Hacker News: zoky

New comment by zoky in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

zoky — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:47:36 +0000

something something XKCD competing standards something something

New comment by zoky in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

zoky — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:24:56 +0000

Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.

New comment by zoky in "Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh"

zoky — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:01:11 +0000

This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.

If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.

But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).

New comment by zoky in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

zoky — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:35:56 +0000

Passersby

New comment by zoky in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

zoky — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:34:12 +0000

And likewise the Romanian “dumneavoastră” evolved into… nothing, that’s still the polite form of “you” in Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second person plural).

New comment by zoky in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"

zoky — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:41:36 +0000

The 2019 Intel Mac Pro had PCIe slots. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro still has them as well, but they’re pretty much useless.

New comment by zoky in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

zoky — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:54:37 +0000

Except that requiring you to testify in order to absolve yourself of guilt violates your Fifth Amendment right not to testify in a trial against you. It is up to the government to prove you did something, not up to you to prove you didn’t.

New comment by zoky in "Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency"

zoky — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 07:23:20 +0000

Man, fuck Facebook Marketplace. I cannot figure out for the life of me why everyone decided to abandon the perfectly useable Craigslist for that unreliable, buggy, scam-laden pile of hot garbage. Never once have I had a single good experience with Facebook Marketplace.

New comment by zoky in "Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus"

zoky — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:57:16 +0000

Well, okay, but that’s like 95% of flying.

New comment by zoky in "An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller"

zoky — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:57:10 +0000

It is a work in progress and is far from providing all the features you might expect from a later model 3174, but it does provide basic TN3270 and VT100 emulation.

+ TN3270

+ Extended Data Stream

+ Basic TN3270E

+ Device name (LU) negotiation

o SSL/TLS

I think that last one is a joke but I really don’t know enough about this sort of thing to be sure…

New comment by zoky in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

zoky — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:35:12 +0000

Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.

New comment by zoky in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

zoky — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:31:22 +0000

I mean, technically it’s short for alter on the way to being short for alternate

New comment by zoky in "Email experiments: filtering out external images"

zoky — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:59:41 +0000

I see them all the time. Usually it’s in the form of “choose your 2FA method” and it gives you a choice between SMS/email/phone call or whatever.

New comment by zoky in "Television is 100 years old today"

zoky — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:41:51 +0000

For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.

New comment by zoky in "Captive Wi-Fi"

zoky — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:22:51 +0000

How do they block them? The only way I can think of would be signal jamming, which is super illegal and would have the FCC on them like brown on coffee beans…

New comment by zoky in "Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)"

zoky — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:51:26 +0000

Actually, the Canadian government suppresses it because they just really don’t want anyone to know how to get to 64K RAM, ON.

New comment by zoky in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

zoky — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:31:36 +0000

I mean, you gotta read it. I’m not normally a huge fan of the classics; I find Steinbeck dry and tedious, and Hemingway to be self-indulgent and repetitious. Even Twain’s other work isn’t exactly to my taste. But I’ve read Huckleberry Finn three times—in elementary school just for fun, in high school because it was assigned, and I recently listened to it on audiobook—and enjoyed the hell out of each time. Banning it simply because it uses a word that the entire book simply couldn’t exist without is a crime, and does a huge disservice to the very students they are supposedly trying to protect.

New comment by zoky in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

zoky — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 03:50:14 +0000

Banning Huckleberry Finn from a school district should be grounds for immediate dismissal.

New comment by zoky in "Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards"

zoky — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 08:05:50 +0000

Contact a known and trusted security researcher who can verify to the world that you did what you said you did, so everyone else can have as much time as possible to figure out exactly how fucked they are. Doing nothing isn’t an option; once someone figures something like that out, it signifies that conditions were ripe for the discovery to be made, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered again independently.

New comment by zoky in "Simple Hotkey Daemon for macOS, Ported to Zig"

zoky — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 05:58:03 +0000

> The one thing I really can't stand about macOS is "Secure Input". It won't let you use something like TE or KM to input a password.

It actually will. The problem is that when secure input is enabled, you can’t trigger a macro from the keyboard, because the daemon isn’t allowed to intercept keystrokes. But if you can trigger the macro some other way, like through a mouse button or a MIDI message, keystrokes can be sent just fine, even into a password field.