dripton

I needed something like this for my basement home office. But I was lazy, so rather than actually building anything, I just bought some color-changing light bulbs ($7 on Amazon including remote) and installed them on the basement stairs. If I have a do-not-disturb meeting, I make the light red.

This is wrong. Exact weights vary with trim levels, but Model are around 4000 lbs. and Suburbans are around 6000 lbs.

A great book, but I read it too late, after I had already learned pretty much everything it says the hard way. So it was one of those books I enjoyed because it reinforced what I already thought, but didn't really get much from. Wish it had been written a decade earlier.

Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)

You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.

One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.

Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.

And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.

Cool. I used an HP48SX in college, and when it finally died about 20 years later, bought 2 HP48Gs so I'd have a Lifetime Supply. (1 is on my desk, 1 is still in the box.) But I confess that hardly ever use my real HP48G anymore, because I have the Droid48 Android app, and the 99% perfect calculator that's always at hand is better than the 100% perfect calculator that's on a shelf way over there, most of the time.

So I doubt I'll buy this one, even though I'm happy someone made it.

It varies a lot depending on how much you have enabled. The distro kernels that are designed to support as much hardware as possible take a long time to build. If you make a custom kernel where you winnow down the config to only support the hardware that's actually in your computer, there's much less code to compile so it's much faster.

I recently built a 6.17 kernel using a full Debian config, and it took about an hour on a fast machine. (Sorry, I didn't save the exact time, but the exact time would only be relevant if you had the exact same hardware and config.) I was surprised how slow it still was. It appears the benefits of faster hardware have been canceled by the amount of new code added.

I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.

The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.

Dumb TVs are still being made. I bought this Sharp commercial TV just last year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCMXNRFH

Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.

We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.

I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.

Istanbul's not Constantinople.

Yes, the term you're looking for is "reverse debugging". It exists, and it's better.

Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.

Yes, many people make many claims. You should think about which ones to believe.

Consumer Reports buys all the items they review, anonymously.

I'm amused that the original ageist response ("old people suck") is left alone and the parody of the original ageist response ("young people suck") is downvoted. I would expect a bit better from HN readers, though any community that becomes popular enough devolves to average-at-best.

Words great, until a page rejects email with a '+' in it.

Sure they do. Agnes and Hugo both tracked quite a bit west, for example.

I installed Linux on a new laptop yesterday, and couldn't get either NixOS or Debian to install until I turned off secure boot. So I guess these distros don't bother getting every release signed by Microsoft.

At least it was easy to turn off. I just wish the error message mentioned Secure Boot -- it took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong. At first I thought I had a corrupt USB stick or something.

A couple of examples would be reduction of some of the Reagan-era defense spending under the Clinton administration, and partial rollback of some of the Reagan-era tax cuts under the Clinton administration.

Of course these were not complete elimination of programs, but adjustments. And you could argue that there were other reasons besides partisanship, like the end of the Cold War and budgetary issues.

I'm just the opposite. One of the worst things about vacations was having to carry along all those books or take a detour to a bookstore (if there were any) to buy more. Now I just carry a single small e-reader. It's a great savings in terms of cargo space.

I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.

Still waiting for 4:3 to come back, as vertical real estate is precious when you're coding. Not holding my breath though. The market has spoken, and the market appears to want screens optimized for watching videos rather than screens optimized for writing text.

There are two clauses that ban export tariffs. One applies to states, the other to the Feds.

Export tariffs are actually unconstitutional in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import-Export_Clause

You can divide realtime applications into safety-critical and non-safety-critical ones. For safety-critical apps, you're totally right. For non-critical apps, if it's late and therefore buggy once in a while, that sucks but nobody dies.

Examples of the latter include audio and video playback and video games. Nobody wants pauses or glitches, but if you get one once in a while, nobody dies. So people deliver these on non-RT operating systems for cost reasons.

Yes, every Berkshire annual report has a chart comparing Berkshire's stock performance to the S&P 500's performance, year by year. See the table near the start of https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2021ar/2021ar.pdf . From 1965-2021, looks like the S&P 500 gained 30000% and Berkshire gained 3,600,000%. Of course, they don't beat the index every year.

The title of the post is not the same as the title of the article, and it's wrong. The problem isn't that the plows aren't powerful enough; it's that they can only plow for four hours before running out of battery life, and the city wants plows to last twelve hours.

Yes. I originally bought this board with a 3800X and 64 GB of inexpensive non-ECC RAM. That configuration worked fine. I later upgraded to a 5950X CPU, when I needed more CPU power and cores for some software I was writing. After upgrading, I occasionally got memory errors under very heavy load, with the same memory that had been fine with the slower CPU. I upgraded to ECC memory, and it fixed all the memory errors. The memory tested correctly as ECC in all the tools I tried, and also solved an actual stability problem I was having, so I trust it.

Some Ryzen boards support ECC RAM, though the support is somewhat unofficial. I'm using 64 GB of ECC on an ASRock X570 Pro4 and it works fine. It's not the cheapest motherboard or the cheapest memory, but I'd say prices for both are in the consumer range rather than the clearly-for-business-only range.

No, they have an arbitration clause, but you have the right to opt out.