HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

exprA

51 karma · joined January 21, 2016

submissionscomments
exprA··on U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Further
You can also prefix any WSJ links (among others) with “facebook.com/l.php?u=” to receive content reserved for users arriving from Facebook; that is, if you don't mind Facebook tracking.
exprA··on Web.dev by Google
Also broken everywhere else in the site for me: you never get back to where you were* , even on a “static” page full of links.

A horrible excuse of a web site – but perhaps that still makes for a good web app. I couldn't tell and don't know if I'd want to.

* edit for clarification: this includes position on previous page

exprA··on Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
Affirmative action is racist.

Accepting that, you can of course debate what sorts of racism we should allow, and perhaps even encourage. I probably disagree with you, but that's just my opinion.

exprA··on Urban Birds Are Evolving to Be Fed
In larger sense, if fed birds are more successful, it affects the distribution of species (favouring fed part of the ecosystem). Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, and city environment does that anyway.
exprA··on The tale of aux.c
I.e. “how do I operate my shell”. You certainly want to understand shell expansion to get stuff done effectively.
exprA··on The tale of aux.c
I don't agree with that at all; a web browser has easily a more complex user interface than a single-purpose command-line tool like “rm” – and that is even before we open any document at all, with all their conventions we have to learn before we can effectively navigate them.

Everything has a learning curve, of course, but are you sure you're just not much more familiar with one of these two?

(edit: just to clarify, what do you expect a decent rm to do when given a single argument of “-”? While there may still be systems where that does not do what you'd expect it to do – it's no different to existing obsolete versions of browsers that do nothing at all when you type in something other than a valid URL in the address bar – and are thus considerably harder to use for some not familiar with the technology. The harder corner case would be to try and remove a file with name that can be confused for a valid flag – like '-i' – but even then, that's about the only corner case for the tool, and not a steep step to learn. Any recent coreutils rm will even suggest a valid command to remove files that look like options, but are not actually valid options, so some thought has been given to discoverability as well.)

exprA··on America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
It's a VW Polo from the early noughties. Petrol, albeit a rather small engine to match the car :)

To clarify my earlier post, I meant of course that a single bottle of oil is enough for the refill (between 3 and 4 litres) and more than enough for any top-ups for the about 30000 km before the car starts to remind of the end of the “Long Life” maintenance cycle. Oil is certainly not up there when it comes to costs of owning a small car, ICE or not.

A cursory look at used oil: it's still rather like the stuff that goes in, albeit black, of course. Without specific tools, I think it's impossible to tell it apart from oil that's used for, say, 10000 km.

exprA··on America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
I guess I'm at the other end of spectrum by simply following what the manufacturer proposes: I change my oil along with the filter every 18,000 miles, and so far, after 100,000 miles (and then some) have not had any issues. (My car is rather cheap, or in EV sense practically free, so I'm not all too concerned, either.)

The engine does not consume too much oil, either, so a single 4L bottle – about a gallon I think – is easily all that the oil I need between changes. With European prices, that is the equivalent of a single refill (even with my modest tank size), which makes you simply laugh and wonder at all the people that (always) bring up oil changes in the discussion of ICE vs EV. I can't but wonder how many of those actually own and maintain a not-imaginary vehicle.

exprA··on Is the C++ preprocessor still needed?
Are you sure you're making a point – because I can't see one. Seems more about unnecessary bitching about C++ being different from [some-different-language].

If they could do anything more stupid as introducing a galling difference and a special case to variable initialisation with auto, it would be to do exactly that, but because “some other languages work more like that”.

exprA··on Shell made a film about climate change in 1991
I wonder which has a bigger impact on human consumption levels: a person that decides to save his time by driving a car instead of waiting for a bus, or Africa's population increasing from 250 million in 1960 to about 5 billion by 2100.

Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.

exprA··on Shell made a film about climate change in 1991
>politicians are too scared to introduce that.

Of course politicians should be the one who decide the rules. That's how democracy works...

Keep in mind that the jet fuel that's used to transport all the world's hipsters to “experience the world” is not taxed at all – or does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car? A life that's aimed at solely minimising emissions is a bleak one, which is why it's not the will of the majority.

exprA··on An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep
You can calculate a number from the resource (over)usage.

Some will, of course, claim that we consume too much – but at that point, it's a matter of opinion. I call it overpopulation for the current level of technology.

exprA··on Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
TIL.

I don't think I've ever seen one of these hotbox driers in person, but gathered somewhere that those had existed earlier and saw them as fully obsolete technology used only in some industrial settings. The fact that they are still sold and installed (with all the requirements) in ordinary homes is very surprising.

(Hint: if you buy a condensation dryer, buy one with a drainage hose, if at all possible. Unless you are a very punctual person, you probably won't learn to empty the water storage after every cycle despite that all the manuals tell you to do so, because it can hold water from several cycles – but you will find yourself having unexpectedly wet laundry from time to time when you start drying with an almost full water tank and are not near when the machine tells it can't continue the program.)

exprA··on Milk that lasts for months
And phytoestrogens for that nice warped hormonal balance... No thanks.
exprA··on Dell’s 32-inch 8K UP3218K Display Now for Sale
>At a normal viewing distance a 100dpi monitor is already decent.

No it isn't.

exprA··on “Alcohol and caffeine created civilization”
You'd think you should be more confused about how alcohol is as accepted as it is.

I feel more pity for the way people still want to impose control over other folks life – and quietly dream of the day more people accepted that substance abuse is the problem, not the substances themselves (and gave more room for personal responsibility and different choices in life). I personally don't see a fundamental difference in people turning away from society for e.g. spiritual reasons, or because they want to get high, but think they should only do so if they can afford it wholly by themselves. (I do accept if assistance – financial, etc.. - comes with obligations.)

exprA··on /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know
The sleep sub-process of time is not part of the pipeline, however. It will exit after the requested time has passed.
exprA··on German institute successfully tests underwater energy storage sphere
Each sphere is only worth 5 MW (for 4 hours, totalling 20 MW·h worth of electricity). 80 spheres were not meant to cover the entire base load, but just to make them a relevant factor in the grid.
exprA··on Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
>but imho the Windows desktop since 7 is better than most on the linux side.

Are you by any chance a fan of minimalism?

Windows desktop by default comes with almost no features at all – be it about window management, file management, network connectivity (shares) or anything else. Personally I find using a plain Windows desktop an exercise in frustration for that.

exprA··on How to create loading image using CSS only
That isn't even relatively close to being the same animation.

If that doesn't matter, who not just (paraphrasing):

  <blink>...</blink>
exprA··on Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it
Speaking as an European, can you really call driving subsidized (if it is in one single area, such as building code) when much more cash is spent in social services paid by fuel taxes?
exprA··on Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it
Because other forms of transport never get people killed, right? Because only passenger vehicles need roads?

Here in the Finnish capital Helsinki we had all of 2 traffic fatalities last year. A low anomaly for sure, but because the first only occurred half way in the year, it was widely reported and I still remember the cause: an elderly pedestrian getting hit by a tram.

Now this is, of course, just a single case, but you can't possibly claim that the only form of transport that causes casualties is driving – because it's not true. (Actually, the conditions here are pretty treacherous as I'm writing this: much harder to fall down and injure yourself while sitting in a car, don't you think?)

For me, driving a car instead of using public transport is making my one-way commute in 15 minutes instead of an hour. How much would you value 1.5 hours of your time every single day – not to even mention to comfort?

exprA··on A friendly web development tutorial for complete beginners
HTML, CSS and JavaScript are not hard.

What's hard is being able to teach any single person them – that requires many sorts of people skills. The irony is that for people with the right mindset, learning the 3 of them, or programming in general is one of the easiest thing they could do.

exprA··on Don't setenv in multi-threaded code on glibc
gets is impossible to use safely with unformatted input, which need not be the case.
exprA··on VESA HOTAS Mounts for IKEA Markus Chair
I've had this chair for the better half of a decade, and I can attest to its reliability.

I don't like everything about the chair, though. The hand rests prevent you from having the keyboard up close in most settings (if you like that), but the worst thing for me is the slight slack that the base has had from the beginning (the whole chair tilts a bit over the base). It almost made me return the chair in the first place, but as the sample model at the local IKEA had the same feature I accepted this as a necessary evil in the price point.

I probably won't buy another one, though – I much prefer firm chairs.

exprA··on The war on drugs has failed: doctors should lead calls for drug policy reform
But that's one of the main driving forces of puritanism, which is what the war on drugs is mostly about.
exprA··on Connect 2016 [video]
Title should have a warning about automatically playing content, although I guess with more “modern” devices background tabs' actions don't matter as much.
exprA··on H.264 is Magic
There's another false claim like that a bit below. I can only assume that the author is close to legally blind, or uses a VGA-res display to watch the page.
exprA··on Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
It isn't smoke, and it isn't burnt plant matter.

In theory the vapour might have as strong a smell as cigarette smoke; in practice even the most strong smelling vapours are mostly comparable to the smell of personal fragrances, and we are ways off from banning those as well.

exprA··on Writing more legible SQL
It isn't just you, and indeed, the alignment examples make little sense with a proportional typeface.

I checked the CSS, and for some reason the code blocks use the exact same fonts as the rest of the text (albeit with a new font-family clause just for them).

Page 1 of 2Next →