HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

eldenbishop

240 karma · joined February 13, 2009

submissionscomments
eldenbishop··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.
eldenbishop··on DEA to Temporarily Schedule 7-Oh and Related Substances to Protect Public Safety
Raw leaf Kratom seems to be helpful for some with what I would consider a manageable and acceptable addiction danger. You can get hooked on it, realize there is an issues and cut back or come off it without it destroying your life. I see no reason to make it illegal. I've even seen is used by people to get off "harder" Kratom concentrates. Sorta like how we regulate beer and wine a bit differently than whiskey... same drug, same abuse potential in theory but massive abuse difference in practice.
eldenbishop··on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything. Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their budgets frozen and lost headcount.
eldenbishop··on The beauty of finished software
Most programmers never get to experience the amazing feeling of being truly done with a software project. I used to work on video games in the 90s which would go into a box and onto a shelf. We did not have updates or patches. The starting, creating and finishing of a concrete and complete project is not available for most programmers today.
eldenbishop··on Tesla's Model 3 cheaper than Toyota's Camry in California with tax benefits
It's satirical but also true. I have a tesla model y. I only use the autopilot feature to quickly take over when I'm going into the U/I to do something complicated... like adjusting the window wipers (buttons are too small for me to hit accurately at speed).
eldenbishop··on Old man yells at cloud
Yup. I recently bought a 4runner, not top of the line mind you, and it cost the same as my wife's Tesla Model Y. Love that thing though ... specifically bought the non-pro model to get the simple three knob climate controls. Ridiculously overpriced but no direct competition in the current US market.
eldenbishop··on ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers
Haven't heard anyone talk about the Shangri-La diet in ages. I did a slight variation of this for awhile way back in my 30s at it worked great. Recently testing this out with OMAD but haven't been doing it long enough to see if it is workable. I'm in my 50s now and a lot of things that worked wonders in my 30s do not work as well as they once did.
eldenbishop··on Lucid announces new lower priced sedans
Yup. Every page on the PG&E site is pushing moving to electric cars and home charging but actually getting a panel upgrade that can support it has been a nightmare. Weeks between emails, no explanations for what steps we need to go through, now waiting for a few months for a technician to come out to check "flutter" on the nearest transformer. It's been nine months so far and I don't expect to have the project finished over a year from start.
eldenbishop··on US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent
LOL - this is good timing. A bunch of my unit tests just started failing due to the recent DST transition. Luckily our CI build servers are all GMT so it only failed on local runs. But even better if this problem went away altogether.
eldenbishop··on A Padlock I’d Use [video]
Interesting. I'd never heard of this sect. Also not allowed to live on the same land as their cattle. Always fascinating to read the rules and behaviors of these outlier communities.
eldenbishop··on An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
There is a wonderful little game based on this concept called universal paperclips. The AI eventually consumes all the matter in the universe in order to turn it into paperclips.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

eldenbishop··on Complexities of e-mail validation logic
It's not even about crazy emails. My wife works for an Aerospace company so her work email was blahblah@blah.aero and a huge number of websites still don't recognize that as a valid top level domain.
eldenbishop··on The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks
You are correct. It's one of many sleight of hand tricks used to exaggerate the impact of beef. For some reason, certain parties don't want harm reduction policies on these issues, they want you to stop eating Beef altogether.
eldenbishop··on Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
I ride a bike, around 2000 miles/year and I'd love to be able to spout the statistic their claiming. But please, /they are also stating that driving a car 10KM has the same carbon footprint as sending 800 emails. That kind of claim makes the whole article suspect.
eldenbishop··on Controversial Programming Opinions (2012)
Sigh. I tried using fizz buzz as an interview question for awhile and never got a single applicant who could solve it. Some just had no idea how to do much of anything but it turned out almost no-one had ever even heard of the modulo operator before.
eldenbishop··on Quiet route planning for pedestrians in traffic noise polluted environments
I have no idea what google optimizes for but it's not time or distance. At least in my neighborhood (San Francisco) it almost alway pushes you onto "main" traffic streets over much faster and more direct routes. It's trivial to just drag the line to a better route and see the time drop by several minutes over just a few miles. And this is not a traffic thing, they are longer even late at night. Maybe some agreement with the district to prefer mandated high traffic areas?
eldenbishop··on Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
For what it's worth the original close order was supposed to align with bringing the newer Flamanville 3 1,650 MW plant online which would have been a nearly even swap. Unfortunately that project has gone 5x over budget with numerous time delays. Current guesstimates expected it to come online in 2022. This article seems a little disingenuous.
eldenbishop··on Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19
I take as much as 20 grams a day with no side-effects. It can take your stomach awhile to get used to that much but once it has adjusted its fine.
eldenbishop··on California car burglaries are at crisis levels
This has always been true. If a poor persons bike is stolen, it's a misdemeanor. If a rich person's bike is stolen it's a felony. It's disgusting.
eldenbishop··on Menlo Park Police used city funds to taxi homeless woman to SF
I think your missing an important detail here. She didn't say she wanted to go to San Francisco.

"she was told that she couldn't remain where she was and was asked where she would go if she could go anywhere other than Menlo Park. She said she recalled that at Ocean Beach there was someplace to wash her hair, so she said she'd go there."

Turning that into "She wanted to go to San Francisco" is disingenuous.

eldenbishop··on Mourning the End of Paper Maps
I own a few Butler motorcycle maps. Phones kind of being impossibly inconvenient on a bike. My riding suit even has a giant back pocket specifically for easy access to a map.
eldenbishop··on The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi
This is correct. I find this excerpt sobering when looking at stats for private planes.

""" Doing the math

In other words, take these comparisons with a grain of salt: In 2013, traffic accidents killed 32,719 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The fatality rate was 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled. Assuming an average vehicle speed of 50 miles per hour (a big assumption), the fatality rate for automobiles translates to 1.1 per every 2 million hours.

Taking the preliminary 2013 fatality rate in general aviation of 1.05 fatalities for every 100,000 hours of flight time and scaling it up to 2 million hours gives a comparison rate of 21 general aviation fatalities per every 2 million hours. This suggests that stepping on a private plane is about 19 times more dangerous than getting into the family sedan. """

from: https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html

eldenbishop··on Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain
He talks about designing a film for the big screen experience but every film he mentioned except maybe "North by Northwest" is vastly superior in a good home theater. "Persona" by Ingmar Bergman is a wonderful film but would gain nothing on a modern digital screen with Atmos sound and speakers that can break windows. His preferred movies are intimate, patient and beautiful but do not in any way take advantage of the format. Many classic films are actual big-screen spectacles like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Wizard of Oz", anything by Akira Kurosawa and hundreds of others but his tastes strike me as explicitly and decidedly "small-screen" and almost anti-cinema if you consider the "cinema" distinction primarily the larger format. Small, intimate movies are great but are sub-par experiences in a cinema next to popcorn munchers and mobile phones. I am a huge movie buff who actually had a Filmstruck subscription and still pay for MUBI. I love the movies he loves but they do not work well in theaters. I would much rather watch these at home. I'll go to the theater for Marvel because those movies are much better in a theater. This is simply not true for his tastes.
eldenbishop··on Alphabet in bid to buy Fitbit
All the works-with-nest integrations got killed recently. Infuriated me as that was a major selling point of the platform. I used to have my lights rotate evenings when I wasn't home. Also had my outside lights activate based on nest cam motion detection. All that is gone now and they haven't improved the base services for ages. It's too bad since the hardware is all really top notch.
eldenbishop··on Amazon Has Transformed the Hasidic Economy
Seems like an unusually large percentage of posts on Hacker News are behind paywalls, some soft, some hard, some with a maximum free articles per time-unit. I peruse most of the top stories daily and can't read a good number of them making me have to just read the comments to get a sense of the article. It is seriously annoying. I wish there was some kind of flair or warning on these posts.
eldenbishop··on Sun Microsystems: A Look Back at a Tech Company Ahead of Its Time
Sun was constantly blowing my mind when I first got into computing. I remember going to my first Java 1 when Sun was showing off the Java Card. There were terminals everywhere and you would just slide your card into the terminal and your X windows sessions would pop up exactly how you left it at the last terminal. I know, its just skipping the login step but it seemed so cool at the time.

Years later at a pre-maker-fair style event Sun was showing off their Java based robotic controllers. They had embedded WIFI and a compiler with a button that would upload the code directly to the device. This was before raspberry pie, IoT and "connected devices". Back then we had to physically update our controllers by attaching them to the PC. It was amazing but sadly WAY too expensive.

Was very sad when their assets got swallowed up by Oracle. I doubt we will ever see their like again.

eldenbishop··on An Antique Toaster That's Better Than Today’s [video]
Sounds suspiciously like a Dualit... https://www.dualit.com/products/classic-toasters
eldenbishop··on “China's Tesla” NIO slashes thousands of jobs as losses mount
Old Volvos had that unreliable reliable quality to them where something was always broken or going wrong but you could keep it essentially useable forever. My handyman was an old Russian dude with something like 360k miles on an old Volvo station wagon. Another old dude in my village has similar miles on theirs. I don't expect modern Volvos are going to hit these kind of miles.
eldenbishop··on We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
Some interesting tidbits on cigarette litter in San Francisco.

A study commissioned by SF Public Works in 2009 determined that the direct costs for cigarette related litter in San Francisco could be remediated with a 22 cent per pack tax. The actual tax in San Francisco is 85 cents per pack known as the "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee". The 2009 study claimed around 30 million packs/year are sold in San Francisco which would be roughly 25 million dollars a year in taxes collected for this purpose with an estimated cleanup cost of only 7-8 million. So not only are cigarette smokers already paying for the cleanup they are paying nearly four times the actual cleanup cost for their litter.

The 2009 study: https://sfpublicworks.org/sites/default/files/tobacco_litter...

The tax: https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette

eldenbishop··on We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
Agree with it or not, this is already normal practice. San Francisco has a "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee" of $0.85 per pack.

https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette

Page 1 of 4Next →