Hacker News Reader

api_or_ipaon Weird, Rare, and Everywhere

Very cool. Being born and raised in the province, when someone mentions the BC coast, I immediately conjure up a mental image of soaring mountains, glistening glaciers, heavily forested mountain-sides and deep fjords. I'll admit, I had no idea there was anything but the image I just described. Never knew there were significant bogs in the area. Sounds like I need to do more exploring of this beautiful coast line!

api_or_ipaon Steal This Idea: The Larger the Car, the More You Pay to Park

Wouldn't using length, or better still, area be a better proxy for land usage? What about area/seats? Weight might be a good proxy except electric vehicles tend to be comparatively heavier than their ICE counterparts.

api_or_ipaon Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (2021) [video]

I used to live on the 8th floor of a highrise with a medium sized arterial road below. Car engines are annoying, but far, far worse was when it rained, the sound of cars plowing through puddles. Being the rainy PNW, this sound was ever-present and very annoying. EVs might solve the car engine problem but I don't see them solving the puddle problem.

api_or_ipaon YouTube on TVs getting unskippable 30-second and pause screen ads

Embrace, extend, extinguish. A tale as old as any in computing (and more broadly, many other product areas)

api_or_ipaon Who wants to be tracked?

Someone should do a talk a la "Birth and Death of Javascript"[0] on the topic of cookies. What started nearly 30 years ago as a crude means of storing state over a stateless protocol spawned an entire industrial ecosystem around systematically tracking and spying on internet users. Take a step back and it's an insane journey.

0 https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

api_or_ipaon Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search

Note that you can turn off advertisements in DDG. Not sure how long that business model will continue to last, but I would _happily_ pay money to not see ads and blog spam on my serps. You need to trust your search engine before you can trust just about anything else you find on the internet, and I truly feel like Google is no longer a trustworthy company.

api_or_ipaon The Sourdough Framework

That's exactly what I was thinking. Super cool.

api_or_ipaon Wizards of the Coast Raids YouTuber’s House to Take Back Magic Cards

Huh, if Pinkerton thugs showed up at my door, I would have demanded a warrant + actual law enforcement to even start the conversation. It's not like they have any more privileges than regular people. On the other hand, if they showed up with regular employees and pleaded their case to me I would probably help them out.

Showing up with private heat is the best way ensure I'll think twice about being helpful.

api_or_ipaon The Sourdough Framework

Oh man ~180mb to build a _book_. It's 2023, why hasn't someone figured out a good way to check in photos and other binary objects into a git repo? I'd expect someone in the latex or ML community to have build a pre-commit hook to, I don't know, link & upload to S3 or something, right?

I think git (and vcs in general) could be revolutionary to the way experts in all fields including law, medicine, book editing & publishing, etc can collaborate and track changes on shared documents, but yeah, we really haven't figured out how to handle necessary accoutrements like images without blowing up the repo size.

Otherwise, definitely enjoyed seeing a project layout using directories for chapters. Might crib (with attribution!) the project layout next time I feel like writing something.

api_or_ipaon As the California sea lion population got bigger, so did male sea lions

Members of the Dolphin Club & South End Rowing Club swim and co-exist happily with the seals and sea lions in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Give them the space they deserve and they rarely are cause for much concern. Fairly frightening when you see one pop his head up close to where you're swimming, but it's not dangerous.

The biggest danger to swimmers has been, is, and will likely always be boats, especially ones with propellers.

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

Practically speaking, they're very similar. Mysql and Postgres differ in their approaches to replication & clustering, which can have a big impact to high availability, high volume database configurations.

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

Sigh. Hoping dang will swoop in and close this flame war...

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Usually I'd agree with you, but San Francisco is _really_ into its neighborhoods. Woe unto you if you say you're in Potrero Hill when you're in Dog Patch, or say you're in the Mission when you're on 12th street on the edge of SOMA. It's why I built the webapp, since as a new-comer I was finding myself on the receiving end of a lot of unwarranted ribbing over where exactly I was!

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

https://neighbs.us/

Really fucking dumb. Uses browser geolocation to tell me which neighborhood in San Francisco I'm currently standing in. Grabbed the lat/longs of each neighborhood from the SFData [0]. It works by plotting a circle representing your location + uncertainty and determining which of SF's 117 neighborhoods intersect with it. If your circle intersects with more than one neighborhood, it's smart enough to categorize them in order of certainty. It even automatically updates as you move, it's pretty fun to sit in an Uber and watch the neighborhood change as you move across the city. Learned a lot about polygon intersection algorithms, they're pretty amazing!

Built it a number of years ago when I moved here. Since it runs entirely in the browser, it's hosted for free on github pages and I don't need to maintain a server.

0 https://datasf.org/opendata/

api_or_ipaon 'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found

I listened to a podcast that posed the question "is it better to pressure industry to stop polluting, or focus on minimizing your own footprint" and the dialogue that sparked, as well as the conclusions, were very informing. In a nutshell, it's incontrovertible that as a single person, most of us can only hope to achieve climate change, there are, after all, 8 billion of us, so on average each of us can only achieve 1/8e9 * 100% change in pollution.

However, behaviour is learned by sharing. In that mind set, the best course of action is, in addition to one's own virtue, to encourage others to also recognize the situation and to change their own ways. In this way, one multiplies their own impact. People need to be the first movers of any social change, regardless of their own insignificant impact, because behaviour spreads and eventually industry will have no choice but to change.

Simply sitting at the sidelines complaining of industrial pollution is about as helpful as watching your own house burn.

api_or_ipaon Regional Sayings: Say These 9 Words and We'll Tell You Where You Grew Up

Shame that it's US-centric. New World English has a fascinating continuum of region dialects and syncretism. For example just over the border in Western Canada, a sticker you put on a car is pronounced 'deck-al' instead of 'dee-cal'. That one is a dead giveaway for someone from AB or BC.

api_or_ipaon San Jose police union executive director charged with smuggling fentanyl into US

Not sure that's a drug dog. More likely simply a dog trained to sniff explosives. I know this because I've been made to walk the dog walk while unknowingly carrying things I should not have been carrying. The dogs never suspected a thing.

api_or_ipaon What the US can do to prepare for a war with China

I despise the recent sentiment that a war with China is imminent and unavoidable. Have we truly tried everything short of banning TikTok and preparing for an invasion of Taiwan?

api_or_ipaon VR Airplane Deicer Simulator

Deicing fluid is expensive, $24/gallon or more, and an airliner might a few hundred gallons or more to deice. Also, when deicing is needed, it's fair to say _lots of airplanes_ are in contention for a limited amount of deicing equipment leading to costly delays which can compound and cause system-wide consequences. Suffice to say, any improvements to deicing aircraft quicker and more efficiently certainly has strong economic incentive.

If buying this software + some oculuses results in even a couple of minutes faster deicing or a few gallons of fluid saved on each airplane this would be an easy sell to airport FBOs.

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: Dealing with ADHD Without Medication?

Went through hell getting my prescription filled last month. Decided to switch to an online pharmacy and so far I'm very impressed. Far less out-of-stock bs and prompt delivery. I use alto.com but there are lots of competitors in this space. Best of luck, I definitely feel for you.

api_or_ipaon Pilot of crashed Nepal plane reported no power in engines -preliminary report

I'd recommend taking a discovery flight at your local flight school. They're fairly affordable (they're a loss-leader to get boots through the door), and they're a lot of fun. Most of all though, they familiarize you with the sensation of flight and the myriad safety features of modern aviation. May not be able to book a discovery flight before your short commercial flight, but it's something to think about for the long term.

api_or_ipaon NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles above the surface

Apollo 17 launched at 12:33am on Dec 7th 1972, and entered lunar orbit at 2:47pm EST on Dec 10th, so, roughly 3.5 days.

Artemis I launched at 1:47am EST on Nov 16 and entered lunar orbit on Nov 20th at 2:09pm ET so roughly 4.5 days. Remember too that Artemis I isn't meant for a landing, instead it entered a distant retrograde orbit which orbits at a considerably higher distance from the surface. Spacecraft move considerably slower at higher apogees, so I don't think there's anything suspect about Artemis I taking a bit longer to reach it's planned orbit around the Moon.

api_or_ipaon Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

https://socketfox.dev/ doesn't resolve for me :/

api_or_ipaon American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

Even if your aircraft doesn't come close to the speed of sound, the tips of the propellers will, leading to insane amounts of noise. The Russians, as they are prone to do, didn't care and did it anyways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?

Reminds me a little bit of a "delta queue" used in efficient discrete time based scheduling, for example, in an OS scheduler. Imagine you want to implement a scheduler that accepts jobs and runs them at some point in the future. Instead of keeping a list and scanning through the list at each clock tick, implement a linked list with (time delta, job) at each node. Now, handling a tick() simply requires decrementing the head node and popping items until you see a non-zero delta. Inserting is done like a normal list, except as you iterate through the list, you decrement the desired time interval as you see deltas in the list. It goes like this:

insert(job1, 1) # (job1, 1) -> null insert(job2, 1) # (job1, 1) -> (job2, 0) -> null insert(job3, 2) # (job1, 1) -> (job2, 0) -> (job3, 1) -> null tick() -> job1, job2 # (job3, 0) -> null tick -> job3 # -> null

api_or_ipaon MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts (2018)

Sounds cool, but the headline is pretty bait-y. First, the aircraft has no control surfaces, so it's limited to flying in a straight line. So the headline should read "MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts in propulsion". And then, even that's not true, since ramjets[0] have been a thing for a long time.

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

api_or_ipaon Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down

Wish I had heard about 70million before this post. As many other commenters have mentioned, I too am happy to make a donation to keep your lights on and your mission alive. The biggest tragedy in America is the wholesale disenfranchisement of millions of people due to incarceration.

api_or_ipaon How Miami Decided Parking Is More Important Than Housing

More to the point, parking regulations _nudge_ people into owning cars since low density places means you have to drive _everywhere_. And the more you drive, the less you walk to the point where it becomes a seldom, maybe Sunday afternoon walk and at that point, it's clear to see how owning a car can overtake your life. And so you drive, and when you get to where you want to go, you need parking. It's a vicious circle. Desire to own a car -> drive instead of walk etc -> build parking -> shops & houses become separated by oceans of parking -> desire to own a car.

Living in a dense, walkable cities where your friends and resources are close is a healthy and sought after lifestyle. You should try it.

api_or_ipaon What Is JSON Patch?

To your second point, the JSON spec allows `null` but not `undefined`, so most js serializers (all?) don't send (or throw an exception) for any `undefined` from any object you attempt to send. To delete a property, you would send the entire surrounding object. Or you can simply define your data-layer without transient key/values. It's certainly not a necessary feature to have.

api_or_ipaon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://neighbs.us/#/location

Takes your location, and tells you which neighborhood of SF you're currently in, as defined by datasf.org, and displays that on a map of the city's 117 neighborhoods. Built it just for myself, hosted for free on GitHub Pages, and it's been endless fun for me to use ever since.