Hacker News: sdk16420

New comment by sdk16420 in "I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C"

sdk16420 — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:46:01 +0000

I used to have a similarly priced Withings smartwatch clone; worked very well for years until I switched to a new phone and the app turned out to be gone from the store and the log in servers were offline. Without the app you can't get notifications or even sync the time and the watch is useless. Yes, well-known brands also discontinue software, but with a cheap watch like this, it's almost guaranteed to become a paperweight in a few years.

Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.

New comment by sdk16420 in "I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C"

sdk16420 — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:39:33 +0000

Living was always expensive, in developing countries, goods are still expensive but so is living. Save for subsistence farmers, but those are a minority in all but the poorest countries.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul"

sdk16420 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:59:29 +0000

High 5 figure salaries can bribe ethics, especially if the engineers are on a Green card

New comment by sdk16420 in "Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot"

sdk16420 — Thu, 22 May 2025 18:15:02 +0000

Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...

New comment by sdk16420 in "You vs. a Billionaire: An Interactive Perspective on Wealth"

sdk16420 — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:55:18 +0000

Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.

Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...

New comment by sdk16420 in "Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA"

sdk16420 — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 14:29:04 +0000

I found several websites switched to 'press here until the timer runs out', probably they are doing the checks while the user is holding their mouse pressed, it would be trivial to bypass the long press by itself with automated mouse clickers.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Germany hits 80 GW milestone"

sdk16420 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 16:37:52 +0000

You are confusing installed capacity with power used. The consumed power is going down since the early 2000s, but since the generated power by most renewables depends on the weather and season, more reserve capacity needs to be installed.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

New comment by sdk16420 in "Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge"

sdk16420 — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 17:34:30 +0000

Not having my browser nagging me to install Chrome every time I open search, maps or gmail?

New comment by sdk16420 in "Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)"

sdk16420 — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 22:42:21 +0000

>Sometimes, people want a more efficient way to read articles, rather than actually reading them.

Is it too much to assume that readers have had at least high school education and know about lead sentences and summary paragraphs?

New comment by sdk16420 in "AP fired reporter after dangerous blunder – Slack chats reveal chaotic process"

sdk16420 — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 05:44:22 +0000

But those were sold with the expectation to be used by Saudi Arabia for that purpose.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days"

sdk16420 — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:52:44 +0000

I feel that we are employed above of all to be available when it matters rather than to do a certain amount of work for the hours you are paid for. Compare it to a workshop with some tools, you buy a hammer not because you use it for 8 hours a day, but because when you need it, you can't do without it. If you go a day without needing to use the hammer, it doesn't mean that having the hammer in your shed is a waste of money.

If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

sdk16420 — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:10:44 +0000

Drum brakes are in the same spot and can last for the life of the vehicle.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

sdk16420 — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:08:45 +0000

Hub motors are in development for cars too, e.g.:

https://lightyear.one/articles/lightyear-and-elaphe-develop-...

New comment by sdk16420 in "TikTok updated privacy policy to collect faceprints and voiceprints (2021)"

sdk16420 — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 18:08:59 +0000

WhatsApp has led to dozens of brutal deaths in India

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

New comment by sdk16420 in "Ask HN: Has anyone made any serious money selling Android apps?"

sdk16420 — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 17:31:12 +0000

There appear to be few good apps left that do not use a subscription model, and when they do, more often than not they charge at least €5/month, or a yearly €40 subscription. I remember around circa 2012, apps like Nova Launcher and Titanium backup were considered expensive, at €7 or so. Another example, I have a grandfathered subscription on Sleep Cycle for €2 a year, if you would take a new subscriptions it's €30 a year.

New comment by sdk16420 in "My students cheated... a lot"

sdk16420 — Sun, 29 May 2022 10:09:56 +0000

>Too bad you used the same phone number that you have on file with the university.

Regardless of the legitimate discussion on cheating, why would a lecturer have access to student phone numbers, either directly or after asking the student affairs office to link them to names? The further I got in the article, the more it seemed like Reddit-style creative writing.

New comment by sdk16420 in "The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today"

sdk16420 — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 19:06:49 +0000

I was hoping most people would be familiar with the exponential chessboard story, of which this is pretty much the inverse.

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

New comment by sdk16420 in "An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown"

sdk16420 — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 14:08:07 +0000

>100% of all villages had erected strict and high barriers to quarantine their villages off from the rest of the China.

https://www.ifpri.org/blog/lockdowns-are-protecting-chinas-r...

You may not be locked inside your house but you can still be locked in your village, which may not have food either.

New comment by sdk16420 in "Why I got a PhD at age 61"

sdk16420 — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 10:32:52 +0000

>just try things out without so much pressure.

I highly doubt you have any experience around promovendi

New comment by sdk16420 in "AI is changing chemical discovery"

sdk16420 — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:16:37 +0000

A similar thing is happening in inorganic chemistry. On https://materialsproject.org probably the majority of materials are 'discovered' computationally, by using DFT simulations to determine if and how stable any crystal structure would be. Using this database, AI can be used to find suitable materials for any application. [1]

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=materials%20project%20h...