.

New comment by rhplus in "Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026"

rhplus — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:25:19 +0000

> either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products

While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.

New comment by rhplus in "ClickHouse acquires Langfuse"

rhplus — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:14:27 +0000

Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.

I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.

Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.

New comment by rhplus in "List of individual trees"

rhplus — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:22:48 +0000

Humans, man.

The Tree of Ténéré was a solitary acacia that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth. It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Lost Tree to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The tree is estimated to have existed for approximately 300 years until it was knocked down in 1973 by a drunk truck driver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9

New comment by rhplus in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

rhplus — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:26:29 +0000

The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)