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myfavoritedog

345 karma · joined May 4, 2021

Reachable at quick.rain0360@fastmail.com
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myfavoritedog··on Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
Any time a language forces you to create boilerplate that could be autogenerated by your toolchain, it's not a feature.
myfavoritedog··on I have reached Vim nirvana
Conveniently, the solution is the editor that thousands of developers have taken time to improve over decades so that the author didn't have to start from scratch.

What are the odds that the solution involved a popular, mature tool that the developer could leverage?

myfavoritedog··on Ask HN: Why isn't remote work advertised as a pro environment initiative?
needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices

I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).

I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.

myfavoritedog··on Why America can’t build
they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better

The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.

You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.

myfavoritedog··on Ask HN: How can you buy high quality healthcare?
Can second that recommendation. On top of the good advice in the book about your back, the author also has a lot to say about the missteps a lot of doctors will make in treating back problems. Those missteps can serve as red flags in evaluating your medical practitioners.
myfavoritedog··on Policy punishes disabled people who save more than $2k
And yet, when the Democrats control Congress and the presidency (like they do now, like they did in 2010), they do absolutely nothing to show us how wonderful their programs could be -- if only they had control!

Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.

myfavoritedog··on Troof on Nootropics
I used Dexedrine some years ago because I was dealing with a lack of focus, tiredness, and brain fog.

For the month or so that it worked, it was pretty awesome. My mind felt like it was hammering away and as sharp as I was in my twenties.

Unfortunately, that feeling didn't last more than maybe six weeks. I was advised by some to just increase the dosage, but my heart was already fluttering in my chest at the dosage I was at. Also, my sleep was odd, with weird dreams that would wake me up, preventing me from falling back asleep for hours. Added to that, my blood pressure got stuck over 140 and wouldn't come down.

If I could get a prescription that would give me the benefits of those first weeks of use, without destroying my health, I'd be all over it.

Eventually, my GP noticed that I had a thyroid deficiency that I'm not treating with thyroid hormone. That's helped a great deal with the tiredness and brain fog.

myfavoritedog··on Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
My wife remembers what clothes people wear and the colors of their cars, their houses, and even the shutters on their houses.

I remember what computers people own, what the bread-winners of the family do for a living, and an insane amount of TV and movie trivia.

It's all about what captures your interest.

myfavoritedog··on Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
Probably the same way that they're blaming Trump for Russia's aggression during the non-Trump presidencies before and after the Trump one. It's almost like reality doesn't align with their tribal narrative but they can't give it up.
myfavoritedog··on Ledit: Simple, GPU-rendered, no bullshit text editor
Standard frameworks give you text frames with minimal hooks to customize them and "good enough" performance. They're great for dumping a log file to or for small documents, but when you want the fine control of a text editor that can handle big files, you need to roll your own.
myfavoritedog··on The harsh truth of video games programming
A very difficult aspect of indie game development is that the quality of the end product is easy to discern. We all can tell if someone creates a game that's got good graphics, sound, gameplay, is fun, etc. The indie developer who does all that has a great deal of skill in multiple areas. The harsh truth is that not everyone can be that good.

My daughter when she was around 6 years old loved to put on princess dresses and dance around singing. In her mind she looked and sounded like the cartoon characters in the movies.

One day, I pulled out an old VHS camera and set it up on a tripod for her. She danced in front of it for half an hour, recording a bunch of songs. Then she sat down to watch it. After the first few minutes, she turned to me with tears running from her eyes and yelled, "I stink!" She was inexperienced at dancing and singing, but she knew immediately from watching herself that she wasn't very skilled.

myfavoritedog··on Heuristics that almost always work
That's only true if the burglar knows that the owners ignore the dog's barking.
myfavoritedog··on Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
SSDs gave my laptops longer effective life. Turns out that the main reason my laptops felt so slow after a few years wasn't software bloat. It was cruft in the file system.
myfavoritedog··on FOSDEM 2022 is going on now
You'd think that would be the first sentence on their landing or at least their about page.
myfavoritedog··on Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
Yes, freedom is in equilibrium with collectivism in any functioning society.

The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.

The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.

You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.

myfavoritedog··on Is college worth it? A return-on-investment analysis
The US government should require schools to divulge this information and make sure that students/parents applying for government-backed student loans are keenly aware of and agree to the financial risks implied by the statistics.
myfavoritedog··on California ports among world’s least efficient, ranking shows
Fairness can only be achieved in a competitive environment without unnecessary and contrived leverage. It's really hard to find something fair when unions elect politicians who write laws for unions that allow strangling negotiations that give unions more money to elect politicians who write laws for unions... and on and on.

What happens with that high leverage, low competition environment is you end up with the richest country on earth having huge supply chain bottlenecks and rated as having some of the worst ports in the world.

myfavoritedog··on California ports among world’s least efficient, ranking shows
The withdrawal from Afghanistan should be instructive of why we should not be eager to see a big power-grab from the current administration.

The main three causes of this shipping kerfuffle are: 1. Environmental regulations on trucking. 2. Anti-independent operator laws in CA. 3. Government subservience to the longshoremen union. 4. Overly-aggressive stay-at-home policies and subsidies from COVID.

The current administration would go in the wrong direction on every one of those causes.

myfavoritedog··on Personal finance experts don’t get wealthy by following their own advice
That blog is a false dichotomy built on top of a strawman.

The strawman is that it's all about "getting rich". Ramsey (the one I've heard talk the most) is mostly about just getting people to stop digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt where they will have no hope for even the basic stability that you need to build greater wealth upon.

The false dichotomy is that you either need a side hustle business or you need to follow sound day-to-day money management discipline. Following sound money management discipline is what gets you to the point of having some discretionary income to build your own business.

myfavoritedog··on My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
I applaud your current open-mindedness, although your past open-mindedness could have used a tweak.

If you are serious about looking into meditation further, read Sam Harris’ book Waking Up. Sam Harris is about as far from a “woo-woo bullshit” practitioner as you can get. He was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, and has a PhD in neuroscience.

myfavoritedog··on The Yoghurt Mafia
There’s something really satisfying about making yogurt. I make it a gallon at a time in an instant pot. The family loves it.
myfavoritedog··on Police have been quitting in droves in the last year
I saw a stat a while back that showed that any higher levels of policing of minority communities was directly attributable to higher levels of disturbance reports from within the communities themselves.

So police aren’t just looking for offenders in minority communities. They’re going where the communities are asking them to be.

myfavoritedog··on Police have been quitting in droves in the last year
No True Scotsman defense incoming, as people pretend that a “very very small niche” is what it means when high-profile congressional members put forth positions that are not vigorously denounced by the media and their political allies.
myfavoritedog··on Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video]
Not surprising since those are all Sinclair stations just repeating canned statements.

What’s really scary is when mainstream media outlets from a variety of corporate entities all repeat the exact same talking points that are exactly in sync with one political party.

myfavoritedog··on Start Your Own ISP
Built an ISP back in the mid-90’s with some friends as a startup. Dial-up, ISDN, Frame Relay, DSL, etc.

My one piece of advice is to not overestimate sales. We engineering types tend to underestimate how hard it can be to sell things. We love the “build it and they will come” fantasy. The real world rarely works that way, especially for something as run-of-the-mill these days as internet service.

myfavoritedog··on Senate Unanimously Approves a Bill to Make Juneteenth a Public Holiday
The ironic thing is that the people on Hacker News understand security.

They know that a lack of voter ID, mass mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, lack of chain of custody of ballots, lack of ability to observe the counting of ballots, etc. are all terrible security practices. They practically guarantee fraud in elections.

If you told the average HN reader to secure his banking information like we secure the vote, she would think you're out of your mind. But somehow, a complete lack of ballot security is just dandy. It's almost like some people feel that any means necessary to win is okay.

myfavoritedog··on NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.
We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main outbreak.
myfavoritedog··on How do I opt my access point out of Google Location services?
What does that have to do with Google's use of your SSID? If someone wants to use your SSID signal to image what's going on in your house, they don't need to have first gotten your SSID from google's mapping database.
myfavoritedog··on NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.
Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?

When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.

myfavoritedog··on NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.
I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted.

The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often. I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had something that "surely might have been COVID".

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