HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

djcapelis

4,479 karma · joined October 1, 2009

My website is http://capelis.dj. You can email me via mail@ the same domain as my website.

I used to work on making the robots that carry hundreds of humans around inside them safer. Which is another way of saying I worked on trains. Now I work elsewhere.

submissionscomments
djcapelis··on The world of pipe fittings
This guy wrote a whole article outlining how bad and unusable the British pipe standards are and you’re surprised the two (ish) continents that don’t use them are actually pretty happy with their standard and don’t want the other?

NPT has some flaws and complexities but generally while it’s comprehensive conventions and practices mean that for specific types of plumbing you’ll need some specific standard fittings and once you get used to them that’s pretty much that. From gases to liquids. None of this “whoa someone decided to use a tapered one here” you don’t get to chose what fitting you’re feeling like that day, we have building codes and if it’s a pipe in a wall carrying water than there’s a convention (and likely building code) that tells you your pipe, fitting, and which way the threads should turn! (Generally in the broadest strokes: Explosive gases are reverse threaded. Everything else isn’t.)

Anyway we’ve been saying no to bad British ideas since 1776. Don’t blame us outside the Americas the rest of you (and ISO) fell for it.

djcapelis··on Project One (San Francisco)
You’ve articulated a common bay area mistake of assuming what you happen to be aware of is a comprehensive list of what exists in the bay area. There are still many common warehouse and workshop communities through the bay. There will eventually be wikipedia articles about them, claiming them to be a nexus of culture in their time. And you will read comments on those articles also bemoaning that there’s no such things anymore. :)

Don’t feel bad, just get out there and be open to what exists. There’s tons yet to discover in the Bay Area and even as we lose spaces we love, others rise.

Edit: and also even if you confine yourself to just hackerspaces (of which there are still several?) then remember that for many of them “barely clinging to life” is pretty much the state some of them have been fine with since their founding and if the pandemic didn’t kill them, they’re probably not likely to die off for real anytime soon.

djcapelis··on Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
In Northern California we dialed POPCORN: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/State-May-Pull-Plug-On-C...
djcapelis··on California to ban the sale of new gasoline cars
Almost all EVs come with built in charging schedule settings and people use them because the alternative is throwing money at your utility company to charge during peak hours for no reason. You just plug it in and wake up charged in the morning.
djcapelis··on California to ban the sale of new gasoline cars
> If the state government was serious about this, they would be installing chargers all over the place.

Seen the charger network in California lately? They’re… quite widespread. And the state is definitely helping with infill to keep adding more. The state is even adding them to rest stops, which is unusual in California since rest stops here are normally very nearly free of any services or amenities.

So yes, they’re serious, and yes, they’re doing exactly what you suggested they’d be doing if they were, and have been for years now.

djcapelis··on Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor
A coupon is an informal term for a small sample of material, most often metal. It’s perhaps most commonly used in welding where practice welds for people first training to weld are done on pieces of metal often referred to as coupons. :)

It is usually an artifact of materials like metal which are hard to cut, and can’t efficiently just be cut as needed during a task, but are prepared and pre-cut into small pieces you can grab easily. Each of those pieces is called a coupon.

I used to store mine in a Chinese takeout container box.

djcapelis··on Volcanic eruption starts in Iceland (Live webcam)
It definitely has supplanted them in Iceland. Even the most remote places that used to use oil are generally switching to geothermal for heating. Converting the heat to power isn’t always worth it because the island has so much plentiful hydro power. Fossil fuels account for basically 0% of Icelandic power.
djcapelis··on “After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance”
Nah. It’s a standard feature of most battery systems to run when the grid is down. Solar without battery doesn’t, (and the solar itself cuts out) but if you have battery systems involved for storage, you’re already capable of them interoperating with the grid, or without it.

As for getting reference from a generator, no need. You can get all that from the batteries and they’re increasingly planned to be used for grid scale black start.

djcapelis··on Ask HN: Is there a TV on the market without “Smart TV” features?
If you haven’t yet, try turning on (or up) the micro contrast feature in the picture/display settings. Won’t solve everything, but can make a lot of dark scenes in a bright room a lot clearer to watch.
djcapelis··on Changing jobs during the Great Resignation
I get VHCOL cities, I live in one and bought a home here in 2020. You may not be at the point where you don’t have to optimize for comp yet, and that’s okay. But when you are, I hope you take the opportunity to do so.

And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in comp increases faster than working on something you care less about. :)

Good luck out there!

djcapelis··on Changing jobs during the Great Resignation
Because not everyone is a twenty year old second generation immigrant with no family wealth who needs a lifeboat.

Are you under the impression the blog post author is?

Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too.

(If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)

djcapelis··on Changing jobs during the Great Resignation
You’re not wrong at all. A lot of us agree with this but the type of people who write blog posts about their process as if searching for a job is a totally generic thing wholly untethered to someone’s goals in their own life outside of pure capital motives don’t cover the interesting bits.

If you want to be a mercenary, read these blog posts.

If you want a job you like working on stuff you care about, avoid this stuff like the plague.

Will you make more in the end? Unclear, but I like to assume that people who work on stuff they care about eventually win under capitalism too. But even if not, I feel like I do fine.

djcapelis··on Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
As a general response not specific to this system failure: Train systems are designed to fail safe when not in state and significant safety engineering is done to ensure that if a rail system remains in a known good state over multiple decades almost every potential threat to human life caused by various equipment failure possibilities is quantified and reduced to a level of risk that’s acceptable. (Zero typically, for any known non-adversarial risks.) Many of the pathways in the fault tree involve shutting something down if it’s out of the correct state. So you will see train networks fail safe rather than run in a regressed state since these vehicles with up to a thousand human lives on board drive themselves to some degree in every modern system and we tend to hold them with a level for safety incompatible with easily winging it when something is wrong. This absolutely makes the system more brittle and less resilient, but for the most part it’s the tradeoff we accept in most modern rail engineering projects which are designed with the goal of reducing human loss of live to zero over the entire span of the system’s operational lifetime.

That said, train systems themselves usually maintain a ton of active operational procedures that remain part of staff training which would theoretically allow them to be more resilient and these procedures are kept current and you will often see them used in emergencies. I.E. on automated systems, trackway signaling often exists in the “not lit” off state and if the automated train control system failures, is often capable of lighting up for human controlled movement (usually required to be done at reduced speeds) of the trains during irregular operations like bringing stuck trains to the end of their lines and letting the people in them out at the next station. And any trains that still have a human conductor in a cab (or a cab for a human conductor at all) have procedures for that human to operate the train directly, even on segments of track where automated train control otherwise control all train movements.

We could try and run these systems in these degraded states under these emergency procedures, but most modern systems have safety analysis and engineering which focus on bringing the system to a safe halt state while fixing the underlying issue and returning to full operational state rather than messing around with rolling along in degraded states with unknown but assumed to be increased potential for catastrophic engineering failures with outcomes including loss of life.

(In the US it is generally illegal for a human being to operate a train unaided by some form of train control above 79mph. Most other systems have similar rules. We no longer trust humans themselves to operate these vehicles just because so many human lives can be at stake when they fail.)

Source: I did a stint working on system security and a little bit of electromagnetic compatibility safety engineering for rail systems. It was enlightening to see how the capital E engineers I was working alongside handle these concepts and design risk out of modern systems. The bulk of my work was in the US but the parts that weren’t were on systems that spanned multiple continents and/or train cars which were distributed worldwide. (To my knowledge none of my work has ever related to system discussed here.)

djcapelis··on France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors
> The same type of reactor as Chernobyl is still in operation at the Leningrad NPP

Along with three units each in Kursk and Smolensk NPPs. Plus I think a lot of people don't realize some of the other reactor units at Chernobyl continued operating until the last one finally shut down in 2000.

djcapelis··on 10 Years of Nukemap
Like this? https://www.nuclearwarmap.com/
djcapelis··on Are We Really Engineers? (2021)
I don't think very many people can build or operate a siege engine so the real question for our modern times is: is anyone?
djcapelis··on Tesla Q3 2021 Earnings
Nope.

States vary somewhat in their laws, but in my home state of California, the laws state only:

California Vehicle Code (CVC) Section 21452(a): "A driver facing a steady circular yellow or yellow arrow signal is, by that signal, warned that the related green movement is ending or that a red indication will be shown immediately thereafter."

CVC Section 21454: "When lane use control signals are placed over individual lanes, those signals shall indicate and apply to drivers of vehicles as follows: (a) Green indication: A driver may travel in any lane over which a green signal is shown. (b) Steady yellow indication: A driver is thereby warned that a lane control change is being made. (c) Steady red indication: A driver shall not enter or travel in any lane over which a red signal is shown. (d) Flashing yellow indication: A driver may use the lane only for the purpose of making a left turn to or from the highway."

A yellow light on a traffic control signal in the state of California only indicates an upcoming transition to a red light, which a driver must stop for. There is no requirement that a driver must stop for a yellow.

djcapelis··on Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication
Offering only a Java installer, of all things from the increasingly distant past, wholly divorced from any semblance on how most anyone wants to install or use software these days, is 100% a choice the freenet project made and entirely that project’s fault.

This type of uncaring about the user experience nonsense is exactly the type of issue that the person you’re replying to is sharing about their experience.

djcapelis··on Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once powered the cinema industry
Not great. Git and then GitHub ate their lunch and then they ended up so desperate they did this: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3aajjs/what_i...

So that pretty much caused whoever still used it to stop. They sold to a new company who stopped that practice but I can’t think of many projects that want a managed SCM that felt there was any reason to switch to sourceforge from GitHub or gitlab after that, which is where most projects have ended up one way or another.

Their new owners now call sourceforge a place for “business software” which seems like hopefully the final stage which will bring sourceforge’s long slow decline to its end.

Edit: it looks like their latest owner (2020) is slashdot. So. I guess they will capably oversee its continued slide to irrelevance.

djcapelis··on Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
I don’t disagree that in comparison to many other nasty byproducts of the U235 chain, most Uranium isotopes are not that “hot” but the danger of HEU comes partly from the increased presence of the U234 isotope, not just U235. So that isotope solely is not the right half life to do math around. While U235 is about as stable as U238, most purification techniques result in selecting the lower weight isotopes, which selects the hotter U234 as well. And while there is less of it, if I recall correctly eventually U234 dominates in terms of radiation output.
djcapelis··on More computer jobs than San Francisco
This is pretty much exactly what results when economists just throw numbers at things without context.

Pretending that an IT helpdesk job and a systems programmer are the same type of 1 unit of job leads to ridiculous conclusions.

djcapelis··on The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007)
Thank you for recommending Adalberto's! It was a bit of a drive but indeed, it is the closest I’ve found!
djcapelis··on The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007)
Yes please. I grew up in and came back to Northern California but San Diego has better Mexican food and we don’t talk about it enough. I uncharitably claim that San Francisco seems to have a reputation for awesome Mexican food more from visitors from New York and other places outside the state who don’t know better. I miss midnight burritos from Cotixan’s something fierce. I haven’t found anything comparable up here since moving back, after years of trying. I have resigned myself to an admittedly still solid mission style burrito or just sneaking over to the taco side of the menu to bypass the burrito feelings.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good places up here for other aspects of Mexican and Mexican adjacent food, but I dearly miss San Diego style burritos and haven’t found a replacement.

djcapelis··on French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights
> [0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.

When I land at SFO from an international flight, I’m on BART way before anyone could board a second flight after clearing customs.

Switching modes doesn’t have to cost any more time than switching vehicles within the same mode. You just have to design the systems to do it well. Train to bus isn’t magically less efficient than bus to bus. Neither is Airbus to train.

Switching to and from cars is pretty bad and usually inefficient though, that I think we can all agree on.

djcapelis··on Why do so many companies incorporate in Delaware?
Apple has state based branches registered in many states that it does business: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C0806592/statemen...

These are so irrelevant to the California corporation that Apple has argued in court that there’s no corporate nexus in Delaware and so litigation there is not a valid venue: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/judge-single-apple-store-make...

It didn’t work, but the ruling was based more around the existence of a retail store there than anything else.

djcapelis··on RFC 1: Host Software (1969)
Amusingly, RFC4 is naturally dated a couple weeks earlier than RFC1.
djcapelis··on Security.txt
The beautiful part of these is they show exactly what happens with these types of files, in that only one of them implements the spec as linked.

(Expires isn’t optional in the proposal on the website.)

djcapelis··on My Experience at Apple
It’s not a hard decision. You unquestionably walk away from a situation like this. If your interactions with the team are going this poorly, walk immediately. There’s nothing to be gained from trying to hang on in a situation like this. This person should have walked much earlier.

It’s agonizing how much broken US immigration policy plays a large role in forcing talented people who have decided to join our country to feel like this isn’t an option for them. We owe them much better.

djcapelis··on How Texas Can Become the Next Silicon Valley
Let’s see what happens. :)

You definitely don’t get high speed rail if you don’t build any.

djcapelis··on How Texas Can Become the Next Silicon Valley
More progress on building a high speed rail network than any other state. If this is what failure looks like other states should try some success, I guess. We’ll just have to settle for keeping up with failure as we construct our new rail line, piece by piece by piece.
← PreviousPage 2 of 33Next →