Hacker News Reader

iamhammon SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987

I love them but unfortunately it’s just not as robust as it once was with regards to support. I’ve been locked out for some time now but can’t get a response from anyone. I know it’s volunteer driven but ultimately if people can’t rely on it, they’ll move on. Still happy I was able to support all these years but absent my account getting fixed, this will be my last year of support.

iamhammon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

Same! My wife is at the opposite end and can visualize these wild scenes and describe them in detail and I’m like “I can tell you roughly where the parts of a cat go”.

iamhammon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!

iamhammon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black. That’s it. No amount of effort conjures an image. That’s not what most people I talk to about it report, so I am going to assume there’s a functional difference between me and people with functioning visualization.

iamhammon Beware of Star Trek managers, especially when bearing MBAs

Feels like the author starts with a valid criticism of Rush and then spends 3,000 words settling old scores with managers. The strongest part of the article is the first 10%; after that it mostly becomes an anti-MBA rant.

iamhammon I rode Elon Musk's Vegas Loop, the worst transit system on Earth

The Vegas Loop isn’t really “better” than a subway, it’s more like the best available option given the specific political and financial reality of Las Vegas.

Vegas has never had meaningful public transit investment, and a real subway would cost billions and take decades of political will that simply doesn’t exist here. The Loop fits the actual use case: moving convention attendees between LVCC halls and eventually casino properties, quickly, in a city where distances are deceptive and walking in 115° heat is brutal.

For that narrow purpose, point-to-point, climate-controlled, short-hop movement in a dense tourist corridor, it works reasonably well. The comparison to a subway is a bit of a category error; no subway was ever on the table. The real question is whether it beats surface-level shuttles and moving walkways, which it probably does.

The critique is fair though: it’s not scalable the way a subway is (throughput is limited by number of cars), and it’s privately owned infrastructure serving commercial interests rather than a public transit network.

iamhammon Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?

I'm an amateur extra, US. Licensed since I was 12 years old back in 1992.

iamhammon Europe Begins Rethinking Its Crackdown on Big Tech

https://archive.is/10L23

iamhammon Trump administration has killed a massive solar power project in Nevada

Great news! Killing the Esmeralda 7 solar project is the right decision. People don’t realize how massive it was, over 110 square miles, bigger than Las Vegas itself. It would’ve scraped up pristine Great Basin desert, wiped out wildlife habitat, and trampled culturally important land not to mention diverting massive amounts of water which is a tight resource out here. Renewable energy is great, but we don’t need to bulldoze entire ecosystems to do it. Killing this one might actually push solar developers to think smaller and smarter next time.

iamhammon We Didn't Evolve to Exercise

Viewing exercise as interesting time spent is probably where the outliers of "people whose instincts defy millennia of evolution" come from. My wife and I truly love trail running and usually running more than 99% of users in Garmin (according to the charts). During race training season we're frequently in the 50 miles per week or more range which, as older and slower runners, means we might be running 10 to 15 hours per week. But, we love it, so no more interesting things for us to do than that.

iamhammon Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job

> I can’t stop myself from thinking that working on a book for 6 months, doing its projects, is a huge waste of time for me, and because I already feel late, I find myself, yet again, in a cycle.

That’s such an important observation. Many of us have become so fooled by the notion of fast consumption and immediate gains that we have all but stopped putting in the meaningful work.

iamhammon Kyawthuite is so rare it's only ever been found once

“It also has hollow, tube-shaped inclusions called en echelon veins that are caused by shear stress – evidence of its natural formation.”

iamhammon Show HN: Tinder, but to Decide What to Eat

What about an app to tell you what kind of sub sandwich to eat? Could call it Grinder!

iamhammon Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

I've personally always had at least an hour each way. What are commutes like where you are?

iamhammon CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

SentinelOne

iamhammon Forest Service orders Arrowhead bottled water to shut down California pipeline

https://archive.is/4QrBw

iamhammon HamClock – a real time space weather dashboard

Too Many Connections :(

iamhammon The 'Broletariat Revolution'

https://archive.is/hX9c0

iamhammon The manager's unbearable lack of endorphins

hug

> So I drift from one interest to the next, because the only reward I get is from novelty, as long as things are interesting I can stay focused, but as soon as I loose interest my brain stops giving me a reward signal and I move on.

That hits so hard as a fellow ADHDer. I read that then turned around to look at my disastrously messy home office filled with hundreds of partly done projects and abandoned hobbies. I often wish I wasn't highly compensated since being broke would meter me. ADHD is a vicious cycle.

iamhammon I kind of like rebasing

I read that as “I kind of like freebasing” at first and thought it was a bit racy.

iamhammon OSRD: Open-Source Railway Designer

Run8 by Run8 Studios is what you want. I just busted 4 coupler knuckles during a boring meeting because I didn't watch my slack coming off while accelerating up a +0.10 grade :)

www.run8studios.com

And if you want to peak train nerd like me: raildriver.com

iamhammon How to Disable Windows Recall

Uninstall Windows seems like an easier fix.

iamhammon Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image) (2022)

I missed this when it came out and thought I'd share this humbling image.

iamhammon Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

Visiting and documenting abandoned mine sites across the U.S. desert southwest.

iamhammon I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

Hi Albertsons/Safeway VP of Security Engineering here. Thank you for disclosing this. I’ll have it fixed along with the fact our VDP submission link is missing from the Safeway site. Here it is for future reference https://albertsons.responsibledisclosure.com/hc/en-us

iamhammon Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

I think that's an interesting point about being present. I actually love the act of taking photos, adjusting the colors and lighting to capture how it looked, and then I rarely look at them again. My wife thinks it's bizarre, but it's not the reflection on the past, but the act of photography I like. I've turned some into prints and have a digital picture frame to scroll them through, but sitting down to reflect and look through them rarely happens.

iamhammon The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

Ha! I moved out of Cambridge in 2011 to CA and as soon as I read "Memorial Drive, Cambridge" I immediately thought "that's going to be the one by Microcenter." Thanks for posting, brought back some memories :)

iamhammon An invitation to a secret society

I had a similar thought about the hard sciences (physics graduate dropout) and the inaccessibility of hard sciences to amateurs. Then I moved to the desert and got interested in geology and much to my surprise learned there's all sort of stuff in geology that is available. It's the result of the need to physically go look at rocks (at least for structural). I'm currently working on a new description of the strata at the end of my street because the highest resolution stratigraphic map fails to correctly delineate at least two units of bedrock - eg the map does not show them, but they appear to be present. To figure it out, I've had to take several road trips to compare my neighborhood rock to the exposed units in those locations. I find it quite fun and entertaining.

Meanwhile, a colleague of mine found a new species of dinosaur using a radiometric detector he designed and got a patent on (https://ktar.com/story/4298984/arizona-volunteers-unearth-75...).

There's still some real science out there if you want it. :)

iamhammon Fallen Flag Railroad Photos

Things I never expected: reference to Stan Rogers on HN.

I believe your interpretation is the generally accepted one. Stan was from Guysborough and as I understand it, the rail line was started, quite a lot of progress made, and then never finished so there was a lot of displeasure from the locals at the constant reminders of the failure of the government to make good on their promise to deliver the railroad.

iamhammon FDA: Acetaminophen one of the most dangerous drugs on the market

2012