HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jeremy_wiebe

418 karma · joined February 20, 2014

Engineer at Khan Academy.
submissionscomments
jeremy_wiebe··on Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
So are you also arguing that pedestrians crossing at arbitrary places and times across a busy bike path is also something that is sensible behaviour?
jeremy_wiebe··on Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
Contrary to your characterization of me, I’m a cautious driver. What in my post led you to believe I’m entitled?

> Their environment is unescapable and every time you interact with a road as a ped. there’s a huge chance you might die.

I’m not excusing bad driving, but when I walk, this is plenty enough reason for me to be doubly cautious. I don’t trust any driver until they’ve stopped.

jeremy_wiebe··on Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
Here in Vancouver, I see bad drivers, cyclists who don’t abide by the rules for cyclists, and pedestrians that are also a careless.

I don’t disagree that there are bad drivers, but unfortunately it’s the cyclists and pedestrians who pay the highest price for either their or a drivers negligence.

So if I’m a pedestrian, I’m going to make sure the cars are stopping before I step into traffic. Doesn’t matter if I’m right or not, I don’t want to be dead.

jeremy_wiebe··on Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
My issue, as a driver, is that more and more pedestrians walk wherever and whenever they want with complete disregard for their environment. I’ve had to hit the brakes pretty hard on several occasions when I had “right of way” (right turn light, for example) and a pedestrian stepped off the curb with their face buried in their phone.

I see the fines for jaywalking as a function to encourage safety rather than criminalizing sensible behaviour (ie crossing a completely empty street probably won’t yield a fine but crossing a busy street while holding your arm out to stop traffic will, and should).

jeremy_wiebe··on Smart Programmers Write STUPID Code (2022)
FWIW: My hunch when I read the title was that it would be about “overly smart” programmers who tended to write code that was too dense/tricky to be maintainable by anyone but themselves. Hence smart programmers writing “stupid” (aka unmaintainable/inscrutable) code.
jeremy_wiebe··on OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era
Thank-you! Now I need to find a Windows machine to play it on. :)
jeremy_wiebe··on OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era
If I find a Total Annihilation remake, I’ll have to kiss my free time goodbye. That was the one strategy game like this that I really got into.
jeremy_wiebe··on Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax
Good for you. The problem is that today’s smartphone is essentially built to be an extremely addictive fidget spinner. Those who don’t succumb to that are the exception, not the rule.

And before you say that it’s the apps you choose to install, not the phone that’s the problem, I’d say that’s a distinction without a difference.

jeremy_wiebe··on Rust 1.72.0
It seems like the Rust team isn't saying that compatibility is broken, just that there is no testing or effort to ensure compatibility. In the end it's similar, but like any project, it comes down to allocation of time and resources. For something like Windows XP, I'd guess the pool of folks interested in targeting it is extremely small.
jeremy_wiebe··on How do we pay for parking?
My personal pet peeve is lots that show you the apps you can pay for parking with, but then make it extremely difficult to find the lot ID.

Pay-for parking feels like the kind of thing that should become a utility with one, easy, well-known way to pay for parking anywhere.

jeremy_wiebe··on Why project-based learning fails (2018)
> > Had she followed that advice in the 60s, she points out, her students would have spent their time studying JCL

> That’s kind of irrelevant.

To be fair, I graduated from a small college in 2001 and I still had a course on JCL. Local industry used it and my program was basically a factory for graduating programmers who could help fix Y2K issues.

jeremy_wiebe··on Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection
> Since it's only implied how it works and there seems to be some confusion in the comments.

Seems like a lot of TLDR; :)

The article says exactly how it works.

> The usage is very simple: Insert the tool into the payment terminal’s chip card slot. If it can insert fully, the terminal is safe. If it gets stopped, there might be a skimmer!

jeremy_wiebe··on A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves
Sounds like a VW: behaves differently under test.
jeremy_wiebe··on macOS command-line tools you might not know about
I often have multiple terminal tabs open. Sometimes I’ll run a command that ends up taking a while and switch away and forget about it.

So I added a fish command completion script that plays a beep with afplay if the task took longer than 5 seconds. It helps me get back on task for those “just long enough” tasks that I run.

jeremy_wiebe··on Tintin, Hergé and Chang
I remember borrowing Tintin books from my local library in rural Manitoba, Canada! I would get every one that I could transferred to my branch. That was in the early ‘80’s
jeremy_wiebe··on 100 Days of SwiftUI
Currently we only share Perseus (our exercise and article npm library). We do hope to begin work to share more code at some point but it hasn’t risen up in the priority list just yet.
jeremy_wiebe··on Apple subreddit reopens after moderation team threatened with removal
Reminds me of Saturday Night Live’s Celebrity Jeopardy where one contestant famously mispronounced “ThePenIsMightier” category. (Just lowercase the first “I”)
jeremy_wiebe··on 100 Days of SwiftUI
The problem is that developer experience (and often user experience) aren’t always the highest priority. For many businesses that want to ship a mobile app, cost is by far the biggest constraint. And “writing once, shipping everywhere” pushes out native development.

We at Khan Academy have moved much of our app to React Native and overall it’s a great experience and much easier to maintain than two native apps.

Of course, the constraints and requirements vary by business and so what’s right for us may not be right for you.

jeremy_wiebe··on Instant Brands, maker of Instant Pot and Pyrex cookware, files for bankruptcy
I’m not too surprised. Since introducing the Instant Pot there has been a lot of competition on their main product (pressure cooker). It seems like a race to the bottom for cost and so they must have faced shrinking profit margins. Also, they were diversifying their product offering into products that seemed like they were grasping and not really aligned with their main offering.
jeremy_wiebe··on Why do cats knead?
So basically, we don’t know?
jeremy_wiebe··on Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news
A cool idea.

Question for the engineers working on this: Does this just summarize one article or at a time or cross reference multiple different sources for the same event?

jeremy_wiebe··on Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news
I’m to the point where I’d probably put more trust in an AI generated news summary than many of the sites that purport to give me accurate and truth worthy news.
jeremy_wiebe··on FaaS in Go with WASM, WASI and Rust
This example sounds like exactly how Fastly’s Compute@Edge works.

Fastly provides an API via a rust crate that you use to build your edge (CDN) logic with. They also provide a local development cli that can run these WASM bundles with.

https://crates.io/crates/fastly

jeremy_wiebe··on Conway's Game of Life digital clock
I read Code by Charles Petzold earlier this year and I feel like I had a similar realization. A simple switch can lead to such complex systems.
jeremy_wiebe··on GM’s decision to ditch Apple CarPlay, Android Auto sparks backlash
I haven’t looked into this for a long time but is the aftermarket head unit market still thriving?

Seems like there’ll be lots of plays for folks like Alpine to cater to all the frustrated folks whose factory unit is trash.

jeremy_wiebe··on Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?
Just change the wifi password. :-)
jeremy_wiebe··on Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
So basically an episode of the show Undercover Boss?

https://www.cbs.com/shows/undercover_boss/

jeremy_wiebe··on Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta
Should have read further.

https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode#source-code

https://github.com/SpartanJ/eepp/tree/develop/src/tools/ecod...

jeremy_wiebe··on Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta
I looked at the repo and I can’t see any code. Is it in a different repo?
jeremy_wiebe··on cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444
I’ve run across comments regarding useless use of cat twice today. However, after reading the linked Wikipedia entry, it feels more like a way to give someone an ego trip than a truly more useful alternative.

The Wikipedia article even concedes that cat might be better:

> A cat written with UUOC might still be preferred for readability reasons, as reading a piped stream left-to-right might be easier to conceptualize.[10] Also, one wrong use of the redirection symbol ">" instead of "<" (often adjacent on keyboards) may permanently delete the content of a file, in other words clobbering, and one way to avoid this is to use cat with pipes.

I‘ll happily continue to “abuse cat” going forward and sleep perfectly well.

Page 1 of 6Next →