Hacker News: southwindcg

New comment by southwindcg in "In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon"

southwindcg — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 14:47:46 +0000

Emoticons have been around since the March 30, 1881 issue of Puck magazine, if not earlier.

New comment by southwindcg in "Show HN: What If Your Phone Was Your Bank? (Offline, Zero Fees, Full Control)"

southwindcg — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 20:21:56 +0000

Show HN is not for reading material. Also, your GitHub link is a 404 error.

New comment by southwindcg in "Russia's first AI-powered robot walked on stage"

southwindcg — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:27:45 +0000

And that this happened with the theme from Rocky playing (a film franchise in which an American underdog beats up a Russian super-athlete), and there were broken plastic robot bits left on the floor... it really, really does seem like a comedy skit.

New comment by southwindcg in "Higher Thermal Conductivty Than Diamond Found in Boron Arsenide"

southwindcg — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:20:16 +0000

Specifically when produced with "exceptional purity"...

Wikipedia [0] lists room temperature thermal conductivity at 1300 W/(m·K) and says "Chemical synthesis of cubic BAs is very challenging and its single crystal forms usually have defects." I guess it remains to be seen how cheaply and easily this "exceptional purity" can be achieved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron_arsenide

New comment by southwindcg in "Day 1 of Light Speed Up: When transparency matters more than perfection"

southwindcg — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 03:38:43 +0000

Your links to the original Show HN just point to a comment.

New comment by southwindcg in "UBCO study disproves the simulation hypothesis"

southwindcg — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:46:11 +0000

Yes, this is exactly my problem with claims about the 'real' universe if we are, in fact, in a simulation. It might be literally, programmatically, impossible for us to infer anything about it. The analogy I like to use is Pac-Man believing that the entire universe exists within the confines of a blue-walled maze.

New comment by southwindcg in "Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)"

southwindcg — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:39:00 +0000

I believe it was H.G. Wells, in his A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).

New comment by southwindcg in "Creator's sue Facebook over broken moderation algorithms"

southwindcg — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:05:28 +0000

Actual title: "How an Oregon court became the stage for a $115,000 showdown between Meta and Facebook creators"

New comment by southwindcg in "Steve Phelps lies about NASCAR for 6 continuous minutes"

southwindcg — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:41:56 +0000

Per the guidelines, please don't editorialize titles. Add a comment if you want to do that.

Actual title: "Phelps says NASCAR 'trying our hardest' to settle antitrust suit"

New comment by southwindcg in "Why do some people play their phones out loud on buses and trains?"

southwindcg — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:50:26 +0000

Maybe they're p-zombies.

New comment by southwindcg in "Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update"

southwindcg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:09:26 +0000

Only eight years for a dryer is definitely not pretty good in my mind. It's barely acceptable unless you have a huge family and are doing laundry daily. I had a low-end Capri (Sears house brand) that was 21 years old and still going strong when I moved away. It was serviced once, by me, to replace a fuse. If I'd paid twice as much and gotten only eight years out of one, I'd be furious.

New comment by southwindcg in "[dead]"

southwindcg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:47:24 +0000

Most of them are flagged/killed. You must have Show Dead turned on. While I agree that this user is basically spamming, the community seems to be removing most of the posts. Maybe shoot an email to Dang if you feel the domain should be flagged automatically.

New comment by southwindcg in "[dead]"

southwindcg — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:27:53 +0000

This is at least the third different account you've used to post this AI slop "prophetic" trilogy here. Please stop.

New comment by southwindcg in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

southwindcg — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:55:03 +0000

Oh, I meant me, personally, I don't have a use case for it. Without a doubt a lot of people are going to find this speed improvement valuable.

New comment by southwindcg in "An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)"

southwindcg — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:24:38 +0000

I don't [currently?] have a use case for this tool, but I love seeing existing tools made faster or more efficient.

New comment by southwindcg in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

southwindcg — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:36:18 +0000

True, everything depends on what one is trying to do at the time.

New comment by southwindcg in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

southwindcg — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:54:38 +0000

Regarding the `line` script, just a note that sed can print an arbitrary line from a file, no need to invoke a pipeline of cat, head, and tail:

    sed -n 2p file

prints the second line of file. The advantage sed has over this line script is it can also print more than one line, should you need to:

    sed -n 2,4p file

prints lines 2 through 4, inclusive.

New comment by southwindcg in "A Closer Look at Piezoelectric Crystal"

southwindcg — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:28:14 +0000

*Crystal

New comment by southwindcg in "Denosing Images of Cats and Dogs with Autoencoders"

southwindcg — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:41:46 +0000

I pointed out this spelling mistake when OP posted it yesterday, and they've done it again. Strange.

New comment by southwindcg in "AI-generated version of Without Me, Eminem recommended by Spotify"

southwindcg — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:34:47 +0000

It looks like everything this IAX Music channel has posted there is AI slop.