Hacker News: samch

New comment by samch in "Phyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone"

samch — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:37:22 +0000

One of my kids has science project due each quarter in school, and this is our go-to app. We’ve measured acceleration in an elevator, sound attenuation of an audio source in a small vacuum chamber, and the Doppler effect. The app makes it easy to capture and export the data points to make graphs. I highly recommend this even just to play around with.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails"

samch — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:41:43 +0000

Copilot is not a model, to my knowledge. When you’re asking about the data that it was trained on, you are most likely referring to an OpenAI or, in some circumstances, an Anthropic model. Customer data is not used for training the models that run Copilot.

New comment by samch in "Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out"

samch — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:14:59 +0000

I hadn’t thought about using their first-party API offering, but I will look into it.

Personally, I’ve used AWS Bedrock as the fallback when my plan runs out, and that seems to work well in my experience. I believe you can now connect to Azure as well.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 now tracks you in real time?"

samch — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:56:30 +0000

Some of this could be related to laws that necessitate updated location data for emergency calling. Since a common component of Teams is Teams Phone, there can be a compliance gap. I’m sure this isn’t the whole story, but it is likely one facet: https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law...

New comment by samch in "NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power"

samch — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:25:33 +0000

Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure"

samch — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:25:20 +0000

Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure"

samch — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:21:24 +0000

The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.

New comment by samch in "Electromechanical reshaping offers safer eye surgery"

samch — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:07:48 +0000

My wife had PRK done on both eyes over a decade ago, and it was great. At the time, she had the choice between LASIK and PRK (I’m not sure that everybody has both options given their particular conditions). After reviewing the long-term prognosis and possible side effects of both, she went with PRK. It’s been a fantastic decision for her, but that just one person’s experience.

New comment by samch in "Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2"

samch — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:40:44 +0000

Maybe they’ve thought about this and measure that too? Maybe they can adjust measurements based on data from multiple sensors?

https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volc...

New comment by samch in "Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say"

samch — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 12:50:20 +0000

Yes, as is OneDrive and Teams file sharing. Those, however, are part of SharePoint Online. SPO is distinct from this CVE, which only applies to the standalone SharePoint Server.

New comment by samch in "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion"

samch — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:53:36 +0000

This is what precisely why I willingly pay more to Google for their fiber optic service than AT&T for an equivalent, albeit less expensive, plan: Google readily allows me to use my own equipment. I am voting with my dollars on this one.

New comment by samch in "Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out Microsoft"

samch — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:29:22 +0000

So many of the comments are focusing on Office products. Okay, that’s fair. People can talk Calc vs Excel for example, and that’s fair. What I don’t get is how you replicate knowledge worker collaboration without using a major commercial provider like Google Workspace or M365. How do you handle the use cases solved by collaborative document editing, SharePoint / OneDrive, Teams with DLP, document classification, etc. I’m not affiliated with Google or MSFT, just genuinely curious how you replace the broader ecosystem around the core Office products using open-source solutions. Has anybody solved for this?

New comment by samch in "Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site"

samch — Fri, 23 May 2025 12:40:51 +0000

Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.

New comment by samch in "A Letter to the American People"

samch — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 03:04:53 +0000

This is precisely what’s happened with the educational system in many U.S. states:

1. Reduce funding and investment in public education.

2. Claim that our educational system is broken and we need to privatize.

3. Fund charter and private schools with vouchers while continuing to defund public schools.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see steps 4 and 5 where we return to well-support education for all.

New comment by samch in "macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)"

samch — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:17:50 +0000

One Windows shortcut that I use habitually is Ctrl + left or right arrow keys and optionally with shift in order to navigate by or select entire words at a time instead of single characters.

I’ve looked into MacOS approaches to achieve the same functionality in the past, but I never seemed to find anything of use. I’m wondering if anybody here would be aware of a solution.

New comment by samch in "PAROL6: 3D-printed desktop robotic arm"

samch — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:59:56 +0000

This is my favorite DIY robot arm at the moment. The parts seem to be fairly high quality, and it has a leader / follower arm option if you build a second one:

https://github.com/AlexanderKoch-Koch/low_cost_robot/tree/ma...

New comment by samch in "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024"

samch — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 17:07:10 +0000

A company called TechEmpower used to run periodic web framework benchmarks and share out the results using nice dashboard. Not sure why they stopped doing these.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown

Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans:

https://www.scanofthemonth.com/

New comment by samch in "Markov Keyboard: keyboard layout that changes by Markov frequency (2019)"

samch — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 16:53:07 +0000

I’ve backed this product, the Flux Keyboard, on Kickstarter - it allows for the type of dynamic changes that the author is describing in case others are interested:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fluxkeyboard/flux-keybo...

New comment by samch in "Futel"

samch — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:19:55 +0000

Reminds me of the 2600 back covers. There is something of the phreaking / phracking culture to this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210312063737/https://www.2600....

New comment by samch in "Intel Keychains with Computer Chips"

samch — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:00:45 +0000

Instead of disposing of or recycling sub-standard chips, Intel used to repurpose some into keychains.