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DougWebbon US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

That may have been the reason for mothballing the old ship designs, but why weren't the new ones nuclear powered? That seems to be independent of the missile launcher design.

DougWebbon Google’s Nest will provide data to police without a warrant

For me, the difference is that the phone (with voice assist turned OFF) is not supposed to be listening all the time, while a device like Alexa is supposed to be listening. I don't want devices listening so I turn that feature off when I can and avoid the device when I can't.

Is the phone listening anyway? Maybe, but that violates a privacy expectation, and there may be recourse if someone discovers it's doing that.

DougWebbon There’s a new hole in the ozone layer, and it’s even bigger than the other ones

Yeah but isn't the absolute measure the one that matters? Because the ozone is blocking UV radiation, and it's the absolute amount of ozone that determines how much radiation is blocked, not the relative amount of ozone in one area vs another.

At best, the relative measure might act as an early warning of a problem. But it could also just be turbulence in a chaotic system. So it's harder to decide if it matters or not.

DougWebbon What comes after Git

That's kind of the point. The hash guarantees a chain of commits/changes. If you're rewriting history, you're creating a new chain, and all the changes along that chain need to be reverified.

DougWebbon 3D-Printed Homes for Sale in Austin

Matt Risinger did a few videos about these homes:

https://youtu.be/_MsOXrprYXs

https://youtu.be/QCWKJvsqjb4

https://youtu.be/N47Mhc7QEds

DougWebbon Apple Unveils M2

I've been running an Odyssey from Seeed Studio for a while now, as an in-house dev server running SQL Server and IIS. It's the form factor you want, and it's been flawless (even though it's underpowered for what I'm doing with it.)

https://www.seeedstudio.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=win10

DougWebbon Make Linux look like Windows 95

I originally used a ZX-81. Can't say I miss the UI.

DougWebbon Google Search Is Dying

I added the quotes because I wasn't getting what I wanted without them. I don't need the user manual; I already have that and I'm not just trying to clean it. I wanted to find a guide to fully disassembling it, like the videos you find for phones when you want to replace a cracked screen yourself. Knowing that there are no matches at all is good information. (Disappointing, but good.) Trying to give me results for a different query, apparently assuming that I accidentally used the exact-match-only quotes, is not useful and kind of condescending. I think that's what leads people to think the quotes don't work the way they used to. Finally, the wording about not many good matches makes it sound like there are some good matches, but they've been mixed in with these other irrelevant matches. That's probably just a wording issue on the message, trying to soften the "We can't find anything" result.

DougWebbon Google Search Is Dying

Mobile doesn't show that, at all. It also doesn't show that bit if you use the brand name "kitchenboss" instead of "kitchen boss", which I originally intended. My phone might have auto-corrected that without me noticing.

Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says:

    Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes):
    It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search

Then it goes on to show me lots of unrelated results, instead of showing me the 'not many' great matches for my search. If my search doesn't turn up many good results (let alone great), that fine. Show me what you've got, let me decide how to broaden my search to get more. All of the unrelated results being shown are marketing spam sites. That's not helpful.

DougWebbon Google Search Is Dying

I want to disassemble my sous vide device, because I broke it today.

"kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%2...

Nothing useful at all. Nothing mentioning disassembly. Not even a YouTube link.

DougWebbon High beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching

I just looked up the eggs I buy: Vital Farms pasture-raised eggs through Amazon Fresh. Currently $7/dz. They come with a url and farm id code you can use to see a live web cam of the hens that laid the eggs in the pack you're holding.

DougWebbon The Sound of Silence: A Noise Map of the U.S.

Not surprising that my area, 12 miles from NYC, is one of the noisiest places in the country. A little more surprising is that it's still the noisiest just from natural sources.

Luckily, my tinnitus is noisier than both, so it doesn't matter where I live. I can't tell the difference.

DougWebbon Newly identified hormone may be a critical driver of type 1 and type 2 diabetes

Type II is caused by chronic ingestion of excess carbohydrates, which leads to insulin resistance in those who are genetically susceptible to it. The mechanism is that the carbohydrates are broken down into glucose in your blood, which must be removed because high blood glucose for an extended period causes severe disease. Higher insulin levels drives glucose into your muscles until they can't take any more, your other cells until they can't take any more, your liver until it can't take any more, and then stored as body fat until your fat cells can't take any more. When everything is full, higher and higher levels of insulin are needed to stuff more and more glucose wherever it can be stuffed. That's Type II diabetes.

DougWebbon Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s

Because calorically inert and metabolically inert are not the same thing.

DougWebbon Microsoft and the Metaverse

One of the reasons I bought a Quest 1 was because it has apps that can connect to my Plex server and play 3D movies. It's neat, and nicely replicates the 3D theater experience including barely being able to see clearly through the grubby lenses. I only have a few 3D movies and don't bother watching them anymore.

I do still watch lots of 2D content using the Quest, though. I like the immersive feel of watching movies and TV on theater-sized screens with none of the visual distractions in my living room.

DougWebbon Show HN: Scribe generates step-by-step guides for GUI workflows

I skimmed very quickly, and this seems pretty similar to the Windows built-in tool Problem Steps Recorder. I assume it's cross-platform, which is a nice advantage. Any other big differences?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-steps-to-...

DougWebbon Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?

Radiation on the other hand is all but permanent.

No it isn't. The purpose of a nuclear reactor is to take highly radioactive material found in nature, cook off a bunch of its radioactive energy (producing power in the process), and create less-radioactive material as a by-product. The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive than the material we started with, albeit much more concentrated. But that makes it easier to handle and store, compared to the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are spewed out all over the place.

If we dumped all that radioactive waste into the ocean (BAD IDEA), mother nature would dilute it for us and spread it out until it disappears into the natural background radiation. The drawback is that it'll be dangerous to everything that encounters it before it's diluted, so we can't do that.

DougWebbon Farmer born in 1842 talks about life and change (1929) [video]

A lot of us "reasonably plugged-in" people were doing those things back in 1995. It is easier today, though.

DougWebbon Know Labs unveils glucose monitor that swaps fingersticks for RF sensors

Well, once you've finished "eating" your body fat, you can't sustain the calorie restriction. But at that point there's no reason too. For those of us prone to insulin resistance, we have to continue to eat low-carb to avoid putting the weight back on. (Very similar to how an alcoholic who's gotten sober has to continue to avoid alcohol.) But we don't need to have a caloric deficit anymore.

DougWebbon Know Labs unveils glucose monitor that swaps fingersticks for RF sensors

Everybody's body responds differently, so you have to experiment to see what works for you. The CGM has been a great tool for that. I also use a Keto-Mojo for blood glucose and ketone testing now and then.

What's worked for me is a diet of eggs, cheese, bacon, chicken, ground beef, ground pork, roast beef, turkey, pepperoni, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, coffee, seltzer, bone broth, half & half, heavy cream, rebel ice cream (but not other keto ice cream brands), almond flour, ground pork rinds (as a bread crumb substitute), and probably some more I'm forgetting.

Typical advice is to stay under 20g net carbs, but I've found that I do better if I count total carbs instead for any non-veggie foods. Keto-friendly substitutes for flour and sugar mess me up most of the time, but I've found a few things that are ok. I also do intermittent fasting, only eating one or two meals during a 6-8 hour window, but I do much better if I fast for 36-48 hours. Dr Eckberg has some good videos on why fasting that long makes a difference.

DougWebbon Know Labs unveils glucose monitor that swaps fingersticks for RF sensors

I'd recommend watching Dr Sten Eckberg's videos, like this one: https://youtu.be/XTmUnIrmAe8

I'm on a keto diet for chronic insulin resistance and obesity, caused by 50 years of high carb eating. (Every meal a sandwich, or including potatoes or rice, and lots of sugar.)

I got a CGM a few months ago to help me directly see the impact of the foods I'm eating. It has allowed me to fine tune my diet and get rid of everything that causes a noticable rise in my glucose. My daily graph now shows little more than than the natural daily cycle of glucose produced by my liver: starts rising before dawn, peaks around 10am, drops to my average by 6pm, and drops to daily low around 3am.

If I were a type 2 diabetic (I was headed there), I wouldn't need supplemental insulin because I'm not eating anything that increases my glucose. The only glucose in my blood is the small amount my liver puts there because I need it.

If I were type 1, I'd need to take insulin because my body wouldn't be making any at all. With my natural, consistent, and small-range daily pattern, it would be easy to predict my needs and take the right amount at the right time.

CGMs are life changing.

DougWebbon What they don’t tell you when you translate your app

Oh, cool. You just reminded me of a feature I had built into my web app many years ago when we implemented translations. We accepted internal commands in our search box, and one of the commands told the app to display the language text identifiers alongside the language text. It was a great mode for developers, QA, and translators. Developers and QA could easily locate text that needed to be put into the language system, and translators could work page by page to find the identifiers they needed to translate.

DougWebbon The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings [pdf]

I am, however, thinking of making something that deepfakes the perspective change correctly.

Or you could, you know, move the camera. I keep mine centered on top of my main monitor.

DougWebbon Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote app store competition

So... don't install Facebook unless it's from the Apple App store. Problem solved, right?

DougWebbon Apps Getting Worse

Obviously they get started on redesigning the foundation.

DougWebbon We don’t use Kubernetes

I'm not a WP expert either, but I did implement a CMS for my company. Caching interferes with people editing the site and getting to see the updates immediately, and the easy way out of that is to disable caching. My guess is that default WP takes the easy way out, because of their largely untrained userbase.

DougWebbon What Made Early Humans Smart

Your iPhone is far more complex than an ENIAC; the only difference is that its transistors are much smaller. To make an iPhone using ENIAC-sized transistors you'd probably fill a building, or city block, or even more.

Neurons, on the other hand, are pretty much the same size in all animals. So brain size, neuron count, and neuron interconnectivity, all correlate with mental complexity.

DougWebbon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

I wanted this to happen so much. I really thought type="javascript" meant that other languages would become available, and that Perl's dominance server-side and embed-ability meant that it would definitely become a client-side option.

DougWebbon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

Skynet won't send terminators. It'll use invisible surveillance, and use automated control systems to gradually increase accident rates and pollute the air, water, and food supplies just enough so that death rates exceed birth rates. Skynet can afford to be patient.

DougWebbon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

Keyboards and mice being supplanted by touch or gesture is only true for phones and tablets, which are new devices that really aren't equivalent to the general computing devices in the 90's: desktops and laptops. If anything, I'd say that tablets are just televisions that became small, light, and interactive, and smart phones are partly that and partly handheld gaming devices with multiplayer capability. Neither are equivalent to a computer (though they have computers built-in.)

Of course, as a software developer, I've always used computers differently than the masses. The computers I need are far more powerful than anything they need.