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mrspuratic

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:31PM (#50340353)
VESA mounted with a generic VESA plate "doubler" solved the aesthetics for me. Out of sight and all. Though I now need to replace its fan with the new one sitting in a drawer.
Re:Europe's fires are just the start on Thursday July 30, 2026 @11:37AM (#49111511)
Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus forest fires while travelling through Alentejo.
Re:The Beam Engine on Friday July 24, 2026 @09:42AM (#49035473)
My uni had an original 1800s style beam engine (from a whiskey distillery) as a feature in the Engineering faculty building foyer. It did move, but driven by electricity, and only a couple of times a year AFAIR.

https://forum.irishwhiskeysociety.com/viewtopic.php-p=12194....

Re:10 REM"_(C2SLFF4 on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @01:29PM (#49010326)
My technophile uncle gave me one in the late 80s when he upgraded, even came with a monster of a daisy wheel printer. Can't remember what the WP was, but I remember being amused with V1.0 Microsoft Basic which came on a cartridge.
This feature has been part of bash since 5.1 (ca 2020), though it may not be enabled in all distros.

  cd src/bash-5.3/examples/loadables
  make accept
  enable -f ./accept accept
  (accept -r RHOST -v SOCKETFD -b 127.0.0.1 8000; 
    read -u $SOCKETFD SOCKETDATA; 
    printf "%s: %s\n" "$RHOST" "$SOCKETDATA";
    printf "goodbye, world\n" 1>&${SOCKETFD} ) &
  nc 127.0.0.1 8000 <<< "hello, world"
For real use you may need to add "exec {SOCKETFD}<&-" to close the FD.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369749 (2024)

Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
Land grab strategy 101.
Re:Shunning AI is the human choice on Thursday May 21, 2026 @12:25PM (#48225330)
Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.
This is how it works. Ireland was a net beneficiary until 2018, and now it is a net contributor (one of only 10 net contributors). These are decades long investments, Poland joined in 2004. Per capita Poland is not the "greatest" beneficiary but I don't think that will help win any arguments for those already resistant to facts or reasoning. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/12/09/eu-budget-who-p...
Re:Appearing productive in the workplace on Thursday May 07, 2026 @07:24AM (#48048072)
\usepackage{comicsans}
Re:Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:27AM (#47932957)
"updoc" is still my favourite joke name. A long time ago (predating E lang's updoc afaict) I wrote a toy markup for semi-technical docs, named so with the specific intention of dropping it casually into conversation. Still funny :D
Re:OpenAI Livestream: ChatGPT Images 2.0 on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @06:40AM (#47861613)
showdead=no in user settings hides flagged & moderator killed posts
Smoke yes, but you're also turning a carbon sink into a carbon source. At ~16% of the island's surface area, peatland stores an estimated 53% of soil based carbon. (source: Irish Peatland Conservation Council)
Re:In Memoriam Robert Tinney on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:11PM (#46926608)
Robert Frank Tinney, artist for over 100 Byte magazine covers 1975-1990, passed away peacefully on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038

Re:DNS Explained – How Domain Names Get Resolved on Friday February 06, 2026 @02:30PM (#46917077)
I grind my teeth every time I hear "I need an urgent DNS change" :/
Re:Norway EV Push Nears 100 Percent: What's Next? on Friday January 30, 2026 @09:50AM (#46825034)
Hydro can help a lot with that. Grid stability is a big issue with non-synchronous power sources (SNSP).
> I couldn't quickly find a way to decompress them

    pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf decompress
Although it's not mentioned in those, it's going away at the end of the month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710
I got a Foxydry (Italy) wall-mounted rack a few years back, best €100 I spent that year. Bottom rack folds up flush to the wall, top rack raises nearly to the ceiling. Towels dry fine spread over extra bar or three to allow for better air circulation.
Re:What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025 on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @12:42PM (#46604635)
No fridge? That's a heat pump.
This. I have that type (regenerative MHVR) installed in the attic for upstairs, and a synced pair of in-wall ceramic (recuperative) types on opposite sides of main living area downstairs (eliminating ducting, albeit with reduced efficiency). I haven't attempted any energy/ROI calculations but fresh filtered air, lower humidity and good nights sleep are well worth the claimed single-digit watt power usage to me.
Re:Aliasing on Monday December 22, 2025 @02:39PM (#46357984)
In old school FORTRAN (I only recall WATFOR/F77, my uni's computers were quite ancient) subroutine (aka "subprogram") parameters are call-by-reference. If you passed a literal constant it would be treated as a variable in order to be aliased/passed by reference. Due to "constant pooling", modifications to a variable that aliased a constant could then propagate throughout the rest of the program where that constant[sic] was used.

"Passing constants to a subprogram" https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-8.html

Re:CO2 Batteries That Store Grid Energy Take Off Globally on Monday December 22, 2025 @01:43PM (#46357247)
Ireland is lucky enough to have several suitable sites, but just one operational: Turlough Hill, which has been running for over 50 years and is in use daily. It's at least as useful in terms of grid stability and (relatively) rapid dispatch as capacity. Output ~0.7% of total daily (~120GWh), ~5% of daily peak (~6GW), wintertime figures. For comparison electricity usage has increased about 8-fold since it was deployed in 1974.
Re:FVWM-95 on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @02:31PM (#46293225)
xmkmf. I feel your pain.
Re:Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts on Monday December 08, 2025 @11:15AM (#46194077)
Total US Fed. Gov. contracts for 2024 was (according to gao.gov) $755B. That's a lot of drinking, never mind any anticipated AI spending boost next year.
Re:The unpowered SSDs in your drawer are slowly losing your data on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @12:57PM (#46060363)
Not problematic, minor pedantry. With much time spent reading (and occasionally writing) technical documentation it's octets, binary prefixes, and other wanton pedantry where likely to be understood/appreciated or precision is required.

FTR, ECMA-130 (the CD "yellow book" equivalent standard) is littered with the term "8-bit bytes", so it was certainly a thing then. Precision when simultaneously discussing eight-to-fourteen modulation, and the 17 encoding "bits" that hit the media for each octet as noted in a sibling comment.

Now, woktets on the other hand...

CD storage has an interesting take, the available sector size varies by use, i.e. audio or MPEG1 video (VideoCD) at 2352 data octets per sector (with two media level ECCs), actual data at 2048 octets per sector where the extra EDC/ECC can be exposed by reading "raw". I learned this the hard way with VideoPack's malformed VCD images, I wrote a tool to post-process the images to recreate the correct EDC/ECC per sector. Fun fact, ISO9660 stores file metadata simultaneously in big-endian and little form (AFAIR VP used to fluff that up too).
It seems like it, but it can't be only that. A float64 representation of an int in the range 2^58 to 2^59 should be rounded to multiples of 2^6, i.e. 348555896224571968 as you found (3.48555896224571968E17) (the final digit 9 in the math.log2() expression was lost, it's 2^58 not 2^54) The unexpected output (according to the bugreport) arises from javascript, it does NOT round like everything else for reasons I don't understand. It seems to prefer rounding to arbitrary multiples of 10 in my limited testing.
Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban on Monday November 10, 2025 @12:23PM (#45878232)
The whole Tapo/Kasa interop thing was badly handled too a few years back. Put me right off, when most were dangling the seamless integration carrot to distract you from the vendor lock-in.

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