Hacker News Reader

cronin101on An unconfirmed tweet about Freeport LNG is upending gas markets

In many parts of Northern Europe, at least, February is often the absolute coldest month (most likely for snowfall in UK, for example). So for heating worries, we’re definitely not out of the woods come February.

cronin101on “The Onion” Files a Supreme Court Brief

With the US thrust into the de-facto "centre of the Anglo-sphere" (note: I am not American, as astute readers might deduce from preceding spelling), many terms are in need of an overhaul. It's particularly amusing how news of the "West" comes from the East and the "East" is accessed by flying West.

Words are hard (and currently under a lot of scrutiny). Has anyone tried turning the language off and on again?

cronin101on How to make an IBM 1311 disk drive move around the floor

Considering that only recently the first-wave of RTX 3xxx cards had a flaw where uncapped FPS on videogame menu screens caused them to spike current outside of the intended design envelope and completely brick the devices with unfixable damage, I think it's pretty safe to assume there's a long history of "user doing something programmer didn't expect ends very badly".

cronin101on Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

<pedant>The singular is "die" not "dice".</pedant>

cronin101on The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

I think GOV.UK in general does a very good job of making important information readily available. It’s however extra jarring switching between the clean/efficient style of the online messaging and the underlying public services/offices that are still held together by chewing gum and a fax machine, whenever you have some issue that can only be resolved by persuading a human to stamp some paper (Visas, public records, etc.)

cronin101on High blood pressure cases double in 30 years

I think the point they were making is that salt when paired with adequate hydration (and offsetting losses from sweating etc.) isn't as obvious an issue.

As always, balance is key. Mediterranean diets aren't skimping on salt but the populations are (relatively) sweating often and taking hydration seriously due to the climate.

If you have an active lifestyle, it sounds reasonable that your salt tolerance could be higher (I'm not a medical professional).

cronin101on Rumbling meteor lights up Norway; part of it may have landed near Oslo

I missed out on the flash but the pressure wave rattled my front door like someone was trying to get in (and the dog was none too pleased about that).

cronin101on Dutch crime reporter dies after being shot

Apologies for derailing slightly but it's strange that you lump UK in with US there, when the UK rate is even below the NL rate (and among the lowest in the world).

The US is an extreme outlier in this regard.

cronin101on Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

Do you have a source? I would love to read more about that.

FWIW I currently live in Norway which is ~100% renewable but that's mainly hydro and a very different situation with the amount of potential energy that hydro gives the 5M population.

cronin101on Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

I'll concede it's not a typical country since the weather is pretty unique, but Scotland is ~97% renewable and ~75% wind. It's well suited for some parts of the world at least.

cronin101on Save the code or save the tests? (2020)

    Forall A:
    add(A, 0) == A

    Forall A B C:
    add(add(A,B), C) == add(A, add(B, C))

I think that’s sufficient. Rule 101 of useful testing is understanding the actual constraints you rely on.

Maybe throw in add(A, B) == add(B, A) if you’re angling for a promotion…

cronin101on Tax details of US super-rich allegedly leaked

It's bizarre to see the federal outcry here since in Norway, everyone's tax return is "public". (You can request to see anybody's but they do get a notification that you viewed it. It was anonymous until recently)

It's hard to argue against sunlight being the best disinfectant.

cronin101on American Solitude: Notes Toward a History of Isolation

> willingly

It could also be the fact that purchasing a house, large enough for raising kids, in a dense urban centre is unobtainable for the vast majority of people.

cronin101on Coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern of brain functional connectivity

YMMV but I find freshly ground, bloomed for 30s before brewing, and 85C aeropress (inverted method) for 90s is my go-to for getting it to taste exactly how I like it. I thoroughly recommend playing around and experimenting to find your own routine, very cathartic.

cronin101on TikToker makes ‘scamcoin’ as a joke and within an hour it’s worth $70M

In the above example you pay capital gains on the one (1) $20m initial painting that allows you to then donate N "equal value" paintings. So you can dilute the capital gains % indefinitely (1/N).

cronin101on Factoring 2048 RSA integers in 177 days with 13436 qubits and a multimode memory

At this rate, maybe the first commercial Fusion plants will have asymmetric quantum encryption securing their management portal.

cronin101on Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com

I've actually been trying to remember the URL to this website on and off for the last six years (note to self, 8 'e's), so thanks for scratching that itch.

cronin101on Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

I see lots of replies suggesting scrolling for a long time and then using CTRL+F.

However, this won't work if the page is using virtualised scrolling (common with React et al. SPA for performance reasons, to avoid huge DOM trees as the page expands). The majority of content that is outside of the visible window will simply be unmounted from the DOM.

I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? Perhaps intercepting Ctrl+F and displaying a custom search that will do the correct filtering on the back-end and update/retarget the view? Azure DevOps does this but it's still frustrating if your focused element is not within the capture point for the event.

cronin101on Unofficial Windows XP SP4

> Apple [has] never tried to adopt a model [...] positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers.

I know it's in a way tangental to what your point was, but if you read this sentence again you'll realise that it is exactly what they have tried (rather successfully) to adopt.

cronin101on Meadow F7 micro board on pre-sale (bare metal .NET Standard 2.0)

> every collection type under the sun [2]

Except heaps / priority queues, which always irked me because it's in the Java standard library :-(

cronin101on Macs Are Slower Than PCS. Here’s Why

I agree that this is shady marketing.

However, like I said, there are superior solutions available for these content/media producers.

Am I supposed to feel bad for them not optimising a tool that is apparently critical for their throughput and suffering mediocrity as a result?

There's an information asymmetry here and if they don't put the effort in to squeeze extra performance out of their equipment then either:

A) Someone who is putting this minimal effort into actually choosing the best tool for their job will usurp them with greater productivity.

B) Render times really aren't a bottleneck compared to the struggle of coming up with content ideas/filming the actual content -- slightly longer running tasks while people slack off and drink coffee are just fine.

I suspect it's actually the latter hence this is really a non-issue.

cronin101on Macs Are Slower Than PCS. Here’s Why

While this is entirely valid criticism, it glosses over the fact that the experiments were heavily biased towards long running workloads typical for media producers.

I'm not using my MBP to render 4k video or maxing all cores of the CPU for sustained periods.

It seems clear to me that for the casual/developer segment, that has eaten up the entire marketshare, having short bursts of peak performance on six cores is perfectly fine for compiling/coding/browsing workloads.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that sustained 100% cpu tasks should be run on portable hardware. Use remote desktop/SSH and a VM/Mac Pro if you need to hit maximum TDP for long periods, RDP has great in-house latency and has the added benefit of your lap not becoming lava.

There's a much better pattern for these tasks, and it isn't using hardware designed to be portable. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

cronin101on Leveraging A Poor Memory In Engineering

    [1,2,3].slice(1, 3)
    > [2, 3]

cronin101on Leveraging A Poor Memory In Engineering

Not sure how much you care, but your example for .slice() is wrong.

.slice(1,3) will give you elements two and three. You're looking for .slice(0,3)

cronin101on Personal Finance Lessons for Technology Professionals

There's more to it than material consumption too.

Money buys the ability to follow expensive hobbies. e.g. skiing, travel, anything that requires lessons to pick-up as a skill.

Money affords the ability to travel at convenient times instead of cheaper off-peak schedules, so that you ultimately spend more time with your family and friends.

Capital investment can help creative pursuits, such as a well-stocked kitchen greatly increasing the amount of joy you can have when cooking, or the benefits of being able to relax with a home cinema/gaming/sound system that you can be truly immersed in.

Most importantly, it brings peace of mind. In my opinion one of the greatest freedoms is not having to worry about the future. Something you don't appreciate until you gain it, and something you could never imagine giving up once you've experienced it.

Don't kid yourself that you can't buy happiness. It won't dig you out of a hole if you have deeper issues, but it's definitely a significant platform to stand upon.

cronin101on Major sites running unauthenticated JavaScript on their payment pages

> What's especially annoying about this, is that the CDNJS website has a "one-click copy" for SRI.

Actually, from the screenshot it's clearly "two-click" and "one-click" provides a link without SRI. Obviously the vast majority of people in a rush are going to use the "one-click" option, secure or not.

There's no reason why the SRI option shouldn't be default on CDNJS when the URL is specifying a specific version. Don't trust consumers to be competent, help them out with good UI patterns. We should be advocating default = secure here.

cronin101on Paul Allen has died

When was the last time there was a school shooting using a Panzer tank or a MiG fighter?

I can't see the pragmatism in demanding equivalence of regulation.

cronin101on I've spent the last two years building a new email client

He isn't trying to take away from the achievement, just highlighting some legitimate security concerns.

IMHO this is justified since people often overlook how critical an attack vector this would be.

Imagine if a state-sponsored "hobbyist" posted a pet project like the OP to Reddit and started harvesting keys/password reset capabilities for huge amounts of users.

Hell, people flocked to use unroll.me and then it turned out they were (predictably) scraping your entire inbox and selling the data to advertisers.

I don't believe that worrying somebody's skepticism might hurt feelings is a legitimate reason to downvote (remember, downvotes aren't about whether you agree with somebody; it's about whether they add constructively to discussion).

Aside: Great work OP. Seems like an incredibly hard sector to make traction with though, so best of luck.

cronin101on Google Bans Crypto-Currency Mining Extensions from Chrome Store

Would it not be better for you (and the rest of the world) if you instead willingly paid them the equivalent portion of your power bill, without actively wasting the resources?

I really don't want the world to devolve into a future where armies of ignored pre-teens with ipads are rapidly accelerating global warming, just so that they can watch clickbait videos and share content in $social_network_vNext, on sites sponsored by "monitising PoW".

cronin101on How I've built a profitable Slack bot as a side project in Rails

Or just only highlight whether the response is from the creator, that way you can't correlate between threads.