Hacker News Reader

exhilarationon Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics.

Wow...

exhilarationon Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

Nice, I just subscribed to their podcast. I'm an adherent to the Starting Strength / Mark Rippetoe school of thought but always looking to learn more.

exhilarationon Ticker: Don't die of heart disease

Thanks for posting this. I was able to plug in all the required values from my last checkup and blood work. Even EGFR was there, I've never paid attention to that before.

exhilarationon Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died

My wife got this from her doctor as an alternative to a colonoscopy (in the US): https://www.cologuard.com/

It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.

exhilarationon Jeep wrangler owners waiting for answers week after an update bricked their cars

Yeah it's really hard, my 2025 Toyota Sienna is always connected. You can't just pull a fuse or rip out an antenna, I have to take the entire dashboard apart to reach the Data Communication Module (DCM) module. If anyone's curious what that looks like, it's a little bit easier on the Toyota Tacoma, here are some pictures of the process: https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...

It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!

exhilarationon Electronic Arts to be acquired for $52B in largest private equity buyout

Previous extensive discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413083

exhilarationon Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

So here's a tip for those of you thinking about using Teams: the huge F500 company company I work for uses Teams but it's used strictly for chat and real-time communications, so essentially it's a replacement for office phones. They enforce this by limiting its history to 10 days!

At first I hated this - it was like using a chat app from the 90's! Why can't I have unlimited history like Slack? Why can't I link to chat discussions in tickets and code comments like I did at every other company I've worked at? But the enforced 10 day limit means you HAVE to properly document conversations and decisions outside of the chat platform. It completely eliminates any reliance on the chat platform - we could switch to something new tomorrow and (except for some grumbling about have to relearn a new interface) nobody would really care.

exhilarationon California’s Alo Slebir unofficially broke the big wave surfing world record

I know nothing about surfing but I picked up Barbarian Days on Audible https://www.audible.com/pd/Barbarian-Days-Audiobook/B00YMMTO... and I was captivated. After I finished it I started looking for surf schools within driving distance of my home, still looking for something on the (New) Jersey Shore or Long Island. Anyone have any suggestions?

exhilarationon Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

I've got out of work friends that would love to see this guide. Please share.

exhilarationon Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy

There's multiple comments in this thread pointing to Chinese car manufacturers paying under $200 for their LIDAR hardware.

exhilarationon Pig lung transplanted into a human

I'm almost afraid to ask, what are living cadavers?

exhilarationon High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

I bet it's Usenet users. WinRAR can split large files into chunks that are uploaded as separate Usenet messages.

exhilarationon Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment

The trick is to to find real locksmiths, with a real storefront, preferably ahead of time. If you just Google emergency locksmith and your ZIP code or location, all of the top results will be scammers in unmarked vans. This is an old scam, it's got its own Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam

There's been some reporting about these fake listings on Google maps: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-maps-fake-listings-lawsu...

exhilarationon Private Welsh island with 19th century fort goes on the market

You haven't read World War Z! Zombies don't need to swim, they just walk on river and ocean bottoms. When there's billions of them, a few will make it anywhere.

exhilarationon States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option

Something like 40% of the homeless nationwide are actually working, employed, but unable to build up enough savings to rent an apartment.

Here's just one source I found on: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...

I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.

exhilarationon Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling

Sounds cool :-) I think we'd forgive you for providing a direct link to this product.

exhilarationon Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from a beetle infestation

That works great for your basement but what's the impact of low humidity on ancient books?

exhilarationon What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

Looming human extinction? Bro, all you need to fix this "problem" in the West is more immigrants.

exhilarationon Heart attacks aren't as fatal as they used to be

I read here (on Hacker News) that the stool test is actually really valuable and cheap enough to pay out of pocket prior to trying to justify an out-of-schedule colonoscopy.

exhilarationon Heart attacks aren't as fatal as they used to be

I would just like to recommend this excellent Radiolab episode about saving lives during heart attacks: https://radiolab.org/podcast/how-to-save-a-life

exhilarationon Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

Sir, this is Hacker News.

exhilarationon The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

Those wet wipes shouldn't be flushed down the down the toilet, even if they're labeled "flushable", here's a nice PDF infographic from the city of Los Angeles explaining why: https://sanitation.lacity.gov/san/sandocview?docname=cnt0365...

exhilarationon They used Xenon to climb Everest in days – is it the future of mountaineering?

If you're interested in Everest, I loved Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer - it's absolutely fantastic and available on Audible. Then last week I discovered Everest on Netflix, which isn't great but it's based on the book and they do a good job showing you the route and distances between the camps with CGI.

Anyways, after all that I have zero desire to ever go near Everest or any other risky mountain climb.

exhilarationon Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

Local LLMs are almost here, no Internet needed!

exhilarationon Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python (2018)

I bought VueScan in 2014 specifically for a Canon scanner, looks like it's still around: https://www.hamrick.com/

exhilarationon How to live on $432 a month in America

At that income level and in a blue state, there might actually be pretty good health coverage.

I've got a relative who lost his job last year, his wife gave birth in Long Island soon after and they paid pretty close to nothing.

exhilarationon A South Korean grand master on the art of the perfect soy sauce

or god forbid that swill they call la choy

An interesting note: La Choy is synthetically fermented (whatever what means!) and is usually the only alcohol-free option for those with medical or religious restrictions on the consumption of alcohol. Soy sauce is specifically listed as something recovering alcoholics taking Antabuse should avoid [1], though I've read it only rarely triggers any reaction. But there is a sometimes a reason for La Choy!

[1] https://advantagetherapy.com.au/the-impact-of-antabuse-on-al...

exhilarationon Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

The root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at anymore at standups.

exhilarationon Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.

exhilarationon We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job

Yeah after a disastrous remote hire I started requiring in-person 2nd round interviews. Company policy is that all future hires are hybrid only (not that we or anyone else is hiring these days...) so it just makes sense.

For developers I share my screen on MS Teams so everyone can watch, then hand them my laptop with Visual Studio. They've got 90 minutes to complete a small assignment while we look at them code - Google is allowed, so is copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and we'll probably allow Copilot as well. The code needs to run and return the expected results. One candidate said, "this was great, it felt like real work".

For cloud admins, our Devops lead creates a new resource group, hands over his laptop, and we ask them to create a few resources and do the network and authentication to make them talk to each other. Most candidates can't do that anymore - we're finding they've become Terraform operators that don't know how the underlying technology works.