<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: wnissen</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wnissen</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:22:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=wnissen" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Show HN: OnKey – I'm a bad singer, so I built an app to show where I'm off-key"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What a fun idea! I love that the song doesn't have to be programmed in by the developer. Will give it a try.<p>Have you played the Rock Band and similar "rhythm games" that were all the rage in the Wii era? I don't know that it helped my singing per se but gave some incentive to practice.<p>In case anyone is interested, you can test your relative pitch perception (as opposed to producing the pitch) in this excellent Yale site: <a href="https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td" rel="nofollow">https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td</a> I got 15th [sic] percentile!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:32:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202551</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "New Apple TV 4K"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, LC OLED to Sonos Arc. Works a treat. At one point the remote started malfunctioning and I had to cover the IR transmitter with tape, but otherwise extremely reliable. Remote on iPhone works fine to control volume. The only thing is that if you add other Sonos speakers (say, in the kitchen as well as TV room) the mute only mutes the TV.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:05:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50075985</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50075985</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50075985</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function even without exercise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You may be right about the article but 64 is the correct number:<p><pre><code>    64 completed week 12 and were included in the repeated-measures analysis.</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:00:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665318</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665318</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Drivers Are Taking Extreme Measures to Avoid New Car Technology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This may not be the type of hot take that generates clicks, but I agree with you think we'll eventually settle on a collection that actually work. The 2017 Subaru I drive from time to time initiates emergency braking about half the time I back out of the driveway; not due to to cross traffic, but the driveway is pretty slanted and it thinks I'm in imminent danger of colliding with... the road. But the concept of emergency braking is a good one, overall.<p>Lane assist, as you mention, is one of those that I'm sure works perfectly on the manufacturer's track in testing. No construction, no exits, no problem! The first Hyundai I drove with lane keeping would "keep" me in my lane... right off the next exit on the freeway. I still think in places like Puerto Rico, with twisty, inconsistently maintained roads, that lane keeping is a hazard (there's a reason everyone drives straight down the middle until reaching an oncoming car). But the vehicles I've driven lately do a pretty good job even though they complain more than I'd like when entering or exiting a merge.<p>Just like physical buttons are making a comeback (not everywhere, have you seen the new all-screen Mercedes EV?) the safety features will settle down into a happy medium eventually.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:38:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49116167</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49116167</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49116167</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "When your vehicle outlives its cloud: What happens next?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yet another reason to avoid any automaker that doesn't support CarPlay/Android Auto. Bad enough not to be able to use one's choice of software on a vehicle you supposedly own. But Apple/Google has a strong incentive to make your new phone compatible with your current vehicle, and GM has a strong incentive in the other direction. You know they're not going to be working particularly hard on a ten-year-old software stack (or, apparently, a 3-year-old one in the case of Acura).<p>My hope is that long term the regulations that require manufacturers to stockpile repair parts will extend to software. If you want to sell a software-defined vehicle, then the software is part of the repair parts!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:23:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997722</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997722</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We laugh, and rightly so, at the time sharing systems of the 70s and 80s that didn't use passwords. I bet allowing a whole other virtual person to run outside a VM, with access to an actual file system instead of a version-controlled branch, will be seen as a worst practice in ten years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:33:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895116</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895116</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895116</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You might be surprised at how little we know about fusion. We can observe the sun, but the sun is already very hot, millions of degrees, so any unknown fusion reactions would have already happened. Nowadays we have high-powered lasers that can create laboratory-scale fusion reactions.<p>E. O. Lawrence's 1930 cyclotron could generate protons at roughly a million degrees Celsius. But that's a single proton stream. Good for splitting atoms but not for fusing them. You really don't know what the cross section of a fusion reaction is until you do it. The properties of matter at that temperature are just super weird. If it had turned out that there was, e.g., a carbon-carbon fusion reaction with a lower initiation, that might be enough to "go critical" and kick off more fusions, and propagate around the world. According to estimates, the Chicxulub crater was 1-10,000 degrees C. Not even the same ballpark.<p><a href="https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/11/4.html" rel="nofollow">https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/11/4.html</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 21:48:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48229246</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48229246</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48229246</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not just amazing, it's inconceivable! I can go on a hike on almost any trail in the SF Bay Area and pick up a half dozen in a couple hours.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 17:00:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051811</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051811</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051811</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is it really not UL approved? Hard to call it a premium product in that case.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:02:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879934</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health system and having no control over their own days. You can see how an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic, degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3 kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they come up and monitor for significant drops in function.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:04:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814891</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814891</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814891</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Doubting U.S. resolve, Europe looks to bolster its own nuclear arsenal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perhaps we didn't realize how much stability the "two powers" model generated. It caused inevitable arms races as the two powers vied to stay competitive, but there were only two. And the USSR was able to de-escalate on its own. If you have three powers, each of them wants the ability to eliminate not one, but both of the others. Could lead to not just incremental, but polynomial expansion of forces. And de-escalation involves multiple parties coordinating, not just one great power.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:18:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737338</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Ioannis Yannas, who invented artificial skin for treatment of burns, has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you have a weird phoneme / meaning mapping brain like mine, I would note that he is not the doctor who is known for the "replication crisis". Even though Ioannis means John in Greek. Took me a second to tease that out.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:57:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904366</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904366</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904366</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "S&P affirms 'AA+' credit rating for US, cites impact of tariff revenue"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It does make you wonder what would cause a downgrade. The debates over the debt ceiling have certainly brought the U.S. closer to default than I would ever have thought. It's true that the U.S. can never run out of dollars, so in once sense it's not possible for a bondholder not to get paid back. But the political environment, the potential unreliability of previously iron-clad data, economic disruption from tariffs, and behavior from the Federal Reserve, these all seem to make an unlikely event much more likely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:08:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418161</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418161</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418161</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Amazon sends brick in lieu of 5080 – latest cautionary tale in commingling scams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh, I have a long list of vendors that I'll buy from over Amazon. I buy almost nothing from them. On the rare occasion that I simply can't find something locally or from a reputable vendor, or need it on very short time scale, well, OK. But we dropped Prime, where we were ordering 100+ times a year, and now I pay out of pocket for shipping on a half-dozen orders a year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:12:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45350778</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45350778</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45350778</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Amazon sends brick in lieu of 5080 – latest cautionary tale in commingling scams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, they wouldn't be able to pretend that they are selling from the official store for that inventory. Which I, personally, would be OK with. I've been on eBay for a couple decades, I don't mind ordering from Jack and Jill's Computer Parts as long as they have a reputation I can check. But the current situation where you can order from what looks like the the official storefront but the fulfillment is from a seething mass of "stickerless commingled inventory", with no way to even determine which merchant introduced the counterfeit product? This has been a problem for over 10 years. It's not just the obvious fraud, it's the subtler fakes. I won't buy anything from Amazon where the failure could kill or injure someone. A sun hat? Sure. A charger or food? Not a chance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:18:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340833</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340833</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340833</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not clear what LLMs are good at, and there's great interest in finding out. This is made harder by the frenetic pace of development (GPT 2 came out in 2019). Not surprising at all that there's research into how LLMs fail and why.<p>Even for someone who kinda understands how the models are trained, it's surprising to me that they struggle when the symbols change. One thing computers are traditionally very good at is symbolic logic. Graph bijection. Stuff like that. So it's worrisome when they fail at it. Even in this research model which is much, much smaller than current or even older models.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:57:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881731</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Nearly 3 out of 4 Oracle Java users say they've been audited in the past 3 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was the same thing for us with Qt Commercial licensing. We use only the LGPL version, dynamically link, don't modify the source, and give credit, so we're fully in compliance. To get support we chose to purchase commercial licenses for our small team of developers. Cue a regular series of calls about whether we were sure we were in compliance, etc. To add insult to injury they couldn't even navigate our purchasing process so it was a pain to pay them.<p>I'll take my chances in the open source world. It's a shame that the companies that created the software aren't getting paid, truly. But don't make it so obnoxious to reward you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:05:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44574092</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44574092</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44574092</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ooh, looks like they added that in late 2023. Man. In August 2023 I actually migrated all of my email to Proton and was ready to go when I realized they didn't support forwarding. Thanks for letting me know.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:18:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537786</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537786</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537786</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Inbox. They claim that the inbox is special in IMAP and it's hard to have a lot of messages there. 150K messages in the whole mailbox, I think. 25 years of email.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:13:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537747</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537747</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44537747</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I chose Migadu because they seem to be genuinely helpful and are very affordable. I probably would have gone Proton but they don't support forwarding.<p>The downside is that downloading messages is fairly slow when you have 10-20k messages in your inbox. And the webmail is fairly primitive.<p>I never tried Fastmail.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:32:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527239</link><dc:creator>wnissen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527239</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527239</guid></item></channel></rss>