Hacker News: scifi

New comment by scifi in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?"

scifi — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:32:05 +0000

True. What I don’t get, is how is vacancy a good move for the landlord? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a tenant during that time?

New comment by scifi in "Morse Code Translator"

scifi — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:24:52 +0000

Providing an avenue that students could (and almost certainly would) use to direct slurs at one another, seems like a surefire way to make things worse. I do share your concerns about social media.

New comment by scifi in "Morse Code Translator"

scifi — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:01:32 +0000

I work in tech for a school district. Just the other day, a request came in to unblock a Morse code learning website. Initially I was hesitant as, I was concerned kids could harass one another using codes. I was surprised to find a nicely built educational site- https://morsefree.com/

New comment by scifi in "Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email"

scifi — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:50:57 +0000

Neat. The potty mouth adds nothing.

New comment by scifi in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

scifi — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 23:59:27 +0000

The writing is hard to engage with—possibly trying to be funny, but it comes off as overly antagonistic. Phrases like “—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—” feel distracting and undermine the point.

New comment by scifi in "Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color"

scifi — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:40:47 +0000

OK, but the article seems to focus on boot time and not performance afterward. During the netbook craze, it seemed like a big performance boost to remove a hi-res desktop in favor of a solid color. At least that's my recollection years later.

New comment by scifi in "NSA can track powered-down phones"

scifi — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:14:43 +0000

OK, but to most folks reading this, the ads on that site probably invaded their privacy to a more substantial level than the NSA will.

New comment by scifi in "Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?"

scifi — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:41:33 +0000

I'm not certain what my point is, but I wanted to mention that jumbo frames don't work over the Internet. More of a LAN thing.

New comment by scifi in "Plane Barely Recovering from Spin in Mountains"

scifi — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 17:09:49 +0000

Possibly, heading over the pass was the return route to the airfield. (Pure speculation on my part.)

New comment by scifi in "Daily Usenet Feed Size Hits 300TB"

scifi — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:40:19 +0000

Usenet, in my experience, is reachable through a variety of easy-to-use web-based providers. Easynews, etc... I agree that it's ill-suited in the sense that often the files are split into parts and often need re-assembing or other such work. But it's fairly trivial stuff that a user may already be familiar with. Other than that it's super easy. Torrents, at least in my experience are not so straightforward due to the required installation of a client. I think users are hesitant to install it on their machines. Just my take based on limited experience.

New comment by scifi in "Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019)"

scifi — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:26:12 +0000

I just wanted to add something I didn't see mentioned in the article or the discussion. In the Christian tradition, figures are often portrayed with their pinky and ring fingers curled up, while the thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended. This is done to symbolize the holy trinity.

New comment by scifi in "California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days"

scifi — Tue, 21 May 2024 22:30:35 +0000

I work for a school. We reached out to So Cal Edison to ask what percent of the power they deliver comes from non-renewable. They said 40%.

New comment by scifi in "Nokia to cut up to 14,000 jobs as US demand shrinks, growth uncertain"

scifi — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:05:07 +0000

For those looking for some context around Nokia, the service provider for a big WAN I am familiar with (Cox) is all run on Nokia gear. Also, nearly every local police dept I am familiar with runs a Nokia firewall.

New comment by scifi in "Squid Caching Proxy Security Audit: 55 vulnerabilities and 35 0days"

scifi — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 16:14:38 +0000

Is this the same Squid that is the basis of many comercial web filters? A few years ago I evaluated web filtering hardware and most of the inline solutions on the market were based on Squid.

New comment by scifi in "Why’s that company so big? I could do that in a weekend (2016)"

scifi — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:12:13 +0000

Have you ever seen a modernist piece of art sell for a bunch of money? There's almost always someone who offers "I could do that". But they cannot. And they will not. It is a statement made to demean others and elevate the self.

New comment by scifi in "July 2023 was the hottest month on record"

scifi — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:19:35 +0000

It's somewhat approached through the concept of Urban Heat Islands. I would also imagine that rocks and mountains store plenty of thermal energy similar to a urban heat island. I don't know enough to offer a substantial comment beyond that.

New comment by scifi in "A copywriter swindled victims out of $200M by pretending to be a psychic"

scifi — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:10:13 +0000

It is interesting to note that some states (NY comes to mind) have anti-fortune telling laws on the books. I'll refrain from commenting on the validity of those laws. Likely they are forgotten and unenforced.

New comment by scifi in "The Ain Dubai, the world’s largest broken Ferris wheel"

scifi — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:53:18 +0000

A colleague built a building in Abu Dhabi about five years ago. He is still trying get a street address assigned to the building. Navigation instead works based on landmarks. So is someone asks the address you say the 'white building behind the BMW dealership'. I have a feeling that's why no one wants to teardown landmarks.

New comment by scifi in "Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling"

scifi — Wed, 10 May 2023 22:04:21 +0000

To add to this, manufacturers (HPE) are now requiring an expensive annual fee in order for customers to use the hardware.

New comment by scifi in "US adult cigarette smoking rate hits new all-time low"

scifi — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 17:01:04 +0000

What an interesting cultural transition to live through. Smoking was omnipresent. Already I am having to provide background to younger folks on automotive cigarette lighters and ashtrays. Along with promotional paper matchbooks.