dredmorbius

Falsehoods programmers believe about Betteridge's Law.

Reddit have started deprecating old.reddit.com as of a week or so ago, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747>.

The site still works if 1) you are logged in or 2) you're in the control of the A/B test group (presuming the A/B test is still ongoing).

I've been unable to access old.reddit.com for over a week now. Site's dead to me.

Ozone, leaded motor vehicle fuels, asbestos, acid rain, DDT, commercial whaling, atmospheric nuclear testing.

(Not all of these were existential to humans necessarily, but all have been largely successes.)

Or HN could just deprecate it entirely.

Different periods have seen different modes of action.

There was a tremendous amount of violence in the labour movement from the late 18th through mid-20th centuries, including numerous armed conflicts. This was perpetrated by both sides, though my sense is that capital was somewhat more prone to exacting violence on labour than vice versa.

The ANTIFA movement of the 1930s--1940s was a worldwide violent struggle, which ultimately proved effective. Nonviolent movements (say, the White Rose resistance in Germany) proved utterly ineffectual. It's useful to remember Gandhi's observation that ahimsa is predicated on an opponent with a conscience which can be shamed. That wasn't the case against Nazi Germany.

Civil rights, across multiple jurisdictions, has seen both violent and non-violent movements. The US civil rights movement of the 1960s is often seen as offering White America a choice between MLK's non-violent movement and the far more radical path pursued by the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and others.

The story is ... complex.

Track utilisation is limited by a number of factors, including headways, much of which is governed by stopping distance.

I believe a general minimum practical headway allows about 10--12 trainsets per hour on a given track. At 400 passengers/trainset, that's roughly 4,000 to 4,800 passengers/hour, per track.

That compares with about 1,500 vehicles/hour per highway lane, or about 2,550 passengers/hour at the U.S. average of 1.7 passengers/vehicle.

I've seen some suggestion that headways could be reduced to 3--4 minutes, or 15--20 trainsets/hour. I know that some urban rapid transit systems (e.g., BART in San Francisco) achieve this, but only on a small section of the system (Colma to Oakland, transiting downtown SF, IIRC). Train speeds there peak at 70 MPH, and I believe are much slower for most of this portion of track.

OTOH, there's a lot of stuff that is far more feasibly moved on the Earth's surface rather than in flight. So some sort of surface-level infrastructure will be required: highways, railroads, canals, rivers, oceans.

Some of those are amenable to high-speed variants, some less so. And once you've established transport corridors, much of the hard part (rights-of-way acquisition) is accomplished, so that adding a high-speed route becomes far more tractable.

For the most part, actual construction costs are fairly modest, modulo bridges and tunnels, both of which can of course be quite expensive.

There's this burning Ring of Fire....

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire>

Depends on the context.

If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief.

I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.

I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue.

I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack>

By contrast, Unicode has something on the order of 160,000 distinct characters.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode>

This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker.

<https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-...>

The subhead, "Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications", makes that clear, and would be far less clickbaity.

Many years ago (and possibly still today) there were firms offering refrigerator-cleaning services. Brushing off the condenser (external) coils.

Yes, that may save you a bit of energy. No, not that much, and overall the financial savings are a small fraction of the service's charge.

A friend worked in energy conservation at the time and actually studied the impact of cleaning coils on refrigerators as part of a recycling programme (so: measuring pre- and post-cleaning power consumption on units which had been in use, most for quite some time). The net results, over hundreds (if not more) units: to little difference to detect statistically.

If you're doing the work yourself or don't have to pay for it: possibly worthwhile for peace of mind if nothing else. Paying someone else? No.

I suspect a similar situation for solar panels.

Brown M&Ms:

<https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...>

"This World of Ours"by James Mickens, from Usenix January 2014, for the unfamiliar:

<https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf> (PDF)

Truth-in-parody.

If you're limiting yourself to carry-on, or even allowing for a (small) checked bag, there are bicycle panniers you can easily mount on the bike and then either carry aboard the plane or check.

Heck, you could pack a bicycle travel bag and pack your bike itself as checked luggage.

NYTimes Wirecutter has had some decent pannier reviews. I've had good luck with Arkel bags. Ortlieb look pretty bombproof.

Wirecutter: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bike-rack-ba...>

Article: "How To Fly With Bike Boxes & Bags For Touring & Bikepacking?" <https://tomsbiketrip.com/how-to-fly-with-bike-boxes-bags-for...>.

Arkel's "Bug" Pannier Backpack: <https://arkel.ca/products/bug-pannier-backpack>.

(Numerous other models, this might be well-suited to bike-hike touring.)

Regwalled URL.

(Account / login required.)

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Paywall: <https://archive.is/83Hia>

A few bits about this:

I was curious whether or not phone spam (telemarketing, robocall, unsolicited calls) were evenly distributed across the U.S. or not. As it turns out, not (normed by population).

I've been looking into and thinking of possible mitigations to phone spam. One of those ideas was bonding, though I'd considered it applied to telephone networks (companies, networks, and providers, whether providing services to the receiving caller, originating caller, or transit networks between the two). It turns out that California requires a $100,000 bond to telemarketers themselves ... and it seems to work quite well.

Reporting from some sources, most notably the FCC's annual Do Not Call Databook[1], provide information of little or no practical use, given that they focus on reports rather than instances of phone spam. As the KarmaCall article makes clear, regions with the highest levels of phone spam have the lowest report rates, and vice versa.

The FCC's report says FAR more about the effectiveness of local mitigations on phone spam than it does on the objective levels in different parts of the country. It also suggests that present phone-spam regulations and legislation are grossly inadequate at a national level, though some states and locales do have relatively effective countermeasures. The Southeastern US (TX, OK, AR, AL, AR, MS, TN, FL, GA, SC, NC) are exceptionally bad.[2]

Given that it's possible to 1) choose an arbitrary area code for a new phone number, 2) that blocking "neighbor" calls is possible under some telco's call filtering[3], and 3) that phone spam incidence varies greatly by area code, choosing a service number in a low-spam remote area code and blocking unknown calls from that area code ... might be an effective mitigation technique.

There've been several recent FCC requests for comments on robocalls and phone spam, most of which are now closed to my knowledge. That said, I'm looking for ongoing substantive discussion on the topic, see my Mastodon/Fediverse thread here:

<https://mastodon.social/@dredmorbius@toot.cat/11698405157843...>

Notes:

________________________________

1. For 2025: <https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/DNC-Data-Book-2...>

2. For a better map, see <https://www.whistleout.com/CellPhones/Guides/robocall-epidem...>. And yeah, that Karmacall map/graphic is clearly AI slop with multiple states mislabeled / unlabeled.

3. See for example Verizon's "Call Filter", "Neighborhood Filter" feature: <https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-238154/>.

Or perhaps the opposite is true.

The content is solid. The presentation very much Gets In The Way.

That was on mobile.

If that's intent, the result is highly aggravating.

I'm thinking through the latter presently: <https://mastodon.social/@dredmorbius@toot.cat/11698405157843...>.

And I see a few ideas that might be worth picking up from this proposal.

Voice and text comms ... have much in common.

The panels keep pushing back into the screen on Mobile.

I quickly resorted to Reader View (Firefox/Android).

Remove those, or stuff them below the article.

I've been using email since the 1980s.

I've ... seen a lot of poorly-considered proposals to fix it.

The fact that email has one hell of a lot of lock-in does not mean that it's not-broken. Just that it happens to be in one hell of a local optimum from which reaching any preferable state has a lot of hill-climbing to do.

Much in the way that evolution is not teleological, and cannot identify some desired state it wishes to evolve toward, but must proceed, by stepwise incremental increases in fitness to another state, so it is with protocols and standards.

That's not to say that SMTP + fiddly bits doesn't solve some problems, occasionally elegantly. But the leap from there to "it's not as broken" is ... rather large.

I've read TFA and am going through comments to this thread. There are some ideas I like, some I question. I'd suggest that this proposal seems better though through than many others I've seen.

Yes, the response is warranted. Appreciated even.

The swipe ("I'd suggest enlightening yourself") is not.

The only work that's added over any of aluminium, stainless, or teflon, is the oil wipe, which takes a few seconds. For daily use.

Again, once a month or so, usually when I'm baking something else, I'll add a coat and leave the pans in the oven whilst I'm making bread, rolls, pizza, etc.

The benefit: a utensil which only improves with age, over decades if not centuries.

If stainless works for you, have at it. What I've described works very well for me.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406645>

No, not all products need be premium.

But trading off a former reputation for premium quality whilst hollowing out the brand / actual goods ... is a pretty bright flag of red hue.

Looking through the list, I'm finding that the classifications and narratives for the cases I'm familiar with largely match my own experience, about 50 of the listed brands.

Principle exceptions are Keen and Merrell, both shoemakers. I've watched their products disintegrate before my eyes. Both had had good reputations. Keen, ironically, being my substitute for Teva when that brand went bad in the early aughts.

If anything, the rankings are generous. Though I don't see any marked "Approved" I'd disagree with.

Cast iron & eggs: if all that's going in are eggs (and fat), I have less clean-up with cast-iron than Teflon.

Heat pan on medium-low, add oil, add slightly-stirred eggs, turn heat off or minimum, mix with a silicone spatula. Perfect eggs in about a minute. The heat retention of the iron transfers at just the right rate to the eggs, the oil (olive, butter, avocado) prevents sticking.

My usual "scramble" has a bunch of ingredients (onions, garlic, sausage, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, seasoning, eggs), and there's more adhesion, but a 10--15 minute soak (whilst eating) hot water + detergent, and a quick scrub, and it's all good.

Looking at alternatives (and I already have both cast-iron and aluminium fry pans which I prefer using), what are people's experiences with ceramic cookware?

I've started seeing these, suspect it's relatively non-stick, should be metabolically benign, but also hear that surfaces are subject to scratching and chipping. (Our storage situation is ... less than ideal.) Prices seem somewhat spendy, but doable.

(And I see <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071016> immediately on submitting this ;-)