Hacker News Reader

sjburton Cruise blames Outside Lands for driverless car traffic fiasco in San Francisco

What a weird defense; Grant Ave/North Beach is nowhere near Outside Lands (in Golden Gate Park).

sjburton A Blog Post with Every HTML Element

I remember the arms race between these kind of framing sites (often increasingly scammy) and sites that did not want to be framed and had various anti-framing scripts.

sjburton Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

The eviction moratorium is still active in SF, Oakland and Berkeley.

sjburton James Webb Space Telescope reveals Fomalhaut's disk in detail

It’s so the sun and the earth will always be in the same direction and both can be hidden behind the sun shield.

sjburton 432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Space Taped Out

Ingenuity had a Snapdragon, but there was also a redundant pair of arm r5f microcontrollers (which are also lockstepped dual-core processors, so quadruple redundancy) where the flight controllers were, and a rad-tolerant FPGA (proasic) that watchdogged everything else. The Snapdragon was used for less critical code such as imaging and comms.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

sjburton First Republic Bank files 8-K – Tech only 4% of total deposits; no sector >9%

If there is a run, it's a question of whether they have enough liquid cash. If they run out they have to start selling things unless they can somehow get some other kind of cash injection.

sjburton Ask HN: Is it a bad time to apply to FAANG companies?

The piece I would be worried about is getting hired and either losing the offer or getting laid off after a few weeks/months when the next round of layoffs comes down.

If you are currently unemployed, maybe there's not much opportunity cost there.

sjburton Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)

I treat Slack DMs like email and respond when I have time dedicated to it. Very rarely found a situation where that was not acceptable. Adding do-not-disturb times and calendar integration helps a lot too--people can tell when you are not working, in a meeting, or in a focus mode.

The big problem with Slack is when a multi-party discussion starts about a topic and you need to make immediate input or be left out. I haven't found a fix for this, but it's really the same problem as coworkers talking in the break room, so I'm not sure if the blame can be laid at Slack-type tools.

sjburton Incoming potentially catastrophic storm for SF area

No, don’t “take it with a grain of salt”. Ignore it completely and don’t repeat it. It is complete and utter crap.

sjburton Existing smartphones will connect with new satellite constellations in 2023

Search-And-Rescue, not Synthetic Aperture Radar.

sjburton Jack Dorsey: “I grew the company size too quickly”

That was almost a bragging point for quite a while. It was definitely not hip to work on ads or even search.

sjburton TSMC approaching 1 nm with 2D materials breakthrough

The particular measurements of the elements are not interesting, but the transistor densities are meaningful. I would expect a 1nm chip to achieve densities 100x a 10nm chip. That seems unlikely.

sjburton Take Advantage of Git Rebase

You have to force push, but you have to do that when pushing a rebased branch as well. In either case it’s a history rewrite. It’s not a big deal unless other people have pulled that branch—if they have they will need to reconcile things on their end as well.

sjburton Can We Throw Satellites to Space? [video]

The US has had (for several decades) guided artillery shells, both optical and inertially guided. These get launched from battleship cannons and deploy fins to guide them to the target. The inertial guidance is almost more surprising, it means the IMU can not only survive being launched, but has enough sensitivity to double integrate accurately through both the launch and free fall.

sjburton Can We Throw Satellites to Space? [video]

The frustrating thing is that the skepticism always centers on basic physics/engineering problems that clearly have been solved before such a design would break ground. Nobody builds a giant centrifuge and says "Oh I didn't expect such high g forces!"

The areas I'm skeptical about are whether customers will be able or willing to design for 10,000G loads, and what market remains once Starlink can bring 120,000 kg to LEO at once. that fits a lot of small satellite ride shares.

sjburton How we renamed our Design Converter to Magical Ass

That happened something like 100 years ago.

sjburton Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

Seems like less of a problem for smart thermostats (which will likely adjust to an odd-number start time based on your actual patterns and the heating speed of your house) versus the clock-based thermostats where everyone just had set it to 6am because that was the default and it was a pain in the ass to change it.

sjburton It is your responsibility to follow up (2019)

Tech recruiters seem to have some kind of god-awful candidate management software that sends follow ups automatically now. It's always the worst recruiters.

sjburton Basement Fertility

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhDMqe8boEY...

I don't see any correlation at all.

sjburton Vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 detected in London, UK

Wait, San Francisco has combined sewers, but they treat the combined sewage before it goes into the bay. Does London not treat their sewage?

The big problem in San Francisco is that during severe rainstorms the flow rate overwhelms the treatment plant so they have to dump the overflow. but at that point it is mostly rainwater so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

sjburton A forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting

What if they are two? Or 100? With different experiences post replication?

sjburton Two envelopes problem

I love this problem because it is so simple, and the false line of reasoning is so compelling that it would hardly raise an eyebrow if you saw it in an academic paper and yet the conclusion is so obviously wrong. Decision problems are tricky and in non intuitive ways.

sjburton Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo

I think a better comparison is what similar apps would sell for. 2-4x annual revenue seems to be common. So $12-$24k which is not bad!

sjburton The big six matrix factorizations

The problem set for the stanford linear dynamic systems that he taught is also fantastic. The level of difficulty and the breadth of applications leaves you with so many tools.

sjburton FAA changes course on eVTOL certification

The Joby vehicle looks like it would be capable of controlled descent, it has decent sized wings.

sjburton How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

The borders are based on census tracts with low average income. The complete list of zones is here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-18-48.pdf

I'm not sure who draws census tract lines.

sjburton 65k fake students enrolled in the California junior college system

Typically you get a small amount, somewhere in the order of $500 per term, refunded directly to you for personal expenses, textbooks, etc. I think certain students may qualify for more.

sjburton UML Diagrams Designer via Code

You can drag or modify the items in the diagram and it changes the UML, that's actually pretty neat. PlantUML normally only goes code to diagram.

sjburton Push Options: Control Gitlab CI/CD and Merges with Git Push

One of the things I miss about phabricator was how much you could do via the CLI (clunky and weird as it was), nice to see something similar in Gitlab but I wish it wasn't so obscure.

sjburton Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

I feel like if there's good documentation, you don't need me. Similarly, the best leverage I can have is improving documentation or making documentation unnecessary through better interfaces.