Hacker News Reader

aldoniuson Ottawa paid nearly $670k for KPMG's advice on cutting consultant costs

Yep. It's about solving a mild case of the Dictator's Information Problem.

Sure.

I still think it's the most intuitive way to describe the first-order explanation for why people are happy with their specific representatives, but not Congress as a whole.

aldoniuson Millions of customers in Australia hit by mobile phone and internet outage

OK, but what about for mobile?

aldoniuson Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?

> Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years?

Australian Aboriginal oral tradition describes flooding to create islands or bays (modern science can date the corresponding event back 7000+ years). But in certain cases the level of detail is even better [see link]:

> The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater.

https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

aldoniuson Seeing like a bank

>> Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating.

> Yes, that's true. (And the Senate is no different.) What does it mean?

Red voters tend to live in red seats & states, blue voters tend to live in blue seats and states.

aldoniuson Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?

Oral tradition can be pretty good, and it's not just the Black Sea that flooded, it's coastlines everywhere.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...

aldoniuson Just paying Figma because nothing else works

Did you find the Connector tool? (hotkey O).

It's by no means a full replacement for the sorts of tools you'd get in Draw.io but it's not nothing.

It lets you create a two-node SVG path with a bit of extra metadata. One or both nodes connect to a special node at the centre of a shape.

Inkscape automatically makes that be a straight line trimmed to the edges of the shape(s. You can move the shapes and have the line move too. If you move the path itself it turns back into a regular path.

The path is just a straight line as mentioned and there's certainly no routing logic.

aldoniuson Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value

Yes, I think that's a fair interpretation of the moral. Note that Carl changes his mind about what's important to him over the course of the movie. First he lets go of the land (literally, by taking flight) and then later the house.

aldoniuson Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value

I think deferment is reasonable. Especially if it makes the difference in getting real LVT over the line, politically.

aldoniuson Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value

Sometimes people want to sit on underdeveloped-for-the-location land not because it's a low-effort way to ride capital gains but for non-economic reasons.

Examples include conservation projects and urban farms, but the big one is empty-nesters ageing in place (while the city has grown around them).

If you've seen the start of the movie Up you'll recall that Mr. Carl Fredrickson owns a detached home which now has apartment towers going up on all sides. As a widower his house holds extreme sentimental value to him; he isn't selling. Under an optimal land tax regime, he'd be paying quite a bit of land tax reflecting the increased desirability of his location, and would potentially be forced to sell up as a result.

aldoniuson This is a black and white photo, but an artist has drawn color lines through it

It's somewhat scale dependent. If you zoom in enough on the OP image you can make out the cross-hatching quite easily, but at preview scale (i.e. standing further away from someone wearing such a shirt) the illusion's OK.

aldoniuson A basic guide to using Asian names

That's similar what I see for Chinese-Australian people. They'll get both a Western and a Chinese given name, though legal order probably varies.

aldoniuson This is a black and white photo, but an artist has drawn color lines through it

Great demonstration of why chroma subsampling works.

aldoniuson Median Center of Population for the United States: 1880 to 2020 (2021)

Oh, I wasn't referring to your other comment.

Just noting that since the Bay Area's pretty heavily populated, bringing in Puerto Rico (shifting the US median south by ~1.6 million people) takes the median from say Napa's latitude to, say Alameda's latitude (keeping in mind that there's also Louisville KY and other smaller non-SFBA towns in the same band of latitude).

aldoniuson Median Center of Population for the United States: 1880 to 2020 (2021)

South, but potentially east a little too. (PR is further east than all but parts of Maine).

Right now most of the Bay Area is barely to the south of the median, so I suspect the 2030 update won't change much there. As far as east-west goes it looks like it's in the middle of Chicago right now (which also helps explain why 2010-2020 didn't move that far west).

aldoniuson RevealJS – An open source HTML presentation framework

Counterpoint: I transitively use reveal.js (for slides-from-markdown stuff) and I didn't even know slides.com existed until now.

aldoniuson The Matt Curve (2019)

Justified.

aldoniuson Why sqlite3 temp files were renamed 'etilqs_*' (2006)

TIL there's a global gitignore, thanks!

aldoniuson Mapping pedestrian traffic light timing in Sydney, Australia

I guess the question I have is what you intend the main interface experience to be for people - the form or the map?

I imagine there's a few trick things that could be done on the map page like nailing the coordinates, doing the timer --- and then bouncing over to Google Forms via the power of pre-filled links.

aldoniuson Mapping pedestrian traffic light timing in Sydney, Australia

If I were to figure out a localised instance would you collect data? I don't go into the CBD that often is all.

edit: or just do data collection for Brissie directly:

https://betterintersections.jakecoppinger.com/?lat=-27.5&lon...

aldoniuson Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

(you missed one of the pronouns, which might be the issue here)

aldoniuson The Rust I wanted had no future

Vec<T>::pop() and similar methods return an Option<T>, so it's a compile-time type error to just add a number to it directly.

aldoniuson Heavy electric trucks cheaper than diesel goods trucks

Developing a new vehicle is quite a substantial fixed cost.

So I think what will happen is that a few existing car manufacturers decide they're OK with being a larger share of a smaller market. Or else a new/adjacent player buys out legacy IP and operations while the original manufacturer focuses on EVs. Or there's a bunch of remanufacturing going on to keep hydrocarbon vehicles running.

Either way, there'll be quite... boutique prices.

aldoniuson SQLite builds for WASI since 3.41.0

Well for starters, SQLite is almost a decade older than CC0...

aldoniuson Please release nano under less restrictive license so we can use it

zsh has been the default shell on macOS for several years now :)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651872/apple-macos-catal...

aldoniuson Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

Maybe not in specs, but what about in specs per dollar? Surely there's been enough computer battery production over the last decade for Wright's Law to have an effect.

aldoniuson The Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust

Rust can dynamically link to/like a library written in C if you really want it to.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/ffi.html

aldoniuson Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

My guess is that (in addition to bot things) this is aimed at taking down e.g. Mastodon crosspost.