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Sprocklem

123 karma · joined September 28, 2012

Feel free to email me at <hn@sprock.dev>.
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Sprocklem··on Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'
I don't think Canada was ever really going to break up, and certainly wouldn't in the near future without the foreign money poured into it.
Sprocklem··on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
> A nice "brown" bookcase or dresser is made of solid wood and will last your entire life. The alternative these days is either insanely priced and still of questionable quality or cheap, badly constructed particleboard that [...] needs to be replaced every few years.

It is truly baffling that most modern book cases have shelves that seemingly can't hold up to the weight of books – the very thing they were made to hold.

Sprocklem··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
They are a simple construction, but I'm not sure I've seen any evidence that their construction is automated.
Sprocklem··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
Me too. My understanding is that clothing manufacturing is basically impossible to automate with our current level of technology, due to the difficulty of manipulating fabric.
Sprocklem··on I Reported on Flock's Cameras. Now I'm One of the System's Mistakes
I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that flock should be flagging this as a partial match in a very prominent way, so hopefully the police officers take a closer look and don't act recklessly. It is shoking to me that this wasn't included from the start.
Sprocklem··on Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada
No province pays equalization payments. They come out of the federal government's general revenues.
Sprocklem··on Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada
The UCP are trying to prolong this whole affair and, I think, trying to pander to separatists without actually risking that Alberta separate.

ETA: There is definitely a significant pro-separatist faction within the UCP, but I don't think the current party leadership is really willing to commit to separating, even if they are buddy-buddy with key figures in the current US regime.

Also note that this referendum does not require that the question be clear (per the Clarity Act), which will allow them to confuse voters and garner apparently higher support, that they can use to coerce the federal government into giving them what they want.

Sprocklem··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
This is my experience as well, as someone who grew up in Alberta and has spent a fair bit of time in other provinces. This narrative that the rest of Canada is anti-Alberta or anti-Quebec (or that the federal government is seeking to undermine those provinces) seems to be invented and pushed by those provinces' governments to drive votes and avoid culpability for their role in their province's problems. It does not seem to be reflective of the opinions of people (or governments) from other provinces.
Sprocklem··on Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)
44oz? That's huge. I couldn't imagine drinking one of those a day.
Sprocklem··on Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
> It is not surprising the the properties would not be called the same.

It is a bit surprising that xdg-desktop-portal has two very similar APIs that differ in non-obvious and seemingly-arbitrary ways. I was also a bit confused about how the two APIs correspond (or don’t) when I first read their documentation.

Sprocklem··on KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support
> My uneducated guess at why Wayland failed to succeed is that it went for extreme modularity and refused to say (back in like 2009) "Here's the security mechanism everyone has to use to take screenshots, etc. If this breaks your spacebar heater, sucks to be you."

I tend to agree. I have long attributed the mess that is wayland-protocols in large part to the fact that they didn’t define a security mechanism or permission model in place from the start.

They seemed to assume, at first, that it was reasonable to prevent all programs from doing what any program could abuse. Had they instead acknowledged that some programs need to be granted the ability to take actions that otherwise risk insecurity, they wouldn’t have needed to try to distort the protocols to fit the lacking security model of Wayland (or, in some cases, wouldn’t have needed to circumvent Wayland entirely to achieve their ends).

Sprocklem··on My dad could still be alive, but he's not
What direction is that?
Sprocklem··on When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
Canada doesn't. It puts Canadian monarchs on its coins. The fact that they are physically the same person as the British monarch is incidental.
Sprocklem··on Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014)
I think a more generous reading of their comment would be: do people with Down's syndrome vary significantly in terms of their Down's syndrome symptoms? Or: do they vary significantly in how they experience their symptoms? I don't have enough experience with Down's syndrome to answer either – I've only met a few such people in passing – but would be interested in knowing the answer.

Edit: I feel I should note that, given the phrasing of the comment, I think your interpretation is closer to the original intent – or at least, a clearer reading of what was said – but I wanted to add this in the interest of taking the strongest interpretation of their comment (and to satisfy my personal curiosity).

Sprocklem··on "None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill
Curriculum-setting neither limits anyones free speech nor does it restrict their access to the free speech of others. Teachers are generally allowed to expand on the curriculum and students are given access to literature with information beyond that in the curriculum. These laws do effectively restrict access to information and ideas.
Sprocklem··on "None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill
This is a strange framing. These laws are neither about what is taught in schools nor what books schools are required to stock, but rather restrictions on what books schools may chose to make available to the children. The government is not limiting the free speech of the authors, but these laws are the government limiting access to the authors' free speech, which is at least related to free speech, even if you don't buy that it is an restriction of free speech per se.

I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.

Sprocklem··on Alberta separatism push roils Canada
As an Albertan, I agree, but it is the inevitable result if Alberta were to separate. Fortunately, separation remains a minority position (for now, at least), despite certain parties fanning the flames.
Sprocklem··on Alberta separatism push roils Canada
The Alberta NDP under Notley was a centrist party and its policies were far more aligned with the federal liberals than the federal NDP. Obviously, there has been a change in leadership, but I don't see any reason to believe that the Alberta NDP will be any less centrist under Nenshi.
Sprocklem··on NASA says Boeing Starliner astronauts may fly home on SpaceX in 2025
It's a contract with NASA. Taxpayers already are footing the bill.
Sprocklem··on When did dogs become our best friends?
I can't speak for GP, but I personally find it kind of fucked up that we selectively breed a lot of dogs for certain asthetic traits at the expense of their health. I assume they meant this brand of artificial selection rather than letting dogs reproduce at all.
Sprocklem··on Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
I have successfully signed up to a google group with a non-gmail account, although I had some difficulty finding the instructions for doing so.
Sprocklem··on Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate
IIRC, this was one of the explanations proposed when the existence of a red shift was first noted: that the light is somehow slowly losing its energy over very long distances, becoming “redder” as it did so. It ultimately lost out to the dark energy / space-time expansion theory, although I do not recall why. Presumably there was some observation that precluded “degrading” light from being the sole explanation.
Sprocklem··on Command line interface guidelines (2021)
tar isn't a POSIX command, and retains its argument format from before the POSIX CLI guidelines were standardized (as does the POSIX ar command). pax, the POSIX-specified (but rarely implemented/used) equivalent of tar does follow the POSIX CLI guidelines.
Sprocklem··on Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
Support for the other two may vary based on hardware, but sound seems to have mostly been solved by pipewire.
Sprocklem··on My favourite Git commit (2019)
Crucially, however, the commit message is not documentation of the code, which would need to be changed and updated. Instead, it is documentation of the change, describing the reason for the change, what the code does to achieve that, and, if relevant, why you chose that solution. It provides necessary context to the already immutable diff and therefore need not be mutable itself.
Sprocklem··on How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)
I'm not sure how exactly the circulatory system developed in our ancestors, but I will add that simpler circulatory systems do exist in animals today, including the open circulatory systems that are found in, e.g., arthropods. In these animals, blood is pumped across an body cavity by a heart, before flowing back through the fluid-filled body cavity itself, outside of any blood vessels. It is definitely possible to have "partial" circulatory system that functions fine while lacking some of the components present in humans.

Similarly, simpler versions of, e.g, eyes have been observed in nature with structures that are thought to be analogous to those of our early ancestors when eyes were first developing.

Sprocklem··on A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note
My understanding is that that was not true of clothing of that era. That being said, the description of the pocket is unclear and it may have been a normal pocket, which would have been built into the folds of the dress so as not to be overtly visible.

ETA: If memory serves, pockets disappeared from women's clothing as skirts became more form-fitting in the 1910s and 1920s.

Sprocklem··on Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
The strings in environ is only contiguous at program start. In every libc I'm aware of, both putenv and setenv replace only the specified key-value pair (and possibly environ itself, if it needs to be larger) and should not affect the address of any other environment variables. It is still thread-unsafe, but far more limited in its unsafety.
Sprocklem··on A four year plan for async Rust
They are in some languages, but Rust instead implemented them with a pollable Future trait. The async keyword, then, causes the block to desugar into a new type that implements Future. In order to emulate a coroutine, the generated poll function includes a state machine that tracks the await point where the function was suspended.
Sprocklem··on Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?
We also have no surviving Egyptian accounts of Atlantis. It was not uncommon, however, for Greeks to attribute fictional and fabricated information to the Egyptians due to how relatively ancient – and therefore, wise – they were believed to be.
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