Hacker News Reader

JohnL4on The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)

Possibly. It was basically the native language of Unisys A-series mainframes and I guess those are still around in some form or other.

JohnL4on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test

Ocean currents + cost-effectiveness, according to Ian Morris.

By his telling, Chinese bureaucrats buried the knowledge of large fleets because it was a more expensive way to project power than simply going over land.

JohnL4on Leaving LinkedIn

Huh, self-aware HN. Don't see that very often.

JohnL4on What HashiCorp’s license change means for our customers

7-day-old comment, but the company I work for (not a startup) flat-out bans creating a dependency on AGPL code.

JohnL4on The English Programming Language

The existence of Gnu COBOL:

JohnL4on Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened

4. I'm an old. I will almost certainly try scaling my display by 125% or 150%.

JohnL4on What I miss in Java, the perspective of a Kotlin developer

Threw me down this rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog

Looks like Flix is in a galaxy of languages implementing Datalog, a variant of (or somehow related to) Prolog. I guess Flix is Turing-complete while Datalog is not?

JohnL4on Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite

https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-var...

I used the swagger interface a few months ago to download my resting heart rate over a three-year period, and it was interesting.

JohnL4on A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)

Waddya mean, your kids? I learned that as a teenager myself in the 1930s, after an article in Scientific American.

JohnL4on Ask HN: How do I find my next job?

Maang? Mmang? Define, please?

JohnL4on Angular v14 is now available

Might want to guess again on "master bedroom".

https://www.homelight.com/blog/buyer-master-bedroom/

JohnL4on Why I left Google: work-life balance

Honestly, "left Google for 40-person startup for work-life balance reasons" brought me up short.

JohnL4on Ask HN: Who would you recommend following on Mastodon?

My technique so far has been to join interesting-looking instances and read the local stream. People who say smart things I follow. At some point I'll coalesce my follows into one account, I guess. I think continuing to do that, along with following boosted toot authors if they look smart/interesting, will eventually generate a good list of follows.

JohnL4on COBOL Programming Course

And VSAM?

JohnL4on Top navy admiral wants rust-free ships

$100 > $80.

Meta: (1) Oh, that's cool, using Wolfram to look up inflation data! I'll try to remember that.

(2) "Trying to gently... I'd suggest..." strikes me the same as "With the greatest respect..." Maybe just post the link next time.

JohnL4on Hetzner Cloud – Data loss incident

Why?

JohnL4on Write plain text files

I have long thought writing law is a LOT like writing code. When you actually look at modern laws, they're basically legal patch files.

JohnL4on I moved this blog from Medium, here

Disqus not good enough? Or Kismet (WordPress)?

JohnL4on Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

And finally: https://startcaving.com/info/caves-are-cold-find-out-how-col...

JohnL4on Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

"Looked the temp gradients up, after 50ft, temp of the earth is 50F, and raises one degree F every 60ft." (So, at 300 feet, 54 degrees; at 500, 57.5 degrees.)

(http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum/read.php?14,46717,4671...)

"...but other parts of the mine was very cold you made sure you had plenty to ware it depended where you worked"

(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Keith-Scott...)

"Underground mines maintain a constant temperature, around 55 degrees Fahrenheit."

(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Tom-Inghram)

«The temperature on average is in the 50s, but you still sweat an enormous amount when you start laboring.“ - Alan Bates, working in the coal mines of Letcher County, Kentucky.»

(https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-working-in-a-coal-mine/a...)

Yes, a 4000m gold mine is hot. I doubt that's where they're storing their compressed air.

JohnL4on Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage

I'm guessing not. Earth's heat is way lower down. Think of a cave: always cold. I think what's going on is they're taking the heat out and storing it more efficiently than just dumping it down the ground, where (1) it would leak away, representing energy loss, and (2) as it leaks away, the air would lose pressure. (It would leak away b/c it's harder to insulate an entire mine, basically.) So, they pull it out ahead of time and put it back in when they decompress the air (which I think would add pressure back in due to heating a gas and maybe reduce problems caused by super-chilling other plant hardware? Anyway, seems fitting to add back what you took out if you're shooting for a closed system.)

JohnL4on Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

Communicators. (Writers, marketers, teachers, ...)

JohnL4on Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

A corollary-ish observation of my own:

   * If coders could write useful documentation (starting w/inline comments) they probably wouldn't be coders.

JohnL4on Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party

Reminds me of the "No Labels" crew in the US. Sounded good for a while, but....

JohnL4on GitHub Having Issues

AZ DevOps just threw this up in my face:

https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/265268533

Related? Geography is US.

JohnL4on Org Mode 9.5

Been using it for years and years, and I started same as you, with some basic outlining. Now it's my primary work organizer/brainstorming/documenting tool (I generate html from it for other folks to read, although I'll occasionally drop plain text somewhere).

JohnL4on Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

Content-free comment, but WOW this is really slick!

JohnL4on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

.plan:

None of your business. Go away. You have mail.

JohnL4on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

I have a blog, which is

(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but (b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and (c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")

And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?

JohnL4on GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

But Google is the problem.