Hacker News: voidpointer

New comment by voidpointer in "My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL"

voidpointer — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:40:48 +0000

Why is this relevant for understanding how the IP works or even tweaking it? Whatever is relevant for that matter will most certainly not be a modification to the Linux kernel that the android system is running. It will not fall under the GPL that the kernel is licensed under. Can someone explain why this dispute is worth having beyond a theoretical legal debate on whether they should hand out the particular source tree from which their kernel was built (if they even built it)?

New comment by voidpointer in "Sync Engines Are the Future"

voidpointer — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:13:47 +0000

Probably a silly question, but if you take this all the way and treat everything as a DB that is synchronized in the background, how do you manage access control where not every user/client is supposed to have access to every object represented in the DB? Where does that logic go? If you do it on the document level like figma or canvas, every document is a DB and you sync the changes that happen to the document but first you need access to the document/DB. But doesn't this whole idea break apart if you need to do access control on individual parts of what you treat as the DB because you would need to have that logic on the client which could never be secure...

New comment by voidpointer in "A day in the life of a prolific voice phishing crew"

voidpointer — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:04:15 +0000

The relative ease with which called-IDs can be spoofed seems to be one of the major "tools" with which scammers can gain the trust of their victims (or trick other systems into believing that they are the victim). Most of the non-technical folks I know will also more or less blindly trust a caller-ID. Fortunately, many scammers (at least here in Europe) are still calling you claiming they are interpol following up on your Paypal account being breached whilst a +233... number shows on your phone.

New comment by voidpointer in "Serverless Horrors"

voidpointer — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:10:14 +0000

Absolutely but that tradeoff should be for the customer to make.

New comment by voidpointer in "Show HN: AI dub tool I made to watch foreign language videos with my 7-year-old"

voidpointer — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:15:27 +0000

Reading speed at that age will vary greatly. Reading subtitles while also having to follow the picture takes away focus and that makes it hard much harder for an inexperienced reader. My daughter, who picked up reading very naturally would have been able to follow sub-titles at age 7 without much trouble. My younger, 7-yo son on the other hand, who is more average in reading ability wouldn't be able to keep up with subtitles yet. Average reading speeds at age 7 seem to be 60-100 words per minute where subtitles are more at the 100-150 words per minute range. So for above-average readers, it will be possible but for the average, they won't be able to keep up consistently.

New comment by voidpointer in "Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years"

voidpointer — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 12:59:53 +0000

I did experience the issue with an FIIO headphone DAC too. Basically, when connecting the device, the balance slider in audio settings would get initialized to what seemed to be a random value. I am using several other audio interfaces (both USB and Thunderbolt) as well for music production/recording and I have never seen that issue with any of those devices. I suppose it is an interoperability problem between the USB audio class driver and core audio that only manifests for certain types of devices. Still, if it is common enough for people publishing apps to fix it, Apple should get it sorted out.

New comment by voidpointer in "John Locke's recipe for Pancakes (2021)"

voidpointer — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 07:17:03 +0000

Texture-wise it should be very different due to how the gluten will develop. Taste-wise you are probably right. It’s mostly a substrate for the butter and syrup.

New comment by voidpointer in "John Locke's recipe for Pancakes (2021)"

voidpointer — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:34:09 +0000

In order to get close to how these might have tasted in Locke's time, one shouldn't be using modern white flour which is a 19th century development. Using (stone-milled) whole wheat might come closer to how things were in the 17th century. (Also better for your glucose levels)

New comment by voidpointer in "Own the problem, not the solution"

voidpointer — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 13:59:35 +0000

The cover-band analogy isn't so great; the issue where a specific solution becomes a proxy for solving some problems that no one bothered to fully understand is real though. Describing problems and doing thorough discovery is hard and silver bullets are attractive. The cargo-cult analogy is quite fitting for a lot of hyped-up topics.

When you go to a car dealer and tell them your problem is getting from A to B, guess what their solution is going to be...

New comment by voidpointer in "Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany"

voidpointer — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 16:28:54 +0000

What I'm not getting: If Project Gutenberg is US based, how can they be dragged in front of a German court at all? How could a German court enforce anything on a US based entity? So couldn'd PG's response just have been to ignore the case? What would have happened then?

New comment by voidpointer in "Heat energy leaps through empty space, thanks to quantum weirdness"

voidpointer — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 15:13:29 +0000

Thanks. drinks-another-coffee

New comment by voidpointer in "Heat energy leaps through empty space, thanks to quantum weirdness"

voidpointer — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 15:08:07 +0000

This is going to be a dumb question I fear... If, as the article says, photons can't travel through a vacuum how are we able t see the stars (let alone distant galaxies)? Is it just because space isn't enough of full vacuum, or what am I missing?

New comment by voidpointer in "Found hidden safe, should we crack?"

voidpointer — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 09:31:09 +0000

If it's just about having a usable safe, it's an easy decision. They just need to decide whether the cost for the locksmith is worth it for them to have a usable safe...

If it's about what might be in there... shouldn't it be fairly easy to drill a small hole (given the right type of drill) and use a miniature/endoscopic camera to take a look?

New comment by voidpointer in "TheForger's Win32 API Programming Tutorial"

voidpointer — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 15:07:22 +0000

You don't need many books on it. There's Petzold.

New comment by voidpointer in "A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers"

voidpointer — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 15:47:57 +0000

Somehow, the examples all sound more like a quality and/or testing issue. The workflow seems prone to people rebasing to a buggy state and at that point, in a non-trivial system, all bets are basically off. Basically I need to be able to have a "JTB" about a pull request having undergone enough review and testing before being merged on the master that it doesn't introduce such glaring regressions as cited in the examples. If that cannot be ensured, I'm setting myself up for one goose chase after the other...

New comment by voidpointer in "Amateur Astronomer Captures Rare First Light of a Supernova"

voidpointer — Sun, 27 May 2018 20:53:53 +0000

Feb. 2016?

New comment by voidpointer in "Buffett bashes Bitcoin as nonproductive, thriving on mystique"

voidpointer — Mon, 07 May 2018 15:34:41 +0000

> The interesting thing here is that the common response here is: "Hey that's a great theory, but in real life, I just paid off my mortgage with my proceeds from bitcoin."

Mortgages have been payed off with lottery wins. That doesn't make lottery tickets a good investment.

New comment by voidpointer in "Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant"

voidpointer — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 14:29:52 +0000

Unfortunately, it cannot power the dock. That was a bit of a letdown for me

New comment by voidpointer in "The tragedy of 100% code coverage (2016)"

voidpointer — Tue, 09 May 2017 11:50:11 +0000

passing 0 to f returns infinity (IEEE 754)

Not arguing the point here. It's just a terrible example.

New comment by voidpointer in "The tragedy of 100% code coverage (2016)"

voidpointer — Tue, 09 May 2017 11:30:14 +0000

Just out of curiosity... What is the point in testing all 2^24 possible color values?