Hacker News: zyxin

New comment by zyxin in "Humpback whales are forming super-groups"

zyxin — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:46:12 +0000

There is a group that is attempting to communicate with whales by training a transformer based model on whale sounds.

https://www.projectceti.org/

New comment by zyxin in "The fuck off contact page"

zyxin — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:24:41 +0000

Ha! I had to do something similar, I think for Texas Instruments? I signed up for an account and for some reason could not login. Apparently on the client side they were limiting how many characters could be in the password. I also had to force a submit of the login form with my longer password to login and then change my password to something shorter.

New comment by zyxin in "You already have a Git server"

zyxin — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:48:38 +0000

I sent over a cgit web page for a take home assessment and the interviewer was horribly confused. I assume they have never seen anything apart from github before...

New comment by zyxin in "Two new PebbleOS watches"

zyxin — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 01:00:06 +0000

I will be visiting China later this year, any chance I can get one while I'm there via something like TaoBao to save on tax and shipping?

New comment by zyxin in "How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain"

zyxin — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:28 +0000

Might just be normal mode? I know that some gaming monitors strobe the backlight in order to reduce motion blur, maybe reader mode just turns that off.

New comment by zyxin in "Reactive Relational Algebra"

zyxin — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 05:32:31 +0000

Same thing happened to me! Did you manage to fix it?

New comment by zyxin in "Lessons from a fountain pen addict"

zyxin — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:08:22 +0000

English is written left to write. If you use your left hand to write, your hand will glide over ink that's still wet.

New comment by zyxin in "The step-by-step mechanical logic of old pinball machines [video]"

zyxin — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 22:14:24 +0000

Those schematics look surprisingly similar to ladder logic. I always thought that ladder logic for programming PLCs makes absolutely no sense compared to a proper programming language, but now I see that it does make quite a lot of sense if you're trying to get electrical engineers who used to design actual physical logic circuits into programming PLCs.

New comment by zyxin in "Gemini AI"

zyxin — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 22:26:00 +0000

I would've liked to see an explanation that includes the weight of water being displaced. That would also explain how a steel ship with an open top is also able to float.

New comment by zyxin in "Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation"

zyxin — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 23:21:35 +0000

Is this an issue with the price of sugar? From the video, it seems like they have already fermented the beans, turning it into some basic dark chocolate after that shouldn't be too hard especially if you're not after a smooth texture.

New comment by zyxin in "The origins of the steam engine"

zyxin — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 23:53:59 +0000

Interestingly, the steam engines of the Titanic made use of the vacuum generated by condensing steam to extract additional energy from steam that's below atmospheric pressure.

https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm

New comment by zyxin in "Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall"

zyxin — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 01:17:54 +0000

Do operators currently need to manually control every movement of the arm? I always assumed that such heavy equipment uses inverse kinematics to help the operator.

New comment by zyxin in "Minosoft: Open-source Minecraft client, written from scratch"

zyxin — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 01:02:13 +0000

The wiki.vg website has a list of quite a few server implementations, even some written in Rust! That site also has extensive documentation of the Minecraft protocol if you want to try writing a server or client yourself.

https://wiki.vg/Server_List

https://wiki.vg/Protocol

New comment by zyxin in "Sweden plans new nuclear reactors by 2035, will share costs"

zyxin — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:23:10 +0000

That battery is for load shifting from peak times to off-peak times and also to provide bridging power while other generators start up. If you want reliable purely green power, you need a lot more battery. For longer term storage, pumped hydro seems to be the only option for now.

New comment by zyxin in "Low current around roots boosts plant growth"

zyxin — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 07:05:56 +0000

That image makes me appreciate just how slowly most plants grow and move. Imagining that bundle of dandelions writhing around triggers the same sort of visceral reaction as seeing maggots for me.

New comment by zyxin in "Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation"

zyxin — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 03:30:57 +0000

This very same site also supports Chinese, along with plenty of other languages! It's linked in the footer.

https://youglish.com/chinese

New comment by zyxin in "Decomposing language models into understandable components"

zyxin — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 03:17:03 +0000

This makes me wonder what would happen if neural networks contain manually programmed components. It seems like trivial components such as detecting DNA sequences could be programmed in by manually setting the weights. The same thing could be done for example to give neural networks a maths component. Would the network when training discover and make use of these predefined components, or would it ignore them and make up its own ways of detecting DNA sequences?

New comment by zyxin in "Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor"

zyxin — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 01:54:09 +0000

If you're referring to the outdated certificates, I installed Let's Encrypt's ISRG Root X1 Certificate onto my old iPad 4 and that seems to have taken care of it. Local sites served over HTTP never had any issues.

New comment by zyxin in "Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor"

zyxin — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 22:19:27 +0000

From the Readme, their eventual plan for the project is to be able to serve the client through the web browser which would mean that almost all tablets would be supported.

New comment by zyxin in "Draggable objects"

zyxin — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:03:02 +0000

The way Windows handles it seems to be that hardware rendering of the pointer is turned off when you drag around windows. It was very obvious when I was using f.lux, the bright white pointer would turn yellow like the rest of the screen when dragging.

Maybe you could try turning the actual cursor invisible when dragging and instead render a custom drag cursor parented to the object being dragged.