Hacker News: sloucher

New comment by sloucher in "OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor"

sloucher — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 13:04:27 +0000

The bow doors?

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

New comment by sloucher in "Take the pedals off the bike"

sloucher — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 11:49:00 +0000

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

New comment by sloucher in "Jaguar Land Rover electric car whistleblower sacked"

sloucher — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 17:29:37 +0000

Nice self-own by Tata. Guy blows whistle while working at their obscure VinFast brand, but they sack him once he's moved to work for Jaguar - so all the headlines are about JLR rather than VinFast...

New comment by sloucher in "Programming a computer for playing chess (1950) [pdf]"

sloucher — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 15:01:53 +0000

Not even 1024 bytes. There were 1024 bytes available to the computer, but some of that was required to store what was displayed on the screen. Exactly how much depended on how much of the screen was used(!).

Different times...

New comment by sloucher in "WonderWorld: Interactive 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image"

sloucher — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:35:26 +0000

Or, you could confuse the heck out of GeoGuessr players :)

New comment by sloucher in "Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time"

sloucher — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:26:14 +0000

When I first tried it, I was like "oh, so the left-most column is the ads". It was only after trying a different query that produced fewer ads that I realised the left-most column is Google :-)

New comment by sloucher in "British pound hits record low against the dollar"

sloucher — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 16:08:12 +0000

I still take issue with the idea that a rise of 3% is unprecedented. I speak as someone who purchased my first property right before the ERM crisis and saw my mortgage payment almost double.

Also, for a long time, 100% and even 105% mortgages were common. I remember that when property prices nose-dived, we had people on TV being interviewed and complaining that they were "now in negative equity" as though that were something that had been done to them. These people started in negative equity by taking out a loan for more than the value of the property at the time of purchase.

With all that said, you're 100% correct that higher rates are going to cause real pain now, just as it did then. I don't accept that it's going to cause unprecedented pain, because to do so is to dismiss the very real problems that many many people had back then.

PS. Your strongest "unprecedented" argument would have been that the percentage increase in rates is bigger than ever before. 5% is 250% of 2%, whereas 15% is "only" 200% of 7.5%. But then it's easy to grow hugely when starting from a very small baseline.

New comment by sloucher in "British pound hits record low against the dollar"

sloucher — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 21:56:20 +0000

> I believe this is actually the fastest rise in rates ever.

Why do you believe that?

https://www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk/property-statist...

New comment by sloucher in "Neutralisation of cockroaches with laser automated by machine vision"

sloucher — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 14:37:25 +0000

I'm more concerned about how possible it is that one of these systems is used to harm humans deliberately.

New comment by sloucher in "20×10%"

sloucher — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:42:13 +0000

Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...

New comment by sloucher in "Italy, Intel close to $5B deal for chip factory"

sloucher — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 12:07:10 +0000

> You need stable government

So yes, Italy is the obvious choice :-).

New comment by sloucher in "Mechanics invent an axle that can achieve steering angles of up to 80 degrees"

sloucher — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:18:01 +0000

One of the things that make this possible is the sudden increase in space in [what was] the engine compartment, now that electric cars are more common.

Most small cars with petrol engines have nowhere near enough space for the wheel to turn like that.

New comment by sloucher in "Number of pubs in England and Wales falls to record low"

sloucher — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:53:13 +0000

Not as sad as it is for Ukraine.

New comment by sloucher in "Ask HN: Blog post about high-voltage electricity transmission / sub-station?"

sloucher — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:13:01 +0000

Sadly not - it was a longer post than that, but that's an interesting one nonetheless - thanks!

BUT, it's linked from the page you linked (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/) - success! Thanks so much.

Ask HN: Blog post about high-voltage electricity transmission / sub-station?

sloucher — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:04:25 +0000

I'm looking for a blog post I saw on HN some years ago (maybe 3) about an underground electricity sub-station. It may be been couched as "what's that mysterious building" or somesuch, but it delved into high-voltage cables and how they need to be cooled with (flammable!) cooling oil. It was fascinating, and I'm keen to re-read it, but Google fails me. Hoping the poster is still around... and sees this before this question (rightly) gets taken down :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642980

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by sloucher in "The whistleblowing bankers who were sent to jail"

sloucher — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 14:43:45 +0000

See also: FX rates that affect billions of transactions daily.

Where there's money to be made or lost on the value of anything that's determined subjectively, pressure will always be brought to bear to move the needle one way or the other.

New comment by sloucher in "Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways"

sloucher — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:30:54 +0000

> no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y

Yep, I sometimes follow up with MANIC or PANIC if I've got too few letters, to test for C/P/M/N

New comment by sloucher in "Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways"

sloucher — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 15:02:21 +0000

I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

New comment by sloucher in "OWL Guide, early hypertext, and “replacing” the Web"

sloucher — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:39:22 +0000

The browser was called Guide. OWL is the company name (or nickname, since the formal name was Office Workstations Ltd).

New comment by sloucher in "Nothing like this will be built again (2002)"

sloucher — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 17:28:27 +0000

My wife visited Torness (the plant in the article) for a meeting with one of the managers. She went through reception, got her badge, and was on her way up the stairs to the meeting room when the receptionist shouted at her. "Maam! MAAAM!... please hold the handrail".

They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.