trox's comments | WingNews

trox | 13 days ago | on: I put my whole life into a single database

It's true that a single private jet is causing tons of CO2 emissions. But in the end, all consumers control the market. You can jump one link further in the chain to regions with much lower emissions. Somalia/Congo emit over 200x less CO2 per capita in comparison to the US. Do you think that's fair for them if the "regular salaried people" don't care? If responsibility always gets dismissed by pointing to someone emitting more, nothing changes.

trox | 1 year ago | on: Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable

Maybe you find this interesting: https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

It's a database of light bulbs tested using a 1-meter barium sulfate integration sphere and calibrated lumen photospectrometer. Although no LED comes close to the Halogen in terms of CRI, it is very informative.

trox | 1 year ago | on: Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen

This looks very cool. I really hope the results are not overly cherry-picked like Adobe's first version of the text-to-vector generation that only worked particularly well for the showcased art styles.

trox | 1 year ago | on: Teenage hacker became a legend attacking companies, then his rivals attacked him

Because properly securing your systems is hard, especially if the attack surface is large. The attacker only needs to find a single weakness. Furthermore, you don't hear from all the teenagers trying to find vulnerabilities across the web, just when there's headlines.

trox | 1 year ago | on: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

Aside from color and translucency, an original artwork shows also the relief. It can tell much about the creation process of a painting and adds additional texture. Furthermore, some pigments were expensive and hard to work with prior to the 19th century such that artists used it very sparingly.

trox | 1 year ago | on: Google took three months to remove scam app that stole over $5M

Further down the article, the lawsuit is cited: "As a result of Google’s material misrepresentations and other deceptive conduct, Ms. Vaca has been significantly damaged, including, but not limited to, financial losses of more than $5 Million, severe emotional and psychological distress, and the loss of the real estate business she spent most of her adult life trying to build," her lawsuit states.

So according to the article she did inverst the 4.6m.

trox | 4 years ago | on: Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating arXiv.org

If you've ever wondered about the unusual arXiv.org website favicon: The original logo was a skull with bones as reference to the piratey nature of distributing preprints without the publisher's consent. The smiley face was added later in order to make it less offensive. Due to the conversion to a non-transparent format, the backgrond was filled with the green color.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-the-arXiv-org-f...

trox | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?

[1] https://blog.verisign.com/domain-names/verisign-q3-2020-doma...

trox | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?

A very valid comparison, they indeed share lots of characteristics. I also feel that adaption in real estate would have societal benefits.

The difference to real estate business lies in the fact that it is much more diverse and way harder to manage.

Domains are managed by one organization, ICANN (with respective tld management), which facilitates a policy change. We also see changes in digital space progress much faster.

There are approx. 600'000 new domain names registered over Verisign in Q3 2020 alone [1]. In the future, the significance of the problem will only grow.

trox | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?

I'm shocked by how many commenters here sympathasize with the domain squatting/parking business. Sure it may be a fun side-project or profitable long-term investment. But trying to make money from people who actually create value is not really the future of the web I want to see.

trox | 5 years ago | on: PBRT in Rust

I always assumed that PBRT is an acronym for "Physically Based Rendering Textbook".

trox | 5 years ago | on: Stable 1.2 Gigabit/s Internet achieved in moving train in Switzerland

As much as I love the swiss mobile network - saying that it works everywhere is wrong. In the mountains you still have smaller regions without service from all major providers. Especially when you are high up, you have to know that you cannot rely on 100% on your mobile connection. You can take a look at the Swissom mobile coverage map here (german):

https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.js...

trox | 5 years ago | on: Gradient Boosted Decision Trees

Very well written article! For further reading, I would also recommend diving into the conceptual overview of the gradient boosting framework LightGBM. It features some interesting optimization techniques for better overall performance.

https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/blob/master/docs/Featu...

trox | 5 years ago | on: Tell HN: FB tracked my sensitive buy outside FB, cant delete a suggestion in app

> Now I can't open FB in the public

The problem here is that the ads would still show on other devices that have no ad block.

trox | 5 years ago | on: [email protected]

Very interesting to read about the history and etymology of the term "Foobar"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

trox | 5 years ago | on: Windows XP source code has leaked

statcounter reports it to be 3.11% in the period Aug 2019 - Aug 2020

https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...

trox | 5 years ago | on: This Website Will Self Destruct

Concerning the second question: I assume it is displaying the placeholder value before replacing it with the actual value.

trox | 5 years ago | on: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

Agreed, especially what I often see from search engines related to health and fitness. Many blogs with short, descriptive domain names, that are completely over-optimizing in SEO, changing publish dates of articles and offering bad UX in general (invasive ads, popups, trackers, ...)

trox | 6 years ago | on: From Australia to Chile, a visualization of the distribution of wildfire smoke

From the article:

> As they have raged for months in Australia, the fires have pumped 400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

That's crazy. For comparison, 400 megatonnes is roughly half of what Germany emits in a whole year.[1]

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-co2-emissions-...

trox | 6 years ago | on: Climate Change Is Killing Alpine Skiing as We Know It

Well, in this case, your decisions define "healthier". In fact, it's up to you whether you study the daily snow bulletin and decide to ski in moderate avalanche danger. It's up to you whether you ski down the steepest descents.

However when skiing in a resort, others can bump into you by accident. Your muscles cool down while sitting on the chair lift, and get tired at the end of the day without really noticing it, which leads to a number of accidents. I've torn my ACL in a resort couple of years ago, and ski touring feels much safer - at least for me.