Hacker News Reader

bigdubson California’s next bold step on climate should be building near transit

Or, we could just build more houses.

bigdubson Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

It's actually the other way around. "SuperNodes" (elective service as a kind of hub) caused lots of dropped calls and flaky connections because people were trying to do it on bad home connections.

Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.

bigdubson Stripe to donate $1M to California Yimby

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/03/01/gue...

That is explicitly what's being advocated by Scott Wiener.

bigdubson Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

It's not just that they have a lot of influence and a lot of people on their platform, it's that they've shown zero interest in responsibility, especially if showing responsibility would reduce usage or advertising dollars.

bigdubson The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster (2017)

I thought control latencies still weren't low enough for drones to compete with human piloted aircraft?

Unless the solution is AI.

bigdubson Why New York City Stopped Building Subways

2nd avenue already got pretty torn up with access tunnels, it's not like tunnel boring helped a ton.

Also a good chunk of NYC subways were built with cut & cover (sections of IRT 2/3 lines as an example).

bigdubson Go: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

1. Minimize dependencies.

Much of the problems w/ dependency management have to do with over-coupling and adding lots of random dependencies for things you could just inline into your project. Also why the stdlib is so strong.

2. You can pick specific versions and follow basic semver constraints if you want by checking out the source for the dependency locally, and then copying to vendor. Automatic resolution would be nice but it's not like you can't do it.

3. Better automatic dependency management is coming. But honestly I prefer it to be arduous to add an external dependency. You should only do it if you absolutely need to.

The bit about import paths being wrong I've generally not found to be the case; the go compiler will treat deps with the same in vendor or in gopath.

bigdubson Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change

That's not because of the cameras being mirrorless; it's because (for Canon anyway) they purposely gimp video on their DSLRs to get you to buy their Cine-EOS cameras.

bigdubson PostgreSQL Begins Adding LLVM JIT Support For Faster Performance

https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arca...

it's pretty common

bigdubson Canon's 120MP Camera Sensor

Take a look at the 35mm section, that's explicitly not the conclusion of the article.

"The results are very impressive and from our comparisons we think scanned color slide film has a digital equivalent resolution of between 12MP and 24MP depending on what aspect you look at (12MP for overall sharpness appearance, 14-16MP for luminosity resolution, and 24MP for color resolution). These figures are estimates based on a good Imacon or Drum scan and would be even higher for projected or enlarged images."

So you're basically reading that and going, well I think I'm right anyway.

bigdubson God Save Austin

Everyone is a newcomer. What it comes down to is if you add to the zeitgeist or detract from it.

bigdubson ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2018 review: The only laptop in a professional’s paradise

A lot of it is priority; the trackpad working well is a low priority for most manufacturers in the face of other things like better looking benchmarks etc.

That attitude, the holistic view of the experience, is what people are willing to pay more for with Apple, that not everyone values.

bigdubson ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2018 review: The only laptop in a professional’s paradise

Almost all of Apple's "responsiveness" advantage is from careful software tuning. You could get a windows trackpad to feel as good as Apple's if you tuned the acceleration curves and added better palm detection.

bigdubson Canon's 120MP Camera Sensor

A lot of the comparisons I've read (and internally Leica's own tests) say otherwise.

https://petapixel.com/2014/12/18/comparing-image-quality-fil...

bigdubson Canon's 120MP Camera Sensor

The lens quality barrier at 24MP isn't arbitrary; that's basically the equivalent digital resolution you get from 35mm film.

bigdubson A Proposal for Package Versioning in Go

govendor anyway will use local versions of deps if you have them in your gopath

bigdubson A Proposal for Package Versioning in Go

The lack of support for private repos is still a dealbreaker for both `dep` and `vgo`.

bigdubson Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

I didn't realize small camera's didn't have an adjustable aperture typically, that makes more sense now.

bigdubson Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

One thing I'm not understanding here; don't most lenses (and by extension cameras) have adjustable apertures? What is so special about having a F1.4 vs. F2.4 apertures available to the camera? Is it because they can both fire at the same time and compose the two exposures?

bigdubson Guide to Writing Dockerfiles for Go Web-Apps

Ditto decreased build speed because of internet downloads.

bigdubson Snap lays off two dozen employees

Kind of unrelated, len("two dozen") vs. len("24") doesn't seem very efficient.

bigdubson Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed.

There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

bigdubson Boston Buzzing with HQ2 Rumors

If one of the motivators for Boston is proximity to top tier universities, as a data point of one I had zero desire to stay in Boston after school and didn't think to get a job in the area. I doubt I would have stayed for Amazon.

bigdubson What I learned in 2017 writing Go

Generally we use vendoring, i.e. you have 1.1 in your gopath, but vendor 1.0 in your projects (as long as they're standalone projects).

It's also important to limit cross package dependencies as much as possible to avoid these situations.

bigdubson Ditch React. Ditch Angular. Go Vanilla with Zam

Eventually everything in javascript will be reinvented by hipster hackers.

bigdubson The Only McLaren F1 Technician in North America

You should absolutely change your tires regardless of use by age (this isn't just a McLaren thing). Tires dry out over time and become unsafe.

bigdubson Clang 5 in a Docker container for C++17

Docker for mac doesn't use a virtualbox, it uses "HyperKit".

> Docker for Mac does not use VirtualBox, but rather HyperKit, a lightweight macOS virtualization solution built on top of Hypervisor.framework in macOS 10.10 Yosemite and higher.

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/docker-toolbox/

bigdubson F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

1) You get the government you deserve. If you're worried it would be mismanaged, become active.

2) I would absolutely rather have an unbiased and fair agency installing utilities than a rent seeking public company that is beholden to shareholder value.

bigdubson 2017 Was Bad for Facebook. 2018 Will Be Worse

Generally if they keep a feature it means that the majority of people were more engaged by it, so the algo feed is probably increasing engagement across the board but alienating a few users.

bigdubson Show HN: Accelerate SHA256 Computations in Go Using AVX512 instructions

It doesn't use CGO.