Hacker News Reader

throw_awayon From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next year

I had no idea that ACA prices were so different based on where you lived. I couldn't understand the numbers as I put in my family's stats & saw $600-$800/mo in my current and a couple of my former locations. Then I flipped to a random zip code in WV & it was $2200.

throw_awayon Quacker News

I miss n-gate

throw_awayon Wasting time in tech interviews

Every US state is at-will. The only state that significantly varies from this is Montana, wherein employment is at-will for only the first six months of employment, which would cover your case here.

https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/employment-a...

I think the taboos are less around the law and more around trying to avoid a reputation that the company will can you a couple months after you've perhaps uprooted your life and moved to a whole new city. I wonder if the taboo will lessen in remote work contexts, where the employee is not so expected to uproot their lives for a job.

throw_awayon New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published

McSweeney's, not The Onion

throw_awayon Starbucks may close its bathrooms to the public again

this is pretty wild:

https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/v8p9ga/japanese_poli...

> You can't carry ANY dangerous objects without a justified reason. E.g., you're going camping.

> The blade length is one law. Carrying it without reason is another law.

> Don't leave tools in your car, for example. You can get arrested over a screwdriver.

throw_awayon I quit the tech industry (2015)

One of my favorite musicians. I was not aware of this backstory, but I'm glad it happened :)

https://eeveebeats.bandcamp.com

throw_awayon How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

This used to exist in the US as well:

http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-ai...

I remember these being an entire aisle in the grocery store in the 80s. I think they've been replaced by store brands with more colorful packaging

throw_awayon Show HN: Babeloop, a new music sight-reading webapp

A cool feature would be to take keyboard input. Either 'abcdefg' typed in or else one of those skeuomorphic layouts used by DAWs. Or else even better, if it supported webmidi so someone could plug in a midi keyboard.

I find the mouse clicking to kinda get in my way, though I see why this makes sense for mobile.

Another cool feature would be if it actually played the tone when pressed. Or chords.

But also super cool as is. I've always had trouble remembering bass cleft notes + I didn't even know all those other clefts even existed.

throw_awayon Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of solid steel (2010) [video]

What would happen if you just started with a slug?

throw_awayon Friendlier SQL with DuckDB

Are leading commas allowed? Because otherwise, you've just traded out the inability to comment out the last element for the inability to comment out the first. I never understood this convention.

throw_awayon How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

Here is another, interactive explanation of this phenomenon in IRV, as well as some alternatives that do not suffer this issue: https://ncase.me/ballot/

throw_awayon Ford did what Tesla won’t

Does this mean that US automakers might start making light trucks again? I thought that the reason why they aren't made much any more was due to milage standards, but that wouldn't be an issue for electric trucks.

throw_awayon Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

I'm wondering, what entity enforces a uniqueness constraint on the URLs? Presumably it wouldn't be hard to copy the content & host & create a whole new URL, but what prevents you from just minting using the original URL?

throw_awayon Ask HN: Anyone highlight text as they read?

I am a highlight reader. Going through this thread, I thought it would be nice to automate it, as it's a triple-click to highlight a paragraph in safari.

What if instead, it was just on hover? I'd like to opt into this for just pages with long text, and so I created a bookmarklet.

Using this page:

https://mcdlr.com/css-inject/

I added this naive css:

  p:hover {
    background-color: Highlight;
  }

It works ok, if any fellow highlight readers want to give it a try, but does anyone with any sort of css-fu know how to make it more robust? I tried adding other tag:hovers, but nesting quickly makes this weird. Is there a way to select parents of text nodes?

throw_awayon House passes bill to limit cost of insulin to $35 a month

I went to look up the amendments, of which there was only one, which seems to have been accepted:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/117th-congress/house-amen...

which, on its face, looks pretty boring, but that amendment includes this bill:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolutio...

which decriminalizes cannabis federally.

I'm not saying anything one way or another, but it's rather interesting this hasn't been mentioned.

throw_awayon The Raymond Smullyan Society

Thanks! I had originally found it in Douglas Hofstadter's & Daniel Dennett's anthology, The Mind's I, which I also strongly recommend to those who haven't heard of it.

throw_awayon To Build a Better Ballot: an interactive guide to alternative voting systems

If you expect the first round winner to always win, then what would be the point of doing RCV at all? First round RCV winner is the same as FPTP winner. The entire reason why you would pick RCV over FPTP is because of those cases where first round plurality winner doesn't express the intent of the electorate.

That said, the OP link goes into detail about real issues with RCV & describes superior alternatives.

throw_awayon Ask HN: Is switching from VSCode to Vim worth it?

Watching that video, there's not much in there that you couldn't do with vscode vim plugin. Lots of it was just setting up vim plugins to replicate behavior present in vscode itself. In vscode, these features can also usually (always?) be accessed via the keyboard.

As for mouse-reaching, just flip it over (maybe put a sticky note over laptop trackpads). If you touch it, think, hey, there's probably a way to do this without the mouse. For vim usage, I would also say the same thing about arrow keys (especially in insert mode). Disable these training wheels & see your productivity skyrocket.

throw_awayon The Raymond Smullyan Society

Fave Raymond Smullyan essay:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...

I once printed this out & gave it to a pair of repeat Jehovah's Witness door-knockers I had befriended. Don't know how they took it as the next time they came around my roommates, unaware of our friendship, told them I moved & they never returned.

throw_awayon Legal Scholars Are Shocked by Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts

It's not just being held responsible for one's spouse's opinions (much less actions)— at least one of his own past judicial decisions now seems quite questionable in light of this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/clarence-thomas-only-justice...

throw_awayon Swapping two Numbers without Temporary Variables

This is a variation on xor-swap, but one that suffers from over(/under)flow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm#Variations

throw_awayon The Many Secrets of Georgian Honey

For some reason the idea of aphid honey gives me a "eww bugs" reaction, but then I think, "oh yeah, bees".

throw_awayon Ask HN: Can anything make Git as popular as Subversion?

I think the issue is more that the tools that designers/marketers/salespeople use are moving to cloud solutions that manage versioning internally (figma/google docs/etc). It's harder to do features like multiplayer interfaces in local file-based workflows.

If SVN was so great for these non-developer use-cases, they could all still be using SVN. Just because the devs moved on to git, doesn't mean that SVN was made unavailable to these people. TortiseSVN still makes releases.

throw_awayon Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)

BTW, Jackall expanded that HBR essay into an entire book. Highly recommended if you want to get entirely black-pilled on corporate work. Wikipedia says it was a favorite of Aaron Swartz.

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

throw_awayon IsUserAGoat()

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13375357/proper-use-case...

I guess this is what getting old feels like, but as time goes on, the more I appreciate the curl Easter egg policy

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/12/06/no-easter-eggs-in-cur...

Save it for the doodle. This just seems unbecoming of an OS.

throw_awayon Ask HN: I don't know text editing shortcuts. Should I learn Vim/Emacs/My IDE?

Vim controls are a certain mode of thinking & no offense meant, but it sounds like you haven't delved too deeply into them. The complexities come when you start to recognize that there are motions and operators and that these can be composed. That you are thinking about arrows means you're not really at that level yet.

First step is to not use arrows any more, especially while in insert mode. Put this in your .vimrc (or jet brains equiv):

  inoremap <left> nop
  inoremap <right> nop
  inoremap <up> nop
  inoremap <down> nop

Insert mode arrows destroy vim brain.

Then, once rid of these broken "training"-wheels learn some of the more advanced motions and operators. https://vim-adventures.com is fun.

The emacs/readline shortcuts are nice in MacOS text fields and in the command line, but there are only a handful I use regularly (^A, ^E, ^K, ^U, ^L). I would use vim-bindings in the shell, but I haven't found a good way to indicate my current mode, so I get confused & don't like it.

throw_awayon Ask HN: Does anyone else miss TouchID?

For me, the biggest pain point with Touch ID was that it didn't work well in the rain, which is precisely the moment when the touch screen for manual password doesn't work all that great either.

I'm hoping masks are more of a transient thing, long-term, than the rain.

throw_awayon Facebook staff now to be known as “Metamates”

I wonder if there is a compendium of what different companies call their own workers internally. Do all companies do this? Also kinda interesting how it doesn't seem Googlers ever became Alphabeters or whatever

throw_awayon Somehow, Futurama Is Coming Back Again

Has there been more recent news since this?: https://www.nme.com/news/tv/king-of-the-hill-reboot-greg-dan...

throw_awayon Somehow, Futurama Is Coming Back Again

Futurama can still get pretty meta. The first five minutes of the last reboot were about how those responsible for their cancelation were ground into Torgo's Executive Powder.

I think a better example of a return to straightforward comedy would be the King of the Hill reboot.

Also kindof wild to think of telling 1997 me that there would be new episodes of Futurama and KotH 25 years from now.