Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Tempest1981's commentslogin

"At this rate, CIE will want your number" - the taunts are great!

What's My JND? 0.0072 #WhatsMyJND


Surprised me too. In the end, I guess it's a time-saving tool for a tedious task. But reduces the old-school grittiness of the adventure. Still an enjoyable read.

Cool!

I found the old drive that worked with my Canon camera. It's a Hitachi 2GB Microdrive from 2003. It says CF+ Type-II. So larger, with a CompactFlash interface, boring in comparison.

More history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

I'm trying to remember the camera... Canon Powershot S1 IS maybe? It used a lot more battery running the microdrive.


Damn, now I want one just to de-lid one and put it on a shelf. Looks like eBay has plenty of these.

Tempting.

I wonder what material they used for the platter. I once took apart a 1.8" drive, and got a big surprise when the platter suddenly shattered. I was expecting aluminum, not glass/ceramic substrate.


Yes, glass was the typical substrate used in small HDDs, even in many of the 2.5" HDDs, e.g. in all the 2.5" HDDs that I had.

It is easier to ensure that glass substrates are perfectly plane and without any surface defects than for substrates made of aluminum alloy.

In 3.5" disks the risk of shattering becomes too great, so aluminum alloy is preferred.


I discovered that one day when I accidentally stepped on a removed 2.5" platter in bare feet :)

One of my most delightful discoveries of the early 2000s was that iPod Minis used Microdrives that were pin-compatible with CompactFlash cards. I had a little cottage industry in the back of my office upgrading my coworkers’ old iPods to use bigger, solid state disks. I still have my 256GB iPod Mini. Aside from battery life, it still runs fine, and it is by far my favorite music player form factor.

> ... "and it is by far my favorite music player form factor."

I really liked the old original iPod Nano myself. Had one for years that I was triple-booting RockBox (for extended media formats support and fancier interface), iPodLinux (for playing Doom and other toys), and the original iPod OS (just in case). Still haven't yet owned another device in that size / form factor that can do as much as that little thing did. Apple really did make some sweet devices back in the day... :)


Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?

Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself.

And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.

Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.

But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?


You don't think aerial lines have upkeep costs? ice, tree branches, hurricanes, etc

Savvy executives can also keep their income near 0 by borrowing against their stock holdings.

So what. They pay interest on that loan, and those interest payments eventually flow to the employees and investors of the lender. Who can be taxed.

Not Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax?

Or for location, the cellular providers?


There are plenty of bad actors

The interesting part is Google & Apple, as part of explaining to courts why their large app store fees are legit and not proof of monopoly positions, hid behind the security argument that they need to be the clearing house of what software runs on the devices. Except... they've knowingly punted on this one for 10+ years.

I would 100% agree that losing privacy through any utility-level carrier (credit cards, phone, OS provider, etc) should be default disallowed, and any opt-ins have a clear transparency mode with easy opt-out. At least two areas the US can learn from the EU on digital policy is digital marketplaces and consumer privacy protection, and this topic is at the intersection of both.


It is a nicely done interactive page, if you can get it to work.

it's a blogpost

there is no need for gpu to show text to read


IBM shares fell 13% in a single day in last month:

"IBM Sinks Most Since 2000 as Anthropic Touts Cobol Tool"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-sinks-most-since-2000-210...

It may not be "cheap", but possibly cheaper than IBM's consulting.


I skip news like that. It's an AI business hyping one of their tools in a major AI hype-cycle. Shares can go up and down based on sentiment. My point still stands.

To me, there's a big difference between saying that migration projects can now be assisted with some AI tooling and saying that it is cheap and to just get Claude to do it.

Maybe I am out of touch but the former is realistic and the latter is just magical hand-waving.


Share-pricing operates on illusions. Just selling a plausible claim can influence the price. Whether they will deliver at the end, doesn't matter at that moment.

Feel free to correct the market and make oodles of money.

Risk my money based on a bunch of wallstreetbets idiots yoloing their money using a random number generator and seeing the word AI on twitter posts, sure lol. I’ll let you play in that cesspool.

I am!

IBM share price is back to where it was pre-Anthropic press release.

Sure, but imagine how much higher it would have gone in the counterfactual world where Anthropic didn't have an automatic port-from-Cobol tool.

Remember that those who trade on the stock market are not programmers with decades of experience writing cobol.

Yep. Perplexity offers this comparison/recommendation:

Choose Perplexity Computer if you: want a managed, safer, minimal‑setup agent for research, content, presentations, and business workflows, and you’re fine paying a subscription for a polished cloud experience.

Choose OpenClaw if you: are technical, want local code execution and device automation, prefer full control over models/tools, and are willing to own the security and troubleshooting burden.


3 orders of magnitude, right? 1e9 vs 1e12

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: