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Breefield

555 karma · joined September 1, 2010

breefield.com / @breefield
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Breefield··on Men paying to have their jaws broken in the name of ‘manliness’
Gender affirming care for cis people—same as breast augmentation, hair transplants or hormonal/endocrine modifications.
Breefield··on I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle
Thank you.
Breefield··on I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle
You seriously misunderstand how hard it is to have sex reassignment surgery.

Even in states where beginning an HRT regimen is based on informed consent, there are many steps one must go through before having this procedure done. Multiple letters of recommendation from licensed therapists and having been on hormones for years. Not to mention the exorbitant costs even with insurance.

Your suggestion that one could Uber to another city and have SRS performed is a gross mischaracterization of the reality trans people face.

Breefield··on Why are antennas popping up over the Salt Lake City foothills?
I betcha it's https://gristleking.com, he's been advocating for paragliders to use LoRaWAN for a tertiary emergency communications network (primary being Garmin's Iridium network, then cell or perhaps iOS 14's GPS SOS).

The idea is to have multiple means of calling for help + tracking location when free-flying.

Breefield··on Show HN: A tool to help you remember shit you are interested in
I'd like a feature that reminds me of a particular piece of information at a logarithmic cadence so I can commit it to memory better by being reminded a few times within a few weeks/months, but then a nudge 6 months down the line, etc.
Breefield··on Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage
It's laughable this was published citing: "the storage capacity effectively comes free of charge" when the whole mess we're in is the tragedy of the commons.

FWIW, the link to the Google article is much more interesting: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google...

Breefield··on Bouncing a LoRa message off the moon
Why isn't it practical? Background noise makes it unreliable?
Breefield··on Bouncing a LoRa message off the moon
Just a guess: given that LoRa operates on line of sight, when trying to update a gateways with sensor status (e.g. GPS position of tracked item) the operator won't be able to get realtime reports if the gateway isn't positioned at a high enough altitude relative to the sensor.

You can mitigate this by having many gateway/collectors at high points on buildings/hills, but bouncing signals off the moon seems like an interesting alternative for connectivity in low coverage locations...

Perhaps this is clear to you I'm just trying to think it through out loud.

Breefield··on Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?
Biased but I've been at ClassPass for 6.5 years for a reason. Everyone has such great attitudes and work life balance is really excellent.

As someone working in the backend I'm super stoked to be able to work with Kotlin in our services.

Breefield··on Homeless encampment grows on Apple property in Silicon Valley
Poe’s law strikes again.
Breefield··on How the World Ran Out of Everything
I haven’t read the article but I find the hyperbolic headline pretty distasteful.

Some countries are experiencing degraded supply chain performance which impacts affordability of goods, and availability as well. The arbitrary, instant gratification SLA that some have come to expect is showing cracks but we certainly haven’t run out of everything.

Breefield··on Why should I put my website to sleep?
No!
Breefield··on Simple bank shutdown goes awry, leaving customers without account access
One finance is close (so far) except that if I spend more than my spend pocket has, the charge is rejected it doesn’t pull from all pockets.
Breefield··on Simple bank shutdown goes awry, leaving customers without account access
They have $700 of mine. I deposited a cashiers check before account closure. They accepted the check then closed my account.

Now I’m being given the runaround as Simple said they’d look into it—didn’t resolve in time and now BBVA is taking over.

Breefield··on Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? (2007)
If you enjoy this article you may like the Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
Breefield··on U.S. senators reintroduce bill to make daylight saving time permanent
Here is the link to the actual bill. I have it bookmarked https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/69?s...
Breefield··on Ether soars above $1k as Bitcoin sets another record
I don't find that these articles acknowledging BTC/ETH clearing the 30k/1k price point provide any value to the discussion surrounding their existence.

Article acknowledges incumbents, pumps them, drops some other altcoin names and provides brief summary of XRP issues with SEC (which we've already discussed here).

Breefield··on Document your code just by hitting “record”
Paircast automatically transcribe the video's audio to text.
Breefield··on CDC declares a federal moratorium on evictions [pdf]
Anecdote time: My tenant said they were denied unemployment. They never tried to negotiate the rent. After 4 months of nonpayment when Oakland formalized my ability to offer them a "Covid19 rent reduction" which wouldn't affect their lease'd rent price on an ongoing basis I gave them a 20% reduction. 7 months later I still haven't received a dime.

I finally decided to look them up on LinkedIn—turns out they used to be a property manager, something I'd overlooked during my background check. I think they just know how long the rope is right now, and how my hands are tied, so they're using the system to their advantage ¯\_(ツ)_/

Breefield··on CDC declares a federal moratorium on evictions [pdf]
Speaking from Oakland CA here where the eviction moratorium is one of the most intense in the country. I think most renters who opt not to pay during eviction moratoriums suspect that being brought to court for rent arrears is akin to squeezing blood from a stone.

My lawyer advised me to negotiate rent to an amount my tenant can pay stating, "the only way you'll be able to collect is by a future collection action, and many times those types of judgments are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on."

I say this all to try and drive the point home, a moratorium on evictions is akin to an implicit rent reduction or rent elimination.

Breefield··on Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
Prior to my joining the team, our homemade migration tool used sequential versioning numbers for filenames, i.e. 001_migration_name.sql, 002_migration_name.sql.

As our team was grew, it was very common to publish a PR, and right before merging realizing you had a conflict with someone else who'd merged to master ahead of you, using your sequence number.

I made a small change to the system, replacing the sequence numbers with unix timestamps and added some previously non-existant tests to cover the migration utility.

Unfortunately the subsequent PR took weeks to be approved by the team/eng leads because there was a lot of hand-wringing about this change. Once it was merged though we never thought about it again, it worked exactly as I'd hoped and nobody ever had to make a final "fix migration name" commit again.

Breefield··on US home construction surges 22.6%, third monthly increase
> Eschew flamebait. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Breefield··on US schools lay off hundreds of thousands
The Elephant In The Brain has a chapter on education which clearly draws a lot from Bryan's book The Case Against Education. Interestingly Bryan Caplan was one of book's pre-publishing reviewers.
Breefield··on PG&E turning off power to protect against fire has created a new disaster
My understanding is that these detection signals can cause fires themselves, as they need to be high enough voltage to traverse the entire length of the line—and as such can spark off said faults and cause fires...
Breefield··on Making $300k in San Francisco can still mean living paycheck-to-paycheck
This, so much of their budget is discretionary for the lifestyle they want to have vs the lifestyle that would let them save.

Atleast they’re contributing to 401k.

Breefield··on Hook on PG&E Tower Eyed as Cause of Deadly Camp Fire
Can you cite this policy change? I could really use this info.
Breefield··on Chinese Company Says It Will Soon Cross $100/kWh Battery Threshold
The 5 lead acid deep cycle's will weight approx 320 lbs, the 100 Ah Lithium Ion is 29lb...
Breefield··on Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
Rugged individualism
Breefield··on Generative Art Finds Its Prodigy
Came here to say this
Breefield··on Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
This.
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