Hacker News Reader

larubbioon Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)

This happened on the flight to my honeymoon, and my wife took the upgrade.

larubbioon SQLite is all you need for durable workflows

'production' doesn't equal 'multi-user concurrent access'. There are production uses where sqlite is a valid choice even if it may not be the best choice for multi-user production use cases.

larubbioon Show HN: A "bank of my parents" for my young kids

I do something similar for my kids, but offline using GNUCash. It's from a book called "The Bank of Dad."

I track their funds, and provide a generous monthly interest rate. The idea was both to teach them how to manage money, and demonstrate compounding interest.

This looks really interesting, and if you could add different interest calculations that would be a nice addition.

larubbioon DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

Here is the study, the link is not clickable if you have an account, you have to view source to get at it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250911165140/https://www.ojp.g...

larubbioon Pelicans on a bicycle

This is the the artist you are thinking of.

https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

larubbioon What are the best options for Amazon SDEs thinking about leaving over RTO policy

I left Amazon back when the 3-day RTO was announced. Their recruiters periodically ping and ask if I'd be interested in returning. So leaving on good terms will give you options to return if you want.

I haven't seen a recent who's hiring post, but searching for the most recent one can help you find jobs that are hybrid or remote friendly.

Also the startup I went to after I left is fully remote and hiring, my email is in my profile.

larubbioon Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

I remember this article from 2017 about the google snippet for how long it takes to caramelize an onion.

https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...

The gist of the story is the author wrote an article debunking the recipe myth that you only need 5 minutes. In their tests it was 25 - 45. Google snippet would report "about 5 minutes" and link to the article as a reference.

I think the information summaries at the top of searches have been wrong for a while.

larubbioon Beeper Mini users find Macs banned from iMessage network

> It works with SMS as well, and I just don't have to think about it.

I have a mac laptop and an android phone. My son has an iphone. Half of his responses to my text messages go to my phone, the other half go to my laptop and I miss them. This is a major problem, imessage shouldn't be greedy about grabbing messages, especially when replying to an SMS. I've missed picking him up from places because I didn't get the reply.

larubbioon McDonald's to retire self-service soda fountains by 2032

Essentially yes. Distribution, instead of funding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_Freestyle

"The Freestyle's beverage dispensing technology was designed by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, in return for Coca-Cola distributing his Slingshot water purification system."

larubbioon Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

I think there are limits on both. Floor area ratio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_area_ratio) is how it is coded into regulations. The lot size and the height restrictions create a bounding box that the building needs to fit within.

larubbioon Ask HN: Top Skills to Learn for 2023?

An Italian town did build a mirror to do that.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnvzn/viganella-italy-fake-...

[edit] Looks like a town in Norway did it as well, and theirs tracks the sun.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/10/using-giant-mirror...

larubbioon Ask HN: Top Skills to Learn for 2023?

I love this goal, best of luck with it. I would like to build (or buy) a robot to protect my chickens from air and ground predators during the day so they can happily free range all day.

larubbioon Switching to an N95 mask gives a 75x boost in Covid protection

I think that stat came from a chart in this article https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/a-quick-note-...

larubbioon Italy’s famous dome is cracking, and muon imaging may help

Everything I know about this comes from the children's book "Pippo the Fool."

Rivals refers to people competing against him in a competition to build the dome. For him to win and get to build his design it was important for him to both prove it could be built and not allow other builders to also solve the design challenge.

I assume for him getting to build the dome was more important than his design ideas being forgotten.

larubbioon Atlantic salmon swim far and wide after fish farm collapse

A caught fish could be wild, or from a hatchery. You can tell the difference since hatchery fish have a fin removed but I imagine it's easier to not differentiate when labelling.

larubbioon How can a programmer help The New York Times report stories?

I had a similar idea, but wanted to build it outside of a single news organisation. Basically a news aggregator, but it would detect when different articles are about the same topic and try to tell if the newer article added anything to the story. This aggregation system would then track public interest in a story over time (based on clicks) along with media interest (based on new stories)

I also wanted to add in user, publication and reporter 'leanings' by having a mechanism where users could say that they thought a story was left/right/neutral. The act of voting would count as a push having the affect of slightly moving the publication and reporter in one direction and the voter in another. I would then use an ELO type metric so a user who was very far in one direction wouldn't have the same impact as a user more in the center.

larubbioon Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

I had thought about something like this a couple of years ago. My idea wasn't really about tracking bias, but providing reputation for authors and news outlets. Users (via a browser plugin or some other mechanism) could declare an article or statement as biased in a certain direction. That vote would give me information about the article, the news outlet and the reader. I could then present that information back to users. In this way I could learn just how biased I am (and maybe even the areas of my bias) and the bias of authors and organizations. Perhaps you could see how an author's bias changes when they write for different sites.

However I don't think just pointing out bias will really help. People like their bubbles, and moving out of them is painful and potentially with real world consequences for them. I also think if you show a user an articles bias ahead of time, it will just be used as a filter or a way to reinforce their bubble. I thought this article was interesting.

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

larubbioon Ants are destroying plants by nurturing perfect aphid colonies

Aphids are fascinating (if annoying in the garden). They are capable of telescoping generations [1] which means an aphid can be pregnant with an aphid that is also pregnant.

https://simonleather.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/living-inside-...

They also can grow wings if the colony gets overcrowded or the plant they are on is starting to die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescoping_generations

larubbioon Home Is Where the Parking Lot Is [video]

Why not have both? Cities have parks that you can lie and eat out on during the evenings and weekends. They also have dog parks. Free roaming cats are bad for birds, so keep them inside. https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/

larubbioon Scientists are teaching robots how to hunt down prey

Their was a robot in 1999 that hunted slugs and powered itself from their decomposing bodies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/503149.stm

larubbioon Evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age

> Meditation is examination not supression or control.

Just one clarification on this. I recently listened to a talk by Bikhu Bodhi [1] where he said meditation was partially about the suppression of emotion, He then quickly clarified that suppression is different from repression. In suppression you investigate the root cause and work to understand and eliminate that and once done you have suppressed the emotion that springs from it.

So I think to express it in an operational analogy, suppression is finding and eliminating the root cause of an outage, repression would be turning of the alarm and pretending the site isn't down.

[1] http://bodhimonastery.org/the-buddhas-teaching-as-it-is.html

larubbioon Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show

Do you need to buyout all the investors or just enough to give you > 50% (Which Zuck already controls doesn't he?)

larubbioon Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show

I think if you read that article, he isn't pushing 'Black Lives Matter', but rather asked employees to stop crossing it out and writing 'All Lives Matter'

His quote from that article explains it

"'Black lives matter' doesn't mean other lives don't. It's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve. We've never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's."

There may be other cases of him pushing the "left agenda" but I don't think the article you link shows it.

larubbioon Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

Although the food pyramid as originally designed was modified at the request of food industry lobbyists out of fear it would hurt sales.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/invented-foo...

larubbioon What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

The article discusses this. Basically you take the current set of services, and by removing the means testing and eliminating all the separate departments that facilitate them you save money and repurpose it towards this single program.

larubbioon Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

Just to be clear, the article you link to, in the very first paragraph says "It’s too soon to tell for sure" which is much less certain than when you say "has caused a massive loss of jobs"

larubbioon World's Largest Meatpacking Firm Wants to Test Out Robot Butchers

Any article that talks about automating what are currently manual tasks I find interesting, but this article had a quote that stuck out to me.

"Workers are really cheaper than machines," Stull says. "Machines have to be maintained. They have to be taken good care of. And that's not really true of workers."

I wonder how much longer workers will be cheaper than machines, I'm also struck by the bluntness of the attitude towards being good to workers.

larubbioon The Scientific Basis of Cryonics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuhEHNey37Q

The above video is a short demonstration of one such amphibian

larubbioon Amazon Will Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices

This move really saddens me. When I left Netscape to work at Amazon one of the things that I was excited about was a quote from Jeff. "Focus on the customer, not competition." It seems they hve forgotten that.

I found it frustrating when I couldn't stream Prime videos to my android phone (is stock android that different from the version on Fire?)

I found it frustrating (but understandable) when they said they wouldn't support Google TV anymore. (Although the 'support' was letting me watch videos in Chrome).

Now this? It seems like they have forgotten completely about the customer and are focusing solely on the competition.

larubbioon Why Nonstop Travel in Personal Pods Has yet to Take Off

I just wanted to post this since it reminded me of the book "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technol...) which I thought was an interesting story of large technology projects, how they take on a life of their own and why they sometimes fail.