HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ack210

37 karma · joined February 10, 2018

submissionscomments
ack210··on The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs
The NYC DOT did a study on this a few years back and found it not to be the case:

> Reports of device distraction are scarce in the New York City and national fatality data, and estimates of annual mobile device-related injuries are dwarfed nationally by pedestrian injury estimates where pedestrian distraction was not cited. In short, despite growing concerns, DOT found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly to pedestrian fatalities and injuries. https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shoul...

ack210··on I Fired Google
Since android auto transitioned to Gemini, whenever I try to reply to a message by tapping the reply button, it now states "Sorry, but to do that, you'll need permission from your Google Workspace administrator." The stupid part is, if I listen to the message first, then say yes when it asks me if I'd like to reply, I'm then allowed to reply. There's countless articles and posts about this but no one seems to have found a reliable solution yet. Has been going on since at least December.

It also now seems to trigger its own barge-in about 50% of the time. It'll start reading the first syllable of a message, apparently confuse itself talking for me saying something, then just follow that with silence "listening" for my response until I physically have to hit the back button on the car.

ack210··on Launch HN: Mosaic (YC W25) – Agentic Video Editing
I just signed up for a Creator plan, but it looks like the automated "Thank you for being a Mosaic Creator" email going out is not configured correctly. Instead of having my company name, it referenced a different business name and description (that seems to exist/be accurate, so not a placeholder).
ack210··on VS Code Pets
Posthog built something similar too, a hedgehog you can move around and that interacts with some of the elements on the page: https://posthog.com/blog/rome-hackathon#hedgehog-mode
ack210··on Show HN: Will I run Boston 2025?
The 0% above 2:55 makes sense at least since it's the BAA's new cutoff this year for males <35yo (the default on the calculator):https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify
ack210··on Gov. DeSantis signs bill banning most direct-to-consumer auto sales
I certainly don't mean to be defending either party, but the bill received bi-partisan support. Only 2 reps voted against it in the house, and it received unanimous support in the senate (which includes 12 democrats).

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/637/?Tab=VoteHist...

ack210··on T-Mobile will start charging a $35 fee on all new activations and upgrades
I have the annual plan and while the auto-renew didn't work for me for some reason, I was able to pay the amount due on their website hassle-free. In some cases I think the pre-paid is more advantageous if you're not a heavy data user since it allows tethering up to your data limit and also includes 1 month of data rollover.

I think the biggest thing missing through pre-paid is the ability to finance devices through the carrier (if this is something you do). Additionally, something like the iphone upgrade program isn't supported if you are on a prepaid plan either. Also, if you ever travel internationally the pricing is absurd ($35/WEEK extra for 5GB of data).

That said, I get the feeling AT&T isn't thrilled about people that opt for their prepaid plans. Porting my number over required me to wait for hours on hold, their support is horrendous if you ever need to get in touch with them for something, and you have to manage your account through an entirely different website that frankly looks like one giant phishing attempt.

ack210··on Ask HN: Is AWS SSM (or other services) down for anyone else?
Yes, also in us-east-1 and we currently have an event showing for it in our personal health dashboard (but doesn't seem to be acknowledged on the health dashboard if logged out). It's preventing us from deploying CloudFormation stacks as well right now.

https://imgur.com/a/4fMho2O

ack210··on A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel.

If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back.

Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.

ack210··on Avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods (2014)
Yup. My parents live in an HOA that used to have a woman (who had no official capacity with the HOA other than living in it) drive around in her golf cart every day with a clipboard to note down any violations she spotted. One of her favorite rules to enforce was one that indicated how long you could have your garage door open for (something like 20 mins). Like another commenter's experience above, she too had a ruler she would use to measure various shrubs etc. in hopes of finding a violation.
ack210··on Management by metrics leads us astray
The Reply All episodes on the real life version of this are a really good listen if you haven't heard them already: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34/

(Short interview with one of the hosts on the episode: https://www.fastcompany.com/90249924/reply-all-podcast-nypd-...)

ack210··on Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random strings and a url-encoded JSON object?

The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.