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driptonon We got Linux on the iPhone, iPad and other idevices

UBlock Origin, right-click on the annoying thing, Block Element, done.

driptonon I have no capslock and I must scream

Text artifacts in the Infocom text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall use this system. Play the games long enough and you get pretty good at reading them.

driptonon The Big Mac index: Our interactive currency comparison tool

Some fast-food places in the US went drive-through-only in 2020 and are still that way. I think if you're in the kind of rural or suburban place where almost everyone drives almost everywhere, then the drive-through does the majority of fast food business anyway, and many people who would have gone inside will switch to the drive-through rather than not buying your food, so the cost savings from not having to hire more staff to maintain the dining room might make up for the lost sales. Obviously in an urban area that gets a lot of foot traffic, this would not be the case.

driptonon The next generation of cobblers are focused on sneakers

I don't buy expensive shoes, so it seems obvious to me that it's cheaper to replace than repair, so I do that.

But I do have one expensive ($150 on sale, $300 retail) pair of winter bike boots, and the soles gradually detached from the uppers, letting water seep in. I took them to my local shoe repair place and they made them good as new for $25. Total bargain.

So, it's worth a shot.

driptonon Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

Life pro tip: most recruiters can't write emails that look like they came from humans rather than spambots. If you're actively looking for a job, check all your spam folders daily. I can't tell you how many actual job leads have ended up in mine.

driptonon 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning

And I've used (checks file) 56 different superchargers in the last 4 years, some of them many times. It comes down to how many long road trips you make. Fast chargers are totally unnecessary for local-only driving if you have a slow charger at home, but critical for convenient road trips beyond your vehicle's range.

driptonon Google promised its contact tracing app was completely private, but it wasn’t

I installed the contact tracing app as soon as it was available, and still have it running. I've never gotten a contact from it. Some of that is probably me being careful and not being around others much, and some of it is probably that almost nobody else is running it.

driptonon McDonald's and other chains are giving their drive-thrus the Jetsons treatment

I think it's mostly to get you to install the app, so they can advertise at you.

driptonon Ask HN: Employees who exersised stock options: how did it go?

1. Exercised my ISOs at small company A when I quit, because the options were buy-within-90-days-or-lose, and they were cheap, and I felt the company had decent odds of being acquired. They were acquired a couple of years later, and my $300 of stock turned into $15k. So an amazing ROI, but a small enough amount of stock that it didn't really matter.

2. Exercised some NQ options that company B, a customer of company A that I worked with, gave me. They got acquired by company C and the stock zoomed, I sold all, then the acquiring company went bust. Most employees of company B never made any money because their shares were locked up during the period that company C was worth something. I was lucky I was a contractor and not locked up, so I cashed mine in. Made about $60k, or about 4 times what I made from Company A who I actually worked for. The moral of this story is that if you have a lot of restricted stock in a company that's worth a lot of money now but might not be worth anything later, don't assume it will be worth anything.

3. I was an employee at company D when the got acquired by a big company E and all our stock got cashed out. This was a riskless exercise-and-sell transaction, and I made about $20k for my small amount of stock. Not bad, but not life-changing.

4. I was an employee at a pretty big famous public company F that gave us RSUs, and the RSUs roughly doubled in value when I was there. I sold most, kept some, and then the company got bought by bigger more famous company G, causing my remaining shares to turn into cash at another premium. Good deal but I didn't have enough stock for it to be life-changing. I think I made about $40k all told.

5. I was an employee at another big famous public company H, that gave me a significant number of RSUs, and during the term of my employment the stock went up and to the right a lot. This one was life-changing money: I can now afford to retire.

6. I'm now an employee at another big famous public company I, that gives me a decent number of RSUs. Like most of the market, the stock went down a lot back in February and March due to COVID-19 and is since up a lot.

The takeaway? Big company RSUs > startup options, in my limited experience. Of course it really comes down to how the individual companies do, but there are so many more ways employees can get screwed with private companies.

driptonon About 150 U.S. Cadillac Dealers to Exit Brand, Rather Than Sell Electric Cars

Agreed. The only time I ever had to wait for a Supercharger was at the one at the Tesla store in Nashville. It had 6 chargers, but 3 were being used by the people who worked at the store, so only 3 were available for other use.

driptonon Mercedes Benz infotainment soon will be able to control Bosch Smart Home devices

"One thing made by us will be able to control one thing made by us, so you should buy everything from us."

No. Put a general web browser in the car, make the devices controllable over the web by any general web browser, and you've got something much more useful.

driptonon Every possible pun of the form ‘You put the X in Y’

YOU PUT THE WHEELCHAIR IN WHEELCHAIR.

Might want to exclude this kind of trivial case.

driptonon HP Instant Ink is “ink as a service”

I've seen large signs at several drug stores "Free flu shots!"

Small print: "Flu shot is free only if your insurance covers all of it."

So, yeah, pretending to be free has spread to that industry too.

driptonon The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

A former employer's telephony software had a 9-character intstring field for the Unix timestamp, so there was a bug when it rolled over to 1000000000 in 2001. Pretty rare, I think. Unix timestamps back then were usually 32-bit ints, so good until 2038. And hopefully they'll be 64 bits everywhere that matters well before 2038.

driptonon Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses

My gmail doppleganger signs me up for mostly animal charities and religious stuff. I keep unsubscribing and marking as spam. Sometimes I wonder if she does this on purpose, giving a "fake email" to people she doesn't want to deal with. If so, Diane, there's a real person with that email, and quit throwing all your spam at me.

driptonon Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought

That's education, not babysitting. I totally agree that high school is important, but it should be geared more for teaching than for supervision. While elementary school does both.

driptonon Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought

I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. We can probably split the difference some on this between elementary school (where the babysitting really is kind of economically important) and the older kids.

driptonon Tesla 5-1 Stock Split

Meh. Total non-event. Once upon a time I hated splits because they made record-keeping more complicated, but the online brokers do a good job of tracking basis across splits now. Once upon a time there was a real reason to do splits to enable easier purchases, but the online brokers allow fractional shares now. So, just not excited either way about splits anymore.

driptonon TSA considers new system for flyers without ID

The right to bicycle in general is not licensed in the US. However, some roads allow bikes and some do not. This seems to mostly be done in a way to not overly restrict freedom of travel. For example, in densely populated places like the Northeastern US, it's not allowed to bike on Interstates, but that's deemed okay because there's usually a parallel smaller highway that allows bikes. While in sparsely populated parts of the Western US, it's sometimes allowed to bike on the shoulder of Interstates, because it's the only road. However, governments aren't perfect, so there are gaps in the logic, like some bridges that don't allow bikes even though they're the only way to cross a large body of water for miles and miles. I'd like to believe that a legal challenge to allow bikes on such bridges, or to require the government to ferry bicyclists over such bridges, would succeed.

driptonon Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

Amazon does not really have centralized hiring. Each team hires for itself, though there are bar raisers from outside the team designed to be a counterweight to desperate hiring managers.

driptonon The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.

driptonon Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to DirectX 11 shift

How did you ask for your refund? I tried twice through Steam and was rejected both times.

driptonon The economics of unused gift cards

I use the Visa gift cards for charitable contributions. The nice thing about charities, as opposed to random purchases, is you get to pick the amount.

driptonon Why Lie Detector Tests Can’t Be Trusted

I failed a polygraph. I was truthful and still failed. It cost me a job. Luckily I found a better job. So, thanks polygraph.

driptonon We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

Oops, missed the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dphw4km60m4

driptonon We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

Here's an 8:50 lap (amateur driver) with a P85D. From 2015.

The 3 is better on the track than the S. Still heavy, of course.

driptonon Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds

Slow security is not inherent to air travel; it's something that was tacked on by politicians. It could easily be added to trains. (Or removed from planes, though I'm not holding my breath.)

Distance to the airport vs. train station depends on where you live. I'm actually closer to an airport than a train station, though I believe that for most people in cities it's the other way around.

You also need to throw cars in there. In the US, I fear the choice is usually car vs. plane not train vs. plane, as passenger rail just doesn't go enough places. Making trains faster would be great for places that already have trains (say, DC to Boston, which is currently doable by train but a bit slow), but wouldn't help with all the places not currently served. Now, if we were to actually ban or hugely tax planes for environmental reasons, that might spur the creation of more passenger rail. I don't see that happening in the US until South Florida goes underwater though.

driptonon $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Available Now

I agree with you, at least for a big ticket item like a car. But Turo exists, so you can test drive pretty much any non-exotic car in any major metro area, for a somewhat reasonable price. That's what we did before we bought a Model 3, as official test drives weren't available yet.

driptonon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)

It's not essential; I know plenty of people at Amazon without college degrees. But you won't make it though the interviews for an Software Development Engineer role without basic computer science knowledge. So if you didn't take data structures and algorithms in school, learn them on your own.

driptonon The Near Future of Electric Cars: Many Models, Few Buyers

https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

December: Tesla 9335, GM 5173