Hacker News: toxik

New comment by toxik in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

toxik — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:44:28 +0000

Worth noting that even in clinical settings, ethanol has largely been replaced by fomepizole (Antizol) as the preferred antidote. It's more predictable, easier to dose, and doesn't come with the side effect of making a critically ill patient drunk. Ethanol is the field expedient, not the standard of care.

New comment by toxik in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

toxik — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:25:49 +0000

Great post. Also, we celebrate "midsummer" on the summer solstice in Sweden and other countries. I see the author noted that.

New comment by toxik in "What Category Theory Teaches Us About DataFrames"

toxik — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:49:22 +0000

Pandas and so on exist for the same reason Django's ORM and SqlAlchemy do: people do not want to string interpolate to talk to their database. SQL is great for DBA's, and absolutely sucks for programmers. Microsoft was really onto something with LINQ, in my opinion.

New comment by toxik in "What category theory teaches us about dataframes"

toxik — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:44:29 +0000

You can reduce in parallel. That was the whole point of MapReduce. For example, the sum abcdefgh can be found by first ab, cd, ef, gh; then those results (ab)(cd), (ef)(gh); then the final result by (abcd)(efgh). That's just three steps to compute seven sums.

New comment by toxik in "Cursor 3"

toxik — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:35:19 +0000

"I have never woodworked a day in my life, with Claude Carpenter I don't have to touch the work at all and can just vaguely ask for things and pray that it does something useful."

New comment by toxik in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

toxik — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:02:53 +0000

Pedantry: 18:16 is the same as 9:8 since it's a ratio.

New comment by toxik in "C++26: A User-Friednly assert() macro"

toxik — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:32:23 +0000

Not just for functional programmers. Prints and other I/O operations absolutely are side effects. That's not running counter to the point being made. Print in an assert and NDEBUG takes away that behavior.

New comment by toxik in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

toxik — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:21:37 +0000

I'm somewhat sure that was the recreated version.

New comment by toxik in "Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]"

toxik — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:30:23 +0000

And in a bold face font:

> You've always needed an account to operate your Joule Sous Vide with the Joule app. This is not a new requirement.

Absolute comedy.

New comment by toxik in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

toxik — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:12:44 +0000

So in other words you can take any Droste image and make an Escher zooming spiral effect. Neat.

Also curious what happens if you take Escher's painting and undo the effect. Probably not great since it wasn't in the video.

What a cool video.

New comment by toxik in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

toxik — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:10:46 +0000

So to do this same Droste effect in 3D you would need a self-similar volume? Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.

Or could you walk around in such a world? That would be a very cool concept for a game.

New comment by toxik in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

toxik — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:48:32 +0000

Well, you get the frequency domain derivative. This is the same as scaling the time domain by a linear ramp. Not exactly hugely useful, unless you happen to be in radar.

You can take the finite difference with eg np.diff(waveform) though.

New comment by toxik in "HopTab – Open source macOS app switcher and tiler that replaces Cmd+Tab"

toxik — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:48:02 +0000

No, Cmd+Tab switches to the next application. This is what people get surprised and annoyed by. I've been using Mac for 15 years now and I find it super awkward to switch between windows within an app. On my machine it's Cmd ` or something strange like that. This is also doubly bound sometimes, such that I can only cycle forwards OR backwards. Complete mess.

New comment by toxik in "E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May"

toxik — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:57:11 +0000

Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.

New comment by toxik in "How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents"

toxik — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:29:45 +0000

Very interesting idea! I think I'll try this. Makes a lot of sense and has almost zero cost.

New comment by toxik in "Warn about PyPy being unmaintained"

toxik — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:09:14 +0000

PyPy on numpy heavy code is often a lot slower than CPython

New comment by toxik in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

toxik — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:47:08 +0000

If all glaciers and ice sheets on Earth melted, sea levels would rise roughly 65–70 meters (about 210–230 feet). It’s worth noting that a full melt of Antarctica alone would take many thousands of years even under extreme warming scenarios, so this is more of a thought experiment than a near-term risk. Current projections for this century focus on partial contributions, with estimates ranging from roughly 0.3 to over 1 meter of rise by 2100 depending on emissions pathways.

New comment by toxik in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

toxik — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:34:47 +0000

I don't think this is terrorism, that's not what the word means. It's a clear and open act of war, so in many ways much worse, but somehow terrorism is a scarier word.

New comment by toxik in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

toxik — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:22:44 +0000

Similarly, just showing up at the gym/hobby/sport is huge. Even if you do next to nothing.

New comment by toxik in "Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

toxik — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 06:49:41 +0000

Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.