Hacker News Reader

Pinckneyon U.S. Identifies First Coronavirus Case Without Outbreak Ties

Indoor range exist, but they're often expensive and poorly ventilated. People certainly use them, and some indoor ranges even host USPSA or IDPA matches. You'll want access to an outside range for most forms of recreational rifle shooting.

Pinckneyon Google interviewing process for software developer role in 2020

That really sucks. They're supposed to just take a photo of the board and transcribe it later. I never touched a computer when I interviewed.

When was this? I think the chromebooks are fairly new in interviews, and it sounds like the interviewer didn't read the memo about how it works.

Pinckneyon What were the creepiest declassified documents of the last decade?

Maybe this is off topic, but am I the only one uncomfortable with the Post seeking names of interviewees?

> The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

> ...

> The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

One of the key problems identified by this report is that military and government officials didn't want to hear bad news. People on the ground felt like they had to paint an overly rosy picture. The SIGAR report seems like an attempt to address that by enabling them to speak anonymously, but the Post doesn't seem concerned that publicizing identities may hamstring such internal government investigations in the future.

Pinckneyon How to undo almost anything with Git (2015)

> By default, Mercurial doesn't do any of these operations; you have to activate extensions.

graft is actually built-in, but that's beside the point. Coming from a rebase heavy workflow in git, things like updating a ref or abandoning a commit feel like fundamental operations, and when moving to Mercurial it wasn't obvious which of the built-ins or bundled extensions I needed to be reading about to do these things.

I did eventually find Evolve, as you suggest, but it's not one of the bundled extensions, and it's not something you'll find in the official tutorial, or "The Definitive Guide", or even in most of the SO answers explaining how to do git-like things.

> By design, Mercurial makes it much harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

This is true, but git makes it so easy to recover from those mistakes.

Pinckneyon How to undo almost anything with Git (2015)

That's what everyone says, but for me, coming from a rebase heavy git workflow, I've found Mercurial far more difficult to learn.

For example, with Mercurial, there's at least four different ways to do a rebase-ish thing: transplant, graft, rebase, and rebase (w/ evolve enabled). It's not obvious which a newbie should pick (rebase+evolve... I think?). Likewise, Mercurial has purge and strip which both delete commits in different ways. Git has multiple ways to do the same thing, but at least it's simple and consistent when you lift the hood.

Undoing any sort of rebase-ish operation in Mercurial also seems difficult and janky. It seems to take multiple steps, and involves unbundling some sort of patch file stored underneath your home directory. Whereas in git, you just update a pointer: `git reset --hard $BRANCH@{1}`. Git's reflog is such a fantastic safety net. Doing any sort of history rewriting in Mercurial feels very dangerous, in comparison.

Pinckneyon The Accidental Book Review That Made Jack Kerouac Famous

Disabling javascript entirely on the page works for me.

Pinckneyon United States to fund gun-violence research after 20-year freeze

Is pornography uncopyrightable because it's not a "science or useful art"? (I.8.8)

Pinckneyon United States to fund gun-violence research after 20-year freeze

You quote the militia act, but congress doesn't get to define the words of the constitution through ordinary legislation. If it worked that way then they could just as easily pass a law defining "arms" as only muskets, "speech" as only spoken words, and "unreasonable search" as only a search conducted without reasonable suspicion.

Pinckneyon California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not bury them?

Actually, most existing underground transmission cables run through pressurized pipes full of oil. Look up HPFF; it's pretty wild.

Newer cables tend to be solid, though.

Pinckneyon California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not bury them?

> A report prepared by the Edison Electric Institute, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind, An Updated Study on the Undergrounding of Overhead Power Lines,” found that while most new commercial and residential developments across the United States tuck electrical facilities underground, burying existing above-ground electric distribution systems can cost up to $5 million a mile in urban areas.

They've linked to 2009 version of this report, although the numbers they use are from the 2012 version. If that confused anyone else, the 2012 version can be found here:

https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...

Pinckneyon PG&E Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade

Do you think taxpayers ought to be on the hook when a state-run electric company burns down a town, or should California invoke sovereign immunity when that happens?

Pinckneyon Loot Box Lottery

Would you not consider this to be gambling, then? Is it just "buying goods"?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/MTG-Repack-BLACK-LOTUS-Vintage-Old-...

Pinckneyon Murder by Rifle vs. Death by Meteor

https://www.xkcd.com/406/

Pinckneyon ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

This PDF from Wisconsin puts the cost at $280k-390k/mi depending on the voltage of the line. They put the cost of underground transmission lines at $1.5M-2M/mi for the same voltages.

https://psc.wi.gov/Documents/Brochures/Under%20Ground%20Tran...

Pinckneyon ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

As far as I can find, SDGE is only burying their distribution lines. Their 1900 miles of transmission lines (which often cut through flammable wilderness areas) will remain above ground.

Pinckneyon ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

The numbers you've quoted, from page 7, are per MW mile, not per mile.

Pinckneyon California power outage triggers chaos in science labs

I'm curious, do you think taxpayers ought to be on the hook when a state-run electric company burns down a town, or should California invoke sovereign immunity when that happens?

Pinckneyon PG&E Outage Darkens Northern California Amid Wildfire Threat

SVP has 55 miles of transmission lines. PG&E has 18,466.

Pinckneyon Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

I don't think we know it was unanimous. The orders list doesn't say anything to that effect, and the justices rarely publicly dissent from denials of cert, so their silence doesn't mean anything.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/100719zor_m6...

Pinckneyon Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

Indeed, what honest business can hope to survive in the face of such reckless malevolence? Truly, it is the end of e-commerce as we know it!

Pinckneyon Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

My understanding, from a quick 5 minute skim, is that it may be. It's being sent back to the district court for reconsideration.

Basically what seems to have happened is this:

1. Robles sued Dominoes alleging their website violated the ADA.

2. The district court dismissed the suit, saying the DOJ needs to provide guidance on the standards that websites must meet, if the court is to hold them to the ADA. They don't examine the question of the phone.

3. The appeals court steps in and says that no, the district court was wrong to dismiss it for that reasons, and sends it back to the district court.

4. Dominoes appeals to SCOTUS, saying "help, the appeals court got it wrong, please step in!" SCOTUS declines to get involved, so the case will go back to the district court, which may still find that the phone access provided is an adequate accommodation.

Pinckneyon Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

Here's the ruling from the 9th circuit:

http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/01/15/17...

A denial of cert doesn't mean the supreme court necessarily has an opinion on the merits of the case. Courts in other circuits can still rule otherwise, and SCOTUS might eventually decide to hear such a case at a later time.

Pinckneyon The Most Misused SSN of All Time

The SSN was never intended to be a secret. Nobody in 1938 thought that one day banks and other businesses would use it as a credential to establish identity.

Pinckneyon Colt is ending production of AR-15s

Suppressors are federally regulated by the NFA, but can be bought with a $200 tax stamp and some paperwork. Only a minority of states ban them.

Pinckneyon Health Insurance That Doesn’t Cover the Bills Has Flooded the Market

If Democrats in California can't muster the votes to outlaw something as uniformly hated as balance billing while they have the Governor's office and a supermajority in both houses, I'm afraid I don't have much faith in their ability to fix any of this at the federal level.

Pinckneyon Sauropod Neck Posture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Meteor_F8_%22Prone_Pil...

Pinckneyon Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

It sounds like he wants to require tech companies to ban speech that the US is constitutionally forbidden from banning itself.

Pinckneyon Jeffrey Epstein’s Donations Create a Schism at M.I.T.’s Media Lab

"asshole"

Personally, I hate this Bowdlerization from the Times. It changes the meaning of the tweet, and it's not even the worst case where I've seen their desire for propriety interfere with their core mission of informing their readers about the world.

If their readers are uncomfortable with words like asshole, maybe a source like Time for Kids would be more appropriate for them.

Pinckneyon America has no use for hides, so leather prices plunge

https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st...

So beef consumption is up slightly since 2015, but is still far below its peak in 1976

Pinckneyon Federal fraud indictment: KU professor secretly worked for Chinese university

90% of federal cases end in a guilty plea, and only 17% of federal cases that do go to trial end in an acquittal.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...

Most likely he looks at the 20 years he's facing if convicted of wire fraud and decides to take a plea deal involving a couple years in prison.