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aspanu

38 karma · joined December 22, 2012

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aspanu··on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
As usual, I'd like to bring up that it is until you have enough profit for it to no longer be only about that.

Also regardless of the quality of the examples, it may be the case that the point (opportunity cost is important to consider) is still valid.

aspanu··on Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free
I'm sorry, but this is just a terrible take. He told the story about how they were thinking of calling it "Khanpanion", but apparently that has a bad connotation in Latin America, so while they were brainstorming, someone mentioned "Khanmigo", as in the portmanteau of "Khan - amigo", and it stuck.
aspanu··on Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free
Sal Khan did an interview at the Commonwealth Club this past week where he stated that the reason for region locking is one of availability and cost. It seems like MSFT is only footing the bill for US use, rather than for the world, so there's still the matter of figuring out how to further reduce costs to make it cheap enough to give away everywhere.

I'm not sure why that implies that the paid plan is not available outside of the US.

aspanu··on California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard
I thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity demand the way in which natural gas can.
aspanu··on Return to Office Is a Mistake
I personally have really not had this experience - especially given that a lot of companies in tech seem to have landed on either remote or hybrid (3 days in two days optional). I also think that this is fundamentally a city design issue (expenses, time, mental health), rather than a work issue.
aspanu··on Return to Office Is a Mistake
I find this type of argument about RTO to be pretty poor. I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population. I think the real discussion about RTO, pro or con, is a lot more nuanced, and this type of argument does a disservice to the complexities.

In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.

aspanu··on U.S. National Park Service API
I don't really understand your complaints about API keys, but if you did want to make an issue of something perhaps it should be that you get your API key sent to you by email, in plaintext. Not amazing, but I guess for their threat model it's generally ok.
aspanu··on Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App
I saw their pricing page, but I’m a little confused. Do they have funding? Is this someone’s passion project that they are paying for out of their own pocket? I’m unsure how or why it’s free right now?
aspanu··on OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era
You can get a copy on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/cnc-red-alert). I don't believe that this is copyright infringement. I think that we're just that old.
aspanu··on Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer letters
My understanding of why companies cannot purposely show that they take perf or years of service into account has more to do with labour law than a lack of caring. You cannot take into account perf in a layoff - if you did, you are not allowed to call it a layoff, AFAIK.
aspanu··on Lichess: The free and open source chess server
Lichess as an application is very impressive, and I use it frequently. The one thing that is somewhat more annoying is the way in which there is a (daily?) restart of the servers, causing strange behaviour in-game. For example, around the restart time, sometimes the restart warning falls away and it seems like you are waiting for the other player to make a move, when in fact you are disconnected.

Is there a reason why restarts happen this way and there isn't traffic draining between servers as they restart one at a time?

aspanu··on Why ghostly false positives cropped up in MH370 satellite hunt
I think that you are missing relative height. Plane is at 10km, GPS satellite at 20Mm.
aspanu··on Why ghostly false positives cropped up in MH370 satellite hunt
I believe that what you are missing is the distance between the satellite and the plane. planes are at ~10,000 m altitude, GPS flies at 20,000,000 m altitude. A very small angle of distortion creates a very large distance at the plane.