Hacker News Reader

t413on Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

I think what it's missing is the full lack of cars. You still don't own your streets in SF! The few days Valencia street was closed to traffic in lockdown, for example, were incredible. Street musicians and people dancing, tables and picnics all over with people who wanted coffee having dinner with friends who wanted pizza alongside vegan sushi. It didn't feel like a party for festival, it felt like _life_.

t413on Solar is dirt-cheap and about to get even more powerful

Sunpower. Here's a list of panels sorted by efficiency: (just one I've been using while researching for a project)

https://www.energysage.com/solar-panels/?noidx=true&sort_by=...

I think they're the only on-the-market 22% efficient panel. This bloomberg article talking about 700W panels is inane, they just increased the panel size past the standard commercial 1mx2m.

t413on 100M more IoT devices are exposed via Name:Wreck

I'm a bit stumped about how to look for vulnerabilities for this. The linked tool, https://github.com/Forescout/project-memoria-detector doesn't mention the exploit and there's no list of specific vulnerabilities. Any idea folks?

t413on California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash from Having to Reclassify Drivers

My understanding is that a ballot measure must be modified only by ballot measure. Adding in a 7/8ths clause is a way of allowing, with difficulty, the legislature to change things.

t413on Apple removes then restores DoNotPay app in the App Store

As of now it appears to still be up: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/donotpay/id1427999657

t413on US military increasingly using drone missile with flying blades in Syria

Yeah, the headline seems to imply it’s some new ‘big bad’ where the article just slowly exposes that it’s a non-explosive missile. Killing fewer people by not combusting the surrounding area sounds like an improvement.

t413on Apple Lightning

Actually, yes. At least anecdotally– I _had_ to do this when my iPhone 5's lightning port was damaged.

When traveling overseas a cheap charger died, partially frying my lightning port. The phone completely refused to charge and I grew more and more desperate as the battery slowly drained over the next day before eventually dying. Now trying again to charge the dead phone had a surprising result: it actually charged enough to boot up! Ridiculously: it then stopped charging once booted and drained again in about 2 minutes.

The solution I developed was to plug it in _then_ power it off and it would charge (slowly) while completely powered down. Removing power for even a moment would boot the phone and stop charging.

I'd absolutely guess that, in a pinch, you could charge your modern iPhone with a non-working cable if you did the same procedure: plug in, power off, let charge while off.

t413on Google Maps Hacks

+1 agreed– just a toggles for 'disable traffic optimization' and 'prefer 2+ lane roads' would do the trick.

I'm definitely adding a pretty bad outlier to real-time traffic data about stopped traffic.. Very similar to what this cute hack is doing.

t413on Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

It may feel super cozy and normal when driving a car around– but the reality is that it's a metal multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. I'm sympathetic to your plight but.. really it _should be stressful._

Especially in a pedestrian-heavy center where walking should be (and thankfully is!) the norm like in Berkeley.

t413on Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

Low Earth Orbit.

t413on Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

> and it's why I no longer ride my bike in the city anymore

So is your response to just drive a car then? That's a most-poignant tragedy of the commons.

t413on Tesla Model 3 becomes best-selling car in Switzerland

I've met [Phil Sadow](https://www.fastcompany.com/90209541/meet-the-renegade-whos-...) the other day in Berkeley, he's pretty fully p0wned the S,3,X systems and replaced the tesla endpoints up with his own server. If you're really worried about this enough then there may be a way.

t413on Marine Electric: A Wreck That Changed the Coast Guard

It's true, well done planet. [google maps view](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mobjack+Bay/@37.3314833,-7...)

t413on Oslo made its city center basically car-free

You're not wrong, and this is the same argument used in regards to bicycling. Something I hear all the time: 'You ride in this city?! Isn't it super dangerous?' When the solution is armor-up with a car and contribute to problem I just think we're thinking about it wrong.

t413on Count the people around you by monitoring wifi signals

It's a great example of the breakdown in understanding of a system. People envision WiFi as a wireless pipe or cable whereas in reality you're broadcasting in every direction out to infinity.

When reality doesn't match peoples' expectations they legislate a 'fix' (making listening illegal) rather than fixing the fundamental technical issue (with encryption, randomized IDs, etc).

t413on The Psychology of Japanese Train Stations

Those 'ultrasonic deterrents' should be completely illegal to deploy on/near any publicly accessible property. Having run into them many times over the years here in the US they're horrifically loud, painful, and less of a deterrent and more a punishment for having less-degraded hearing.

t413on Why I Regret Making My House a Smart-House (2013)

Sure: amazon.com/gp/product/B00HPIYJWU is the door sensor and amazon.com/gp/product/B00E1OVFAK are the dimmers I have.

t413on Why I Regret Making My House a Smart-House (2013)

Yes, it seems like Control 4 was the root of his problem. My architect aunt always builds homes with similar expensive and locked-in systems and although they do seem to last reliably for years they're 10's of thousands of dollars and locked into a certain set of functionality and hardware. But there are alternatives now.

My $50 Wink hub runs my apartment's 5x $30 z-wave dimmers, 1x $25 front door sensor, and 1x $75 z-wave thermostat and 1x $15 cree xbee LED bulb I cannibalized to drive some low voltage LED fairy lights. That's $315, ordered piecemeal and all delivered amazon prime. It's been rock-solid reliable for about two years. I recently added Amazon Alexa voice control and used the open source 'HomeBridge' node project to add Siri integration (which ROCKS).

There are inexpensive connected-home systems now. Spend an afternoon wiring one up!

t413on Flying Aquila: Early lessons from the first full-scale test flight

This is the only article of original substance on the internet, everyone else copied pieces from it. I still can't find an answer (or even anyone asking the question): How does it land?

There's no landing gear, it takes off from a dolly, and it's only designed to stay up for 'months at a time.' Does this mean it needs extensive repairs after it crash lands on runways that are half its width? The ScanEagle UAS also has no landing gear but is small enough to be caught by a cable mid-air [1].

Having no journalists present for their test launch and only getting officially produced videos and non-critical reposts is not enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w88uCC2Jv48

t413on El Capitan and Homebrew

Will homebrew switch the default install location out of /usr/local for new installations then? I doubt most developers will want to dive into recovery mode just to install wget.

t413on Irving, TX ninth grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school

Thanks for this! I offered a FaceTime tour of our scientific robotics labs. When I was in middle school learning and playing with electronics I would've loved that.

t413on Is it just me or is networking really hard?

Boost ASIO for me. The ability to single threaded high-speed servers and then to extend to multithreaded with a things like thread pools and atomic stores is invaluable.

t413on Simple genetic models for autism spectrum disorder

"This model makes strong and as yet not fully tested predictions, namely that females are the primary carriers in cases of genetic transmission"

No kidding. Quite interesting though, especially when combined with "The high reproductive costs of autism ensure that most strongly associated genetic mutations are short-lived" and ASD showing a gender bias toward males.

t413on Whiteboard Clock

The writing on this one is much nicer! Add selective erase so only one character is (usually) ever erased and you've got yourself a very neat novelty clock.

t413on A trucker trying to hack the haulage industry [video]

   you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop

True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. Add in-wheel pressure and temperature sensors-- plus scheduled maintenance checkups and that problem mostly goes away. There are also numerous examples of adaptive control systems landing aircraft after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle.

You bring up good difficulties. Still-- most of those problems have solutions and I sure hope it's sooner than 50 years from now we see self-driving long-haul trucks on the road.

t413on Show HN: Picky Pint – Scan beer lists with a photo

Very similar to WhatWine App (http://www.whatwineapp.com): ocr menu parsing and reviews / recommendations. Cool! (Not my app, just saw it at a hackathon)

t413on A "Hacker's" Guide to the Bay Area

The fitness section missed rock climbing! It's a great community that's very popular with young engineers. Mission Cliffs (touchstone gyms) and Planet Granite are the big names and there's endless beautiful real rock around the area to be found too.

t413on Live map of SF MUNI

Replicate the functionality of transloc (try ncsu.transloc.com) and it'll be golden. Filtering routes and visible route paths!

t413on A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon

The financial companies are the most technology adverse group out there. They are risk handling and money moving engines and not interested in innovation. Every advance in technology is a direct result of legislation (like the recent addition of check scanning at ATMs) and legislation never follows the cutting edge.

t413on Script for clicking Proceed button at Google Play cart every 4sec to buy Nexus

Legendary. Was working on building this exact kindof thing but you beat me to it. Took 1.5 minutes and it worked.

However, it HAS NO DETECTION OF SUCCESS, there is a popup not a page change. If I did it again I'd save the setInterval() result id and then use clearInterval(thatVar) when it works.