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dnron As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do (2017)

That's why I said "or near". I figured it was common knowledge if you drive anywhere around the area. But it's true that it's not signed anywhere (that I know of), so if you're driving from farther away, it would be easy to get caught.

dnron As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do (2017)

You lived in or near NYC and didn't know that right-on-red is illegal in the whole city, at all times? There's no possible confusion there (except maybe near the borders of the outer boroughs, but Manhattan is an island so pretty hard to claim you didn't know you were in the city).

dnron Go Contracts – Draft Design

That doesn't work for the same reason that < and > don't work, right? They are existing operators in the language, so the parser would need unbounded lookahead. Using a different set of characters is unambiguous (and additionally is more compact).

dnron Go Contracts – Draft Design

This is really bike-shed-y, but:

I'm disappointed they didn't go with «» or similar to set apart type parameters. The answer in the doc is that they "couldn't bring ourselves to require non-ascii", but there's an easy way to handle this without _requiring_ non-ascii characters: let "(type …)" and "«…»" be syntactically identical, and have gofmt change the former to the latter. Basically everyone uses gofmt all the time, so all the code everyone reads would use the more visually distinctive syntax, but it would be easy to type using ascii only.

dnron Org-mode on web, built with React, for mobile, synced with Dropbox, Google Drive

Fair enough. It's a small company and their ops seem competent, but yeah, I wouldn't trust confidential or sensitive information to it.

dnron Org-mode on web, built with React, for mobile, synced with Dropbox, Google Drive

Since other people are throwing out alternatives, here's what I use:

https://dynalist.io/

I'm not affiliated, just a happy paying customer. I organize a pretty good chunk of my life in it.

dnron Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive

Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet:

https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

is a command-line tool (in Python) that downloads (incrementally) your Google Photos content directly using the Photos API, not through Drive. I just set it up recently.

The two main caveats are the lack of location info and that it won't re-download photos that have been edited.

dnron Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit

I think it's good to get more data out there, positive and negative, so I'll add: I'm using btrfs on a home server (and sometimes desktop) for half a year now and haven't had any issues. It's fast (on nvme ssd), I can play with snapshots. It is admittedly a very lightly-loaded system.

I filled up the root filesystem by accident once, which is supposed to be a very bad situation for btrfs. I was able to ssh in, diagnose stuff, delete the offending files, and then I did a minor rebalance to clean up some of the unnecessary metadata space that got allocated (not essential but I wanted to try it). No big deal and still works fine.

I haven't used any btrfs raid features. I mirror it (via daily rsync) to an ext4 filesystem on another device to guard against filesystem-related bugs and device failure.

dnron I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

I wish it were so, but it's not. I usually start interviews with 5-10 minutes of talking about a previous project of the candidate, digging in to see how sophisticated the work was, how they solved problems, etc. I've had plenty of examples where someone bullshitted well enough to pretty much convince me that they knew what they were talking about, only to have it become clear in the more hands-on part of the interview that they couldn't possibly. I admit I'm not a great interviewer, so perhaps a really good interviewer could tease those things out, but I maintain that it's not always easy.

I think the usual situation is that the candidate was on a team where some impressive work was being done by others, understood it enough to talk about it in detail, but didn't actually do any of the challenging work themselves and couldn't work at that level consistently.

I'd like to think most people aren't actively lying or bullshitting, but it's easy enough to implicitly take credit for work done by a team when you're trying to sound impressive.

dnron The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

That's addressed in the article:

  Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply
  assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had 
  to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an 
  Italian pun,” he said.

dnron The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

I have no dog in this fight but that is a very uncharitable "synopsis". The main argument that I took away is that the plays contain many references to things (foreign cultures, social customs, musical instruments, etc.) that Shakespeare had no way of being exposed to, based on what we know of his life, but this woman's background did expose her to all these things, and she ran in the same circles at the same time (enough so that she could have been his lover). The secondary argument is the feminist content. It's all obviously very circumstantial and doesn't constitute "proof", but it's highly unlikely we'll ever get any actual proof after five hundred years of digging into the limited evidence from the time. The point is it's interesting to consider, and might make you think differently about the context and content of his (or her) work.

dnron Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

But Google completely failed at "hopping on the social train". Are they now irrelevant? It seems now that that "realization" was just wrong.

dnron The Notre Dame fire and the future of history

Not to push your expectations even higher, but visiting and seeing the Sagrada Familia literally moved me to tears. It's one of only two buildings that have ever done that to me. (And I'm not religious at all, and was not raised Christian.)

dnron How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

I got some stuff in the mail, and eventually two checks for the two phases. I think they were something like $1100 and $7000.

I was kind of annoyed because the initial settlement was apparently so embarrassing that the _judge_ rejected it, something like $330M on supposedly $3B in lost wages. So they went back and increased it to the $435M, still nowhere close to what it should have been. Of course at this point the lawyers' incentives and the class' incentives are not aligned at all, so that's how it ended.

dnron I've Listened to Loud Rock Music All My Life. Now My Hearing Is Paying the Price

Someone on a flight once explained to me that the noise on an airplane is a large factor of why flying makes you tired: your brain is constantly processing all that background noise and looking for patterns in it. Since then I've always worn earplugs on flights, and usually also big over-the-ear headphones over them (just turn the volume up slightly higher). It's been a big improvement in flying comfort.

dnron Peak California

Of those cities I've only spent time in the Bay Area and NYC, but NYC feels much more diverse than the Bay Area. The Bay Area has people of every race and ethnicity, but it feels very segregated both geographically and economically. People don't interact across ethnic lines as much (with a few prominent exceptions). In NYC, it doesn't feel like race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are so tightly correlated.

dnron The sad state of font rendering on Linux

I'm not trying to deny your experiences, but sometimes you just have to accept the way the world is: there's no big company behind Linux support on laptops, so you have to go where the most users are. If you want to use OSX, you buy macbooks. If you want to use Linux, you buy thinkpads. It's sad, I wish I had more hardware choice, but I accept that I don't. Windows users are the only ones that do.

For the record, I'm current using Ubuntu on an X1 carbon 4th gen and it has worked literally flawlessly since day 1, no issues with wifi, bluetooth, or sleep, and it has great battery life. My X220 before that was 98% perfect.

Thank you for reporting bugs, though!

dnron Sub-Acute Effects of Psilocybin on Empathy, Creative Thinking

I've noticed that whenever I describe my MDMA experiences to others, I feel a faint a faint version of the effects, sorta like a flashback. I chalked it up to something about the effects being associated with those memories, so activating the memories also activates the effects.

dnron Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

It works at a job too: you get more attention rushing in as the hero to fight fires on a system that's blowing up than you do building it so it just works and scales better in the first place.

dnron Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

The incentive is just not having to come up with and calibrate new questions. It takes a lot of effort to do that, and if you've been asking a "banned" question for a while and are comfortable with it, it's easy to just keep using it until someone explicitly tells you not to (reverse feedback from hiring committee to interviewer wasn't a thing for a while). Most engineers don't really enjoy interviewing and want to put minimal effort into it.

dnron Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

The old 7-row ThinkPad keyboard.

Also Rdio.

dnron Arguing against using protobuffers

Btw, I realize this argument is very similar to the argument for dynamic typing + lots of unit tests instead of static typing: "you have to write the tests anyway, and the tests will check the types".

I'd like to note that even if you're a static typing fan and don't believe that argument for code, you can still believe it for serialization and protocols, because data schemas and protocols evolve in different ways than code does (they're almost duals of each other).

dnron Arguing against using protobuffers

I was there at the time too and couldn't believe people were defending required. I had already run into enough problems with it that I stopped using it earlier, and I worked on a relatively small system with not that many moving parts! I can hardly imagine how much pain required must have caused in something like the indexing pipeline.

The thing I realized was that even if a field is present, you almost always still want to do further checks on it before declaring the whole thing valid and good to go. "required" just tells you that it's an integer, for example, it doesn't tell you if it's in the range [0, 1000). Or that a string is a valid filesystem path. Or that two parallel arrays are the same size. You have to do those things anyway, so the has_... check is no big deal. And making everything optional is really nice when you have to make large changes to your protocol and don't want to have to carry around dummy values forever.

Protocol buffers weren't designed from scratch by Jeff Dean, they evolved from various ad-hoc ways of specifying query parameters (which, ok, were probably mostly written by Jeff), so I don't think it reflects badly on him to say that required was a mistake. Groups were a mistake in retrospect too, but no one thinks that means Jeff is an idiot.

dnron Treating the Bay Area as like working in the mines

The author seems pretty confused about the geography of the bay area, and comes to odd conclusions because of it. First of all:

> Google programmers living two to three to a bedroom in Bernal Heights, not even that close to BART.

Why would Google employees care about living close to BART? They take the Google shuttle to work, and Bernal has great highway access, making it a shorter commute than other parts of SF.

Besides that, the people I know who have tons of roommates in SF do it because they want the experience of living in SF (culture, nightlife, food, socializing). If they just wanted to make money and save as much as possible, they'd live on the peninsula or in the east bay and have a more comfortable, and also cheaper, housing situation.

Even for people working in SF (SOMA), commuting on BART from Oakland is often faster than many parts of SF, and almost certainly cheaper. If you choose to live in SF anyway, it's because you want to be there specifically.

dnron Evernote just slashed 54 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce

https://dynalist.io/

I haven't used evernote so I don't know all of its features, and I'm sure dynalist is missing many of them, but it's wonderful for all those things you mentioned (notes, lists, ideas, reminders, todos). The android app is a little sluggish, but that's pretty much my only complaint, I love everything else about it.

dnron Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

If they're not in the config file, where exactly are they then?

A text file sitting next to the config file? I can't see any benefit to that arrangement over just using comments in the file.

Comments that exist in the file in the repo but get stripped out by the deploy process? Again, there seems to be no point to doing this.

Commit log messages? I agree commit logs can sometimes be valuable to see the context of a change, but 1) they're fundamentally about documenting _changes_, not the contents themselves, and 2) the UI is really clunky: git blame, find the line you want context for, then git show on that commit.

dnron Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

You're talking about comments that document the semantics of fields in a config file. Most other people here are talking about comments that describe why the _specific values_ present in a _specific file_ were chosen.

Whether documenting semantics of fields belongs in a config file or code (I say both!), it simply doesn't make any sense to say that comments about why specific values in specific files are the way they are belong in the code that parses them. (How can the parsing code have knowledge of all config files out there?)

dnron Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard

Ubuntu has worked perfectly on my last two thinkpads, an X220 and X1 Carbon (4th gen). That's almost 7 years now. I think only the only real caveat is that the fingerprint reader isn't supported. I can't speak for other laptop brands, but just get a thinkpad (or a dell xps).

dnron Launch HN: Frey (YC S18) – Laundry and Clothing Care Products Tailored for Men

I just used oxiclean whitening for the first time and it made a bunch of white shirts (dress shirts and undershirts) look nearly new again. Pretty impressive stuff, and cheap too. Only downside is it made the fabric feel a little stiff and rough after drying. Next time I'll try a little vinegar in the rinse.

Tip: get some rubber gloves to deal with the concentrated solution.

dnron $36k Google App Engine RCE

That's probably not quite true. "google3 file access" most likely means the ability to open paths with the "google3 file library", which lets you use paths like "/gfs/<cluster>/...", and similar for all the different storage services. But you'd also need an identity with permissions to read whatever you're reading. Without an identity that's in ACLs and stuff, you'd only be able to see "world-readable" data, which is still quite serious because who knows what's lying around, but probably nothing sensitive like source code.