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bjornsteffanson

152 karma · joined September 13, 2011

Programmer and SVG enthusiast in UTC +10, for now.
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bjornsteffanson··on Why didn't our ancient ancestors get cavities?
I'm 36, and I've had 32 cavities filled in my lifetime. I can't stand the procedure every time, and it's been heartbreaking for me not to be able to pinpoint why I've had so many cavities. I'm vegetarian, and I don't drink soda or alcohol. I brush regularly but should probably floss more. I do drink a lot of coffee and a lot of water. I completely avoid any candy and processed sugar (except for the occasional bit of something sweet in a restaurant dessert once or twice a year). I also eat a lot of acidic fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, lemons, limes, and pineapples.

Most were in my early teens (I had eight filled at once one time) so I was convinced it was the dentist racketeering and my parents wouldn't let me out of getting them filled. I should note my parents have a similar diet and a similar amount of major dental work. The handful of cavities I've had in adulthood have been major blows to my mental health.

bjornsteffanson··on Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
> Does Apple have any way to verify it’s actually a full delete, and do they do so?

The guidelines do state that it should be a full delete. In my experience, Apple has never checked or asked to verify if a user account was fully deleted on apps I've worked on, which involve PHI. It's been a part of HIPAA compliance for our apps since the beginning (and we do actually fat delete, FWIW). It's a relatively new requirement from Apple's end, though. The deadline was actually extended from January 31st 2022 to now June 30th 2022. Enforcement or stringency on Apple's part could change around then, but I don't see Apple having the resources or willpower to do much of an increase here.

Full guidelines are here: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i71db0mv

bjornsteffanson··on Moving money internationally
Internationally, between currencies? The best offer I've found for transferring $200,000 USD to AUD is 0.4% ($800). At scale, that's not exactly cheap. I'm referencing the original parent comment which suggests it's possible for fractions of a penny, as I would love to find this service:

> There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.

bjornsteffanson··on Moving money internationally
What services are the best for transferring large sums of money cheaply, safely, and quickly? In my experience, you can only choose one. I would prefer to chose two: cheaply and safely. I am not as worried about time. Recommendations?
bjornsteffanson··on Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
Exactly this. Every OSS project is going to have a slightly different arrangement, but many contributions to OSS projects are subject to conflict of interest agreements. I work full-time on a large OSS project that has thousands of community contributors, and also has a few hundred paid full-time contributors as well. Our COI agreement limits what we can accept as gifts and outside payments. I would be open to speaking of course -- in fact, it's our responsibility to the community as core contributors. But taking a paid Zoom call with a commercial entity is very different than speaking at a conference or responding to Github issues (at my company, at least).

I'm genuinely not certain how someone would approach my company to do this, which is also exactly to the author's first point quoted in the parent comment. My guess is likely that someone would pay my company, and my company would compensate me to speak as a normal part of my day-to-day role.

bjornsteffanson··on MonoLisa – A font designed for developers
Same. You might find Inconsolata interesting, too: https://github.com/googlefonts/Inconsolata
bjornsteffanson··on The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Pretty rad. What's the etiquette on the drop-in/surf time? And who built it/paid for it? Is it free?

Asking because I used to live near Bend, Oregon, which had a similar lowhead dam problem that they turned into a whitewater park with three separate channels of rapids. Love it when cities fund these sorts of things.

https://www.bendparksandrec.org/facility/bend-whitewater-par...

bjornsteffanson··on MSPaint in JavaScript
Shortcut to the Electron app: https://github.com/1j01/jspaint#desktop-app-electron
bjornsteffanson··on Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry
I have not seen this at all, thank you for sharing!
bjornsteffanson··on Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry
The Second Reality source code is on Github -- it is fun to poke around through the code and code comments with what seems like little in-jokes between themselves. Also interesting to note the contrast of when English and Finnish is used...you can run into gems like "pikkukuva" and "pakkaamaton formaatti"

https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/

bjornsteffanson··on Ask HN: Any front end engineers transition to ML/AI engineering? What's it like?
What are some of the languages/frameworks/tools you use at your current role?
bjornsteffanson··on Ask HN: What do you do when have free time?
I learn bluegrass guitar licks. Lots of free resources on Youtube.
bjornsteffanson··on Water rabbits and logs: The nature of Sun Tzu’s war, reexamined
"Water Rabbit" is a reference to the Chinese Zodiac, as in "Year of the Water Rabbit". I have no idea what this could mean in the context of the article other than offering a poetic-sounding title.

Just as improbably, it could also be a missing comma typo for Water, Rabbits, and Logs, since the author refers to all of those things separately.

bjornsteffanson··on The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
For my past six or seven contracts I've been carrying around the same set of fetch util functions I wrote in ES6 a few years ago - it's less than 200 lines of code. If the API endpoints are ready to go, CRUD is the easy part. Which tools would you consider CRUD as something you get free?
bjornsteffanson··on American Phrase Book
Which cultures would be considered high-context? (Genuinely curious)
bjornsteffanson··on The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)
For starters, you have a leaderboard. Any sort of number metric or gamification is enough to keep me off a platform.

Edit: I just realized the irony of the above as I type this on Hacker News.

bjornsteffanson··on Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2
Far less serious (and not polysyllabic), but still linguistically interesting: the Chinese character for _biáng_, one of the most complex in modern usage. There are 15 variants of the character consisting of between 56 and 70 strokes, which can be recalled with various mnemonics. It is not yet included in standard Unicode, but scheduled for inclusion in March 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles

bjornsteffanson··on Not a full timer
Same - I cannot tell if this is meant to be satire.

I am an hourly contractor, and I prefer it to 'full time' employment. As with everything, there are pros and cons, but overall it is a net-positive for me and the way I wish to spend my time.

I sort of follow the point about respecting productive time. I do try to cut the bullshit. I do spend a lot of time thinking about the emails I'm going to send my clients (that I don't bill them for) so that my information is as efficient as possible. I've found an hourly rate that works for me and if I'm offered below that I just say 'no'. I don't consider that working for free. I don't find myself competing against 'full-time' employees in the way the article suggests. My experience is the opposite. I still think it might be satire...maybe?

bjornsteffanson··on AWS EC2/RDS Outage in us-east-1
I'm in Australia and Reddit/Twitter ground to a standstill - request timeout after request timeout. I presumed it was an outage somewhere but was surprised to learn it was with AWS us-east-1? I would have thought surely that my connection would have referenced a different region based on my location.
bjornsteffanson··on A mobile phone that respects your freedom [video]
You buy a SIM card from a wireless provider, register your service, and you're connected to that provider's network. Depending on which country you live in, you may be asked to provide evidence of your identity to varying degrees.

For example, to set up my service in Australia, I bought a SIM card in a little packet at a corner store for A$40. The SIM card was from a specific wireless provider (Telstra, in this instance), but it was sitting side-by-side with SIM cards from other providers in the store. It came "pre-loaded" with 35GB of data to use on their network, plus unlimited SMS and voice calling, which was described on the packaging. When I put the SIM in the device I was prompted to go to a website to register my service, where I input a code from the SIM card packet to link the SIM itself. I was asked to provide my driver license number or passport number. I was then able to choose between three pre-selected phone numbers that were displayed on the screen. Click Finish, and my cellular service started working on my phone. Every month I have the option to renew my plan under the same terms, or choose a plan with different terms (more or less GB of data, for instance), or throw the SIM card away and switch to a different wireless provider.

bjornsteffanson··on Super Mario 64 has been decompiled
I got a pi 3b+ as I romanticized the idea of it, but it struggles a bit with SM64. I just use OpenEmu on my higher-powered laptop and HDMI out instead.

Pi format is still fun to tinker with and I encourage you to get one if you're at all interested. The 3b+ just wasn't the right tool for the job in my case. I haven't tried the pi 4, however.

bjornsteffanson··on Hospitalized in Split – Intoxication
Thanks for that info. I'm a permanent resident of Australia now, with access to the public (and private) medical care down here. My injury and procedure happened in the US though, and I've moved around quite a bit since then, and haven't really seen anyone about my ankle since my last post-op visit 4+ years ago. I enquired about speaking to a syndesmotic specialist down here but it still seemed to be an expensive visit to be told "yeah nah everyone just keeps the plate in nowadays mate," which is what I was expecting...so I'm always very curious when someone has had the implant removed. Thanks again.
bjornsteffanson··on Hospitalized in Split – Intoxication
Also broke my ankle, and also had a plate installed via ORIF surgery. My insurance company was billed nearly $80,000 USD, and I was asked to pay $6k of that. And that was just the single procedure, not any of the follow-up visits or physical therapy.

The doctor who performed the initial surgery said that it is not common to remove the plate due to the risk and expense of another surgery procedure, so I still have it. Been nearly 5 years. Would love to get rid of it.

If I may ask, what was your consultation conversation like when you discussed having the plate removed with your doctor /surgeon?

bjornsteffanson··on The plane that led D-Day is flying back to Normandy
According to this article, the plane itself was found while researching Lt. Col. John Donalson, who was credited with piloting the lead aircraft during the invasion.

It also provides a reason why this plane was selected:

"Donalson's plane was in the lead partly because it was equipped with an early form of radar that homed in on electronic beacons set up on the French coast by a small group of paratroopers in "pathfinder" aircraft, Scales said. Some mountings of that electronic system remain on the C-47's fuselage."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/d-day-anniversary-cere...

bjornsteffanson··on Japanese Writing After Murakami
Of other Murakami works, I really enjoyed "After Dark" and his collection of short stories, "The Elephant Vanishes".
bjornsteffanson··on Japanese Vending Machines at Night Juxtaposed with a Wintry Hokkaido Landscape
I would definitely describe "putting two coins into a vending machine to receive a ticket to hand to someone in exchange for a tasty bowl of ramen" as more technically advanced than "table for two?...[waiting, waiting]...one ramen, please...[waiting, waiting]..."everything ok here?" "yes go away" [waiting waiting] ... "here's the bill"...[waiting waiting]..."have a nice night"

Advanced tech doesn't have to be high tech.

bjornsteffanson··on Why some of the best developers keep quitting
> My life is governed by a set of rules inspired from daoism and taijiquan. First and foremost is "Make good change"(The secret trick is to smile, from you heart)

Can you elaborate?

bjornsteffanson··on Snapshot of North Korea’s DNS data taken from zone transfers
GNU actually refers to 'grand national unity' in this context, one of the three fundamentals for Korean unification outlined in the 1972 North-South Joint Declaration (the other two being peace and independence).

Based on the screenshots, gnu.rep.kp appears to be a website for the Pyongyang Broadcasting Station.

bjornsteffanson··on Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek
That sucks, man. It really hurts my heart that we're still doing shit like this in 2016...
bjornsteffanson··on A man overrides his camera's firmware to bring rare pictures of North Korea back
The principal subject of this film recanted much of his story in 2015.
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