Hacker News Reader

ewgoforthon KO Myung-Hun's OS/2 Factory

I remember that 15 years ago, many ATMs were running OS/2. Is this still the case?

ewgoforthon Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

So many sites don't work correctly in Firefox. Chrome is the new IE6.

ewgoforthon Tesla Model Y overtakes Corolla to be world’s best-selling car in 2023

Part of this is because cars are losing out to trucks.

https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/light-trucks-now-outselli....

https://www.statista.com/statistics/204212/north-america-car...

ewgoforthon Niche Museums

As far as in the USA, I like https://roadsideamerica.com

ewgoforthon Congress wants AM radio in all new cars – trade groups say that’s a mistake

You do see signs saying tune in to XXXX Hz to hear information about road construction, air port traffic, etc.

ewgoforthon The skills gap for Fortran looms large in HPC

Fortran (1957) is older than RPG (1959)

ewgoforthon Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

Not necessarily easy, but you can dispute it with your credit card company.

ewgoforthon 12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes – but they can work in tobacco fields

I'm from North Carolina, but never picked tobacco. Another problem I heard was that you absorb nicotine through your skin when picking tobacco, so it can make you sick if you aren't a tobacco user. It was used as an excuse to allow kids to smoke some cigarettes in order to get a tolerance for nicotine. This was back when there was an outside smoking area in high schools for students to smoke in.

ewgoforthon South Korea has the lowest fertility rate, which has lessons for us all

As the population ages you have fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees.

ewgoforthon Silicon Valley Learns to Love Socialism for the Rich

When I hear that I wonder why we just don't eliminate all taxes? The economic benefits would be huge!

ewgoforthon Chicago sold rights to 36k parking meters for $1.2B that generate $200M per year

I generally agree with you, but it looks like there cases where governments like the City of Chicago and Australia do a terrible job of balancing short term versus long term economics.

ewgoforthon Physically Demanding Work Tied to Male Fertility

Could this be a self-selecting group? Guys with higher testosterone can't stand the idea of sitting at a desk all day?

ewgoforthon EU-wide maximum limit of €10K for cash payments

It will suck for private parties to sell a used car in Europe. There are so many scams with non-cash payment methods.

ewgoforthon Electric car sales drive toward cleaner air, less mortality

Brake wear yes, but the resistance to forward motion still has to be transferred via that tires.

ewgoforthon Alternative Egyptology and scientific archaeology were born on the Giza Plateau

All in all I prefer the SI system, but the Imperial system has it's advantages. 5280 feet seems really arbitrary, but can halve it five times and still get an integer.

It also divides evenly by 3.

For comparison:

1/3 of a mile is 1760 feet. 1/2 of that is 880 feet 1/2 of that is 440 feet 1/2 of that is 220 feet 1/2 of that is 110 feet 1/2 of that is 55 feet.

1/3 of a km is 333.333333 meters 1/2 of that is 166.666667 meters 1/2 of that is 83.333333 meters 1/2 of that is 41.666667 meters 1/2 of that is 20.833333 meters 1/2 of that is 10.416667 meters

ewgoforthon The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

I'd also be curious to know what features that Edge doesn't support. I know it doesn't do everything Chrome does, but I haven't run into any scenarios that Edge didn't support in a long time.

It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only browser people supported, but it's Chrome now instead of IE.

ewgoforthon The “No Code” Delusion

The idea that you can write software without having to learn to code goes all the way back to COBOL in the fifties. It was a big step forward in abstracting some of the details. As languages have progressed they abstract away details, but you still have to be able to think like a programmer, especially if you want your code to be performant.

ewgoforthon Hong Kong Protestors Take over Universities and Financial District

India did.

ewgoforthon In China, tattoos border on illegal – and they're his life's work

The perception of tattoos in the US was pretty much the same until the late eighties. Only criminals, bikers, and some military people had them. The Research book Modern Primitives seemed to really popularize them among college kids in the US and it kind of trickled down from there. I definitely saw a lot of people get them in the wake of that book. As this generation has gotten older tattoos have become more acceptable.

ewgoforthon Sunlight through glass does not provide Vitamin D

I've known about glass inherently blocking UV for a long time, but have wondered why do posters, etc. fade in store windows.

ewgoforthon Austria is the next country working to impose a tech tax on companies like Apple

Actually the peasants were taxed to pay the nobility, not the other way around.

ewgoforthon Fortran is still a thing

I learned Fortran IV and later Fortan 77 in the mid eighties and programmed professionally in Fortran 77 up until 2000. I was taught and programmed with fixed format. I believe that there may have been compiler switches to allow non-fixed format. I'm pretty sure that longer lines were allowed via a compiler switch.

ewgoforthon Former Google chief predicts the Internet will split by 2028

This is pretty much a return to the mid nineties AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. era.