HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

phoobahr

112 karma · joined March 10, 2011

submissionscomments
phoobahr··on Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost
LLMs as “AI” is a scam, and a dead end.

They might be useful for some things in some situations and they are here to stay… for now. They won’t be the future though.

phoobahr··on 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos
Immaterial - no liberal government in Canada could be said to be “far left”.
phoobahr··on Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?
It's even better with a "AeroPress Flow Control Filter Cap". No dripping, no inversion, and a little extra resistance improves the cup (I think).
phoobahr··on The Ruby community has a DHH problem
Ah yes. Complaining about brown people in the capital of a decayed empire that spanned the globe. The sun never sets on this crap.
phoobahr··on The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press
“The best downloaded for iOS/ipados” is yt-dlp. Install in ashell, view with VLC.
phoobahr··on Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+
He spouted every kind of hateful shit, and surrounded himself with even more vile shitstains. Every terrible thing imaginable was put on the table. Some Americans may not have liked the alternative but this election was never about “better” or more tolerable” or any thing else except shortsighted hate.

Reap what you so, this turd sand which does what it said on the tin.

phoobahr··on Why you should not immigrate to Canada
spoken as someone who doesn't need health care (yet) spoken as someone who doesn't need schools (yet) spoken as someone who doesn't need reliable infrastructure (wtf?)

Better take-home pay only counts if you don't need the things taxes pay for, or (apparently) don't need a supporting community that does need them. That situation, though, is a lot like saying "I'm a CEO with my own jet - I don't need no stinking' roads" but then can't sell anything because all of their product and all of their employees need roads to get to work, to ship, to function.

phoobahr··on Pandas 2.0
In addition to this here's one really specific case: ever had a pandas groupby().apply() that took forever often mostly re-aggregating after the apply?

With columnar data DuckDuckGo is somuchfaster at this.

For one of my projects I have what sounds like a dumb workflow: - JSON api fetches get cached in sqlite3 - Parsing the JSON gets done with sqlite3 JSON operators (Fast! Fault tolerant! Handles NULLs nicely! Fast!!). - Collating data later gets queried with duckdb - everything gets munged and aggregated into the shape I want it and is persisted in parquet files - When it's time to consume it duckdb queries my various sources, does my (used to be expensive) groupbys onthefly and spits out pandas data frames - Lastly those data frames are small-ish, tidy and flexible

So yeah, on paper it sounds like these 3 libraries overlap too much to be use at the same time but in practice they can each have their place and interact well.

phoobahr··on Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London
If you're particularly envious you may want to consider asking how those who can't drive make do in your location. Life's about making choices and seeking different perspectives might help change and/or inform your priors.
phoobahr··on SQLite 2022 Recap
Similarly one of my most important projects reads a lot of api calls returning serialized json. Those calls are expensive so I have, over time, tried many complicated cacheing mechanism.

These days though it's _so_much_simpler_and_cleaner_ to just wrap the call in a decorator that caches the request to sqlite3 and only makes the call if the cache is stale.

I don't worry about parsing the results or doing any of the heavy lifting right away - just cache the json.

Sqlite is so good at querying those blobs and is so fast it's just not worth munging them. Nice.

And using something like datasette to prototype queries for some of the more complicated tree structures is a breeze.

phoobahr··on Ask HN: M1 MacBook Pro/Air users, how is it going?
Similar situation here; I try not to unplug mine :)

That being said the heat output is so low my mini lives in a drawer and serves to host time machine, a Jupiter notebook server, media server and a couple parallels VMs.

The fact that it just as easily serves up a display on my tv, iPad, Chromebook etc is extremely nice. It's been reliable enough to act like an appliance & fast enough that I never worry what else is running.

phoobahr··on Long Covid: A Parallel Pandemic
Covid-19 is a vascular disease. Turns out several organs (not just lungs) have a lot of vascular area.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7556303/ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2022.8248...

Similar to, say, an ABI but more so, there's no reason to think that cases would present identically. Complex systems-of-systems in homeostasis can be expected to have breakdown behaviour that clusters around some targets with a very very long tail of other less common features.

phoobahr··on Quebec Sovereignty Movement
Nope - this is a real issue inside our domestic borders. The country has two official languages but only one region that legislates one of them as second class.

Additionally - Quebec's insistence on "protecting their distinct and unique culture" tramples all over the rights of other demographics important to the formation of the country. Ex: Montreal sits on unneeded Mohawk land and the insistence on French (very Quebecois French, see numerous stories of relocating citizens of France not passing the competency requirements) but you can't get served in any Iroquoian language and in much of the north many citizens speak dialects of Cree as a first language.

So you have Indigenous people who were trampled, those who signed treaties that were then broken and/or ignored, the Metis who at least got a slightly better deal having negotiated later and spent a lot of blood, and then the Quebecois who were (basically) on the loosing side of a war & abandoned by the mother country in favour of sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

And of course they get the best deal with untenable consequences and have to be entertained every time there's a complaint that can't possibly be backed up. Whether a referendum ever actually passes the province simply can't afford to separate so, uhh, yeah. Sweetheart deals (when compared to everyone else) because, simply put, racism.

So keep some of the context in mind when Canadians complain that the province will outlaw "bonjour-hi" but you can still be served in English at nearly every fast-food joint in Montreal but might very well not get admitted to a hospital because your French isn't proficient enough.

phoobahr··on iPadOS 16
I do primarily use it as a laptop... but ~30% of the time it comes off the case and gets carried for data input. Then it's the best tablet I can spend money on, has a very responsive stylus and weighs about the same as a clipboard and pad.

It's the most flexible computer I own. It could be even more so, which I would appreciate, but that depends largely on apple.

For the work I do I can code *locally* but I *don't have to*. Comparing it to a Switch is completely missing what makes them different. Even an attempted reductio ad absurdum should be a little more rigorous than that.

phoobahr··on iPadOS 16
Sorry, I haven't used it so I can't say.
phoobahr··on iPadOS 16
I write a lot of python. A fair chunk of inside Jupiter notebooks. Safari is a capable browser for accessing remotes juypter lab servers and there are a couple developers one-upping each other & producing pretty good options for local development with native libraries.

When I'm home I don't really need the iPad for this (much). There a few use cases where it's clearly better than my MacBook Pro though: the screen is veerry nice outside and I've written more in a hammock than you'd think. Also - airplanes which I am on more often than I'd like to be. an iPad Pro with the magic keyboard is fantastically shallow. It fits on a tray better than anything else.

phoobahr··on iPadOS 16
Blink: <https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...>, or Shellfish: <https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...>, or aShell: <https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...> for a local shell, or iSH: <https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...> for an emulated shell. I'm sure there are others.

I don't know about C#, it's not an ecosystem I swim in at all, but there are multiple python options (including Pyto, the venerable Pythonista and jupyter notebook hosts like Juno & Carnets). There are js environments like Scriptable and Play.js. And it's not Xcode but Swift Playgrounds offers, of course, swift including swift.ui and the ability to redistribute those projects (with some limitations) including submitting directly to the App Store.

I get it; I use an iPad a lot for a great many things. It's not perfect - I have a long list of things I would like to see addressed. Low effort complaints like "let me know when I can code on it" are just that though; low effort. So those who complain "how to code on it?" or about how it exactly match the workflow they use on a completely different platform etc just sound.... whiney.

Low effort noise when some basic infrastructure could enable so many other workflows. I like my iPad, I use it every day, I hope to use more with less friction soon-ish. Yup, same thing every June.

phoobahr··on More Users Flock to Mastodon After Musk's Twitter Acquisition Bid
Not to mention: media relations, community management & risk exposure are all really really hard problems. Hard problems that an entity like twitter has to sink huge effort into just to be bad at it.

Musk brings absolutely nothing to the table in any of these arenas and has been publicly terrible at at least two of them.

The internet is full of agendas, opinions and viewpoints. All this move shows is that there's also at least one idiot will to watch 45billion evaporate.

Ok, ok, it's Elon. So he's willing to talk about it and anything substantiative coming out of this will probably arrive just after full autonomous self driving vehicles.

phoobahr··on Trudeau announces intention to freeze bank accounts of protestors
Here's some money to go f--k with another country's capital.

This is not a good look.

phoobahr··on A wake-up call for iPhone users – it's time to go
Well just try using google in China for one thing.

I really don't get the outragefilter here - Apple (take 'em or leave 'em) lays out for the public a system for checking uploaded content for illicit material that everyone else is already checking for and just didn't tell you. And somehow the disclosure is reason to get pissy?

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying the only alternative is to love the largest corp that's ever existed because that's a dumb-ass false dichotomy. I just don't understand the vitriol expressed in certain quarters over this issue when you know that the rest of FAANG, and smaller players, are doing no less and never even bothered to figure out how to do so with even an iota of respect for their users. Hell y'know google's using your photo backups to sell you advertising at least, training models in the mid, and at worst going to comb through everything you ever brought within their arms reach the moment local law enforcement makes them. If they're not doing so already.

phoobahr··on Why do people think that the US won WW2 in Europe?
The US is a super power built on stolen land with stolen labour and stolen IP that really "came into it's own" on a tide of stolen valour post WWII.
phoobahr··on Put macOS on the iPad, You Cowards
A less flexible, but _much_ more performant option, is <a href="https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/">ashell.app</a>
phoobahr··on This Startup is solving epilepsy with biosensors and AI
Guh, this is truly terrible.

>CAN EPILERT PREDICT SEIZURES? >Epilert cannot predict or prevent seizures. >Our technology is designed to detect patterns that could be >associated only with motor seizures for now. However, we are >gathering EDA data to try building behavioral and emotional >profiles relative to non-motor seizures that will help >scientists better understand these types in the future.

>WHAT TYPES OF SEIZURES IS EPILERT DESIGNED TO DETECT? >Epilert Bracelet is made to detect motor seizures that can >be focal or generalized and could be tonic-clonic or from >another motor type.

So.... thanks for 'solving' the I-had-a-locomtor-seizure-and-I-guess-I've-fallen-and-can't-get-up-please help-me-problem. Thanks but not thanks; already have a toolbox of coping strategies for that. Call me back when you've got a 'solution' for: * please don't arrest me for public intoxication - I'll be better in 20minutes * here's a record of everything that happened 60minutes before and after an absence seizure (that this won't detect) 'cause I don't remember any of it * having a shitty day and I can't tell what you're feeling, what I'm feeling or how to feel about the meta. Please leave me alone but, well, don't fire me ok? * is this headache signalling a migraine or a seizure? They both suck but my best options are dramatically different

There are so many things that could be so much better with some unobtanium applied to this field... but detecting tonic clonic seizures is... underwhelming. This is no kind of solution but mightpossibly* be a tool in the toolbox; that's about it.

phoobahr··on Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
"when Dropbox was announced"

This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.

phoobahr··on The Reshaped Mac Experience
This is also what I generally want and we're not alone. There are a few active projects to facilitate this. Personally I like <ahref=https://freemacsoft.net/tiles/">Tiles</a>
phoobahr··on Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business
Funny how the reliable services are regulated utilities and the unreliable ones are byproducts of advertising companies.
phoobahr··on Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business
This is not a helpful take when there are actual nazi's - right over there - talking about (and doing) nazi shit.

And the thing about shit is it does splash damage.

When cesspools like twitter and facebook finally give up their add revenue from the flies circling said shit and the turds have to go live in a latrine maybe _just_maybe_ someone should be asking "Are we the baddies?".

Furthermore when someone does try to start cleaning up this shit, and it's always a terrible nasty thankless job, and you're inconvenienced because you're standing too close maybe the question shouldn't be "what about my rights?" But "why the hell am I here in the first place?"

Shit.

phoobahr··on Why Americans Have Been Deceived About Canada's Health Care System
"right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. Qualified individuals may be required to pay the entire premium for coverage up to 102% of the cost to the plan."

Yeah, no, that's not the same thing at all. As a Canadian I have health coverage I can, y'know, live with regardless of whether I'm employed or not. And buying coverage in the US (with a pre-existing condition) was absolutely not worth it (even considering the wage gap) when I entertained a few offers in the early oughts.

Staying here means I have substantially better freedom of movement and negotiating power. In the US the "freedom" to not have healthcare just seems to mean that everyone has the "freedom" to pay more - and often for less.

phoobahr··on GFXBench: Apple M1
Probably because the announced hardware is clearly entry level. The only model line that gets replaced is the MacBook Air which has been, frankly, cheap-is and underpowered for a long time.

So you have a platform that is (currently) embodied by entry level systems that appear to be noticeably faster than their predecessors. Apple has said publicly that they plan to finish this transition in 2 years. So more models are coming - and they'll have to be more performant again.

It seems pretty clear that the play here runs "Look here's our entry level, it's better than anyone else's entry level and could be comparable to midlevel from anyone else. But after taking crap for being underpowered while waiting for intel to deliver we cn now say that this is the new bar for performance at the entry level in these price brackets."

phoobahr··on Apple announces ‘One More Thing’ event for November 10th
And, at that time, a mandatory stylus meant (likely) a resistive not capacitive touch screen.
Page 1 of 3Next →