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mabcaton Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

One that I like is commonly branded TTGO, a search for "esp32 ttgo" or "esp32 oled battery" will turn up some options.

This is a link to the exact one I bought since you asked: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/283082902927 (not actually branded TTGO, it's a clone)

Why you might like it:

- it has an OLED screen on the board for debugging and status output

- it has a battery holder and charging circuitry for an 18650 on the back of the board for portable powering/"UPS"

- it breaks out all the GPIO lines onto pins

Why you might not like it:

- like many esp32 dev boards it's slightly too fat to go straight into a standard breadboard. You have to join two breadboards to get access to both rows of pins.

mabcaton TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program

I have no inside information on the following... but an effective explosive trace detection screen would go like this.

First, it would be random, with no profiling. Profiling gets defeated by shaving, change of clothing, etc. Random selection can't be defeated.

I would make it resistant to implicit profiling from the operators by saying "wear a watch, every time the seconds reach 0 you select the next person for screening."

Then, I would make it hard to dodge being selected by varying pace through screening, with a rule that "at the selection time you pick the next person through the metal detector, without giving passengers any indication that you've picked, and wait for your selectee who gets screened no matter how much they dawdle or how long the X-ray search takes".

Next time you fly you'll observe that the ETD procedure at Australian airports is consistent with this theoretical design.

mabcaton Ask HN: How to find a mental health professional?

This is something I'm trying to solve, starting with Australia.[0] I'm building the service that I wish existed when I needed a mental health professional, something I can send friends and colleagues to.

It does a lot of what you suggest. I've started from a position of "so you know you want a psychologist" because otherwise the scope is just overwhelming.

Like people have found, fit is the most difficult thing. I think we can improve this with data. But until someone's figured it out, I recommend always calling a therapist on the phone and talking to them a bit, before committing to a session. The phone is scary, but a bad intro call is much less draining and expensive than a bad session.

We're working on enabling online appointment scheduling for the reasons you say, but getting a uniform booking interface for thousands of individual psychologists turns out to be a huge task.

If people wanted to have a look around we have a test link [1] so the human clinical staff know that you don't need help.

[0] https://mindfit.org.au [1] https://mindfit.org.au/demo

mabcaton Building the Commodore computer that should have existed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

That's the book I learned to program from, a compilation of games in BASIC published in 1973. I don't know the truth of the GP's claim but reportedly that book was very influential so there might be something to it.

mabcaton I was a corporate restaurant consultant

Some tactical googling about the orange chicken says Pei Wei. Not from around there, never heard of them, but it’s clear from their menu PDF.

mabcaton Vipassana for Hackers [pdf]

Harris's point is that there are only speech centres on one side of the brain. Both hemispheres have sensory and motor cortices and control of half the body, so the sense in which the right hemisphere is silenced/held prisoner is that it can't generate or understand speech.

If "you" are setting out to converse with the neighbouring regions of your brain, which in my experience is a worthwhile endeavour that does pay off, it'll have to be through visualisations, symbols, images, daydreams, imaginings.

Like any adult language-learning, there are a bunch of practice exercises before you're ready to converse in vivo. As a way in for you: first get a bunch of spare attention through your meditative practice. Then use it to work on visualisation of familiar places like your house/neighbourhood until you can move around fluently. Repeat with a request like "find something red" and notice when a part separate from your monologue locates it without effort/searching. Then start making broader requests for imaginary landscapes or situations and see what replies you get. Be a kind, accepting, fearless conversation partner. Look for surprise and speed as markers of authentic responses from elsewhere than your monologue.

mabcaton Trump administration cracks down on H-1B visa abuse

A relative of mine just got PR in Slovakia and the "money in the bank" requirement is 2400 EUR. While there's a bit more to it and he'll have to meet some visa conditions over the next 5 years if he wants to stay on, the detail was handled swiftly and quite cheaply by a visa agent. Nothing like the US or AU PR experience.

mabcaton Does anyone remember websites?

I have a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet to do that job, as the first thing on my bookmarks toolbar. I'm clicking that thing all the time, it works great. So long stupid sliding navbars, enter-your-email popups, fixed video autoplayers, etc. I think I got it from here: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

mabcaton Show HN: Little Warden, monitoring the tedious things about websites

When your pricing page says "10 checks per URL" etc what does it mean? I assume it means that more things are checked as you move up the tiers but I couldn't find any table of what things were checked at what pricepoints.

Edit: there's a problem with your payments flow. I signed up, paid, and got another prompt to pay. I reloaded that page and saw that my card was saved, so I hit it again and got another prompt to pay. I signed in using the email confirmation and got a prompt to pay showing my card, which then redirected me /subscriptions which 404s. There's an authorisation sitting on my card for a null amount.

mabcaton [dead]

While my car is in the shop getting unsmashed I've had the pleasure of four different cars and four different sound systems in as many weeks. That's how I know the workaround won't get it done on a Peugeot 308. "Spotify's playing? Nah, let's hear that song you like whose name starts with '('. Spotify's grabbed the audio output again, almost as if you opened it again and pressed play? I can help... And you wanted it on single-track repeat, right?"

Never thought I'd be happy to see Carplay again with its 3-ring circus of UI tomfoolery, but there it is.

mabcaton Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

I've been using this Kill Sticky bookmarklet, and it's turned out to be one of life's simple pleasures. Gets rid of menu bars and popovers. It's the most-used thing on my bookmarks toolbar by a factor of about eleventy babillion. It's not automatic like an extension would be, but you'll find you get 80% of what you want with a tiny bookmarklet.

https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

mabcaton Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

Briefly and maybe not 100% truthy: the state of South Australia produces a lot of its electricity from a wind farm. It brings in extra power from another state over a giant cable (the interconnect). A while ago a storm damaged the interconnect and this triggered cascading failsafes that shut down a lot of the state.

The wind farm has been a thumb in the eye of the federal government, who is huge on coal. The feds lost no time blaming the blackouts on renewables and sticking it to SA. Elon Musk offered to install a giant battery in what seemed to be a wild-arse publicity stunt. SA said ok do it, and they're getting a giant battery and their energy independence back.

mabcaton Pop-up bike lanes show that demand exists

There's a sweet spot for bicycle travel: journeys between 2km and 5km are too far for most people to walk, doable on a bike in most climates/terrains without breaking a sweat, and faster on a bike than a car when you account for parking time. Cycle infrastructure is about enabling that sweet spot at both ends, getting people out of cars as well as enabling non-car owners to travel around their whole neighbourhood.

mabcaton Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker

You might like to look into Parnis. The brand is used by a group of Chinese makers producing watches with decent, if budget, internals and styling inspired by famous brands. Some people find it's a good way to see what style of watch will suit them when they're rich, some people think it's cheap plagiarism. I've got two that I'm very pleased with.

If you decide on this path you'll need to do a bit of research and exploring first. A good starting point is this thread: http://forums.watchuseek.com/f72/buying-parnis-read-first-79...

mabcaton The Diary of an Ex-Tesla Intern

What's "Golden Eleven" in reference to?

mabcaton Show HN: Your Own Task Queue for Python

The other "simplest" way is to run the cron job on the web workers, and put something in the job to abort unless this host is the first web-worker instance. (Otherwise your jobs would run multiply on each instance.) That's what we're doing to kick off scheduled tasks for Django and it works well. It'd be very messy if the scheduled tasks created load because backend load in the web layer would really confuse autoscaling, but ours don't.

I'm also running little celery instances on each web worker, using Django as the backend. No SQS/Redis/RabbitMQ, no huge AWS lock in, no having to set up a backend worker layer. In general it's been fine for a year. You don't get good visibility into processing queue length etc but we usually have four bone-idle web workers so there is no queue length. If that might be a fit for your situation I could bang together a blog post or something.

mabcaton Please Make Google AMP Optional

It's not always the user doing the blocking. A lot of sites broke for me when I was in China because they were trying to fetch resources from Google's CDN, which is/was blocked there.

mabcaton An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

My riding school was big on checklisting the bike before every ride: indicators front and back, low beam, high beam, brake light by the lever and the footbrake, horn. Not thrilling either but it's how I found out about my busted horn and busted brake light switch promptly instead of the hard way. In most places riding in traffic is risky enough that it's worth knowing all the bits are working every time.

mabcaton India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green

Digging up and selling our coal has a range of horrible environmental effects both short and long term. Short term includes: massive use of water that we need for agriculture and environmental flows, destruction of marine environment from dredging so coal ships can get in, giant holes in landscape. Long term: more of the same ocean warming that's killed about 50% of the Great Barrier Reef already. Google Adani coal mine for more on what Australians are pissed about. If you'd like a more strictly economic argument, the sale price sure doesn't cover the damage.

mabcaton Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

> Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.

So that's what that was all about. I noticed the changes because for me they reduced the usability of Overcast massively. The features I used the most were resuming the current podcast, playing a different podcast, and setting a sleep timer. All of these things now take double the taps they did before, with much smaller controls that are hard to hit in the car. You tap a podcast and some miscellaneous options jump out. Ugh, when I tap a podcast I want it to open and start playing! The sleep timer durations move around, so it takes 7 presses and some squinting to set a 25-minute timer. By this time my retinas are seared because the UI for that is white even in night mode.

I know full well about swiping in tables and I'd love the old behaviour to be an option. The author could probably make some good coin by making it available as an IAP.

mabcaton Tips for Building High-Quality Django Apps at Scale

Is there a good place or pattern for service methods in Django? I've got some very fat models right now, and it's a DRY improvement over having the fat in the views, but like you say it takes a lot of effort to trace what's going on.

mabcaton Sydney’s solar-powered e-paper traffic signs report zero failures since 2013

I haven't seen the signs used in Sydney for anything except clearways, as pictured in the article. The contrast isn't great but you don't really need high-vis for no-stopping-or-we-tow-you signs.

Judging by their posts on this page, the company that manufactures the signs is clearly hooked up to an IV drip of their own koolaid. Still, for this particular application (temporary parking restrictions) e-paper is much better than the previous solution, which was to print plastic inserts and drive around the city sliding them into tracks on the signs.

mabcaton No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems

Note that negative reinforcement is reinforcement. It reinforces (i.e. encourages) a behaviour by stopping something unpleasant. e.g. your kid asks you nicely to turn off that dad music, you flip the stereo off, your kid feels better and learns to ask nicely. e.g.2. your kid screams that he hates carrots, you take the carrots off the plate, your kid feels better and learns to scream. When you say negative reinforcement you mean punishment.

mabcaton A Primer on DarkNet Marketplaces

I think the screenshot tells a much more accurate story than the text. 120,000 listings for drugs, 1,900 for weapons, no main category for child porn. Based on the listings, the kinds of activity that actually go on would seem to be in reverse order from what the press release suggests. I'm struggling to imagine anyone leaving feedback about how potent a poison was or chatting away about their last 'cache of guns'. I could be wrong.

mabcaton AdultFriendFinder was hacked

Now how did I not know about `make_random_password`? Solid tip, thanks!

mabcaton One Road Out of Depression

To a first approximation, nobody recovers from obesity. Less than 1% of obese people regain a normal weight through any kind of lifestyle change. What works, kind of, is bariatric surgery.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-07/kcl-lco07141...

mabcaton Show HN: A Simple Highway Simulator

The 200ms default reaction time in the simulation is wildly optimistic. I remember 1500ms from rider training and http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/reactiontime.html seems to bear that out.

mabcaton The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting “Doored”

This got discussed in motorbike school. Even if you rode slowly enough to peer into every car you passed, children in the back seat are too short to see. Just don't ride anything in the door zone under any circumstances, it's crazy.