idlephysicist

I wish that people would just stop looking at their phones while driving.

I think they mean that because people have been driving automobiles for over 100 years and that proves (somehow) that visual detection works for identifying hazards on the road.

But they seem to be conflating human vision with computer vision.

> What are you protecting cloudflare?

A cheeky response is "their profit margins", but I don't think that quite right considering that their earnings per share is $-0.28.

I've not looked into Cloudflare much, I've never needed their services, so I'm not totally sure on what all their revenue streams are. I have heard that small websites are not paying much if anything at all [1]. With that preface out of the way–I think that we see challenges on sites that perhaps don't need them as a form of advertising, to ensure that their name is ever-present. Maybe they don't need this form of advertising, or maybe they do.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/

It's kind of amazing that this periodic check has not been implemented already.

Firstly, I love that website. It's simple and informative.

I don't the average mileage or a hydrogen vehicle nor tank size, so I'll take your word on that. Using your numbers and the map I plotted a route that does get you from San Diego to the Oregon border. But you will need a tow truck to meet you at the end, because there would not be enough fuel to get you back to Sacramento.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/p5tgvAkErktL7LTF6

Anyone that get’s a telephone call from “Google” should be immediately suspicious. I used to work for a company that paid GCP about as much as my annual salary _every_ month, and we still struggled to get GCP on the phone when we needed assistance.

I used Alacritty until about 3 weeks ago, switched to Ghostty. I'm very happy with the change.

Fair play to them, it's a detailed paper. But I'm not sure that this would have much practicality in other caves. The terrain just changes too quickly (most of the time).

The woeful inconsistency between airport security checks within the same country and sometimes within the same airport, really lends itself to the theory that it’s all a farce.

Travel time makes a big difference too, e.g. at peak times please keep your shoes on.

I've never come across that myself, but the audacity of some firms is outrageous.

Part of me thinks that you're right, but I've applied to _so many_ jobs over the years (prior to AI) that use workday and required that I fill in all the info again. I've also never ever heard back from a company that used workday.

Today I will only apply to a job that requires me to make an account (like workday) if at least one of these criteria are met (i) I am exceptionally qualified (in my own eyes), (ii) I have a reference, (iii) I already have made an account previously. Though thankfully there are many (smaller) companies these days (at least in my current field) that don't require me to make an account.

Can you explain what you mean when you say "to be sound"?

I wonder how many U.S. service persons stationed in South Korea could have been affected by this? Do we know if it was exploited in the wild?

Who else noticed the pointers websocket for displaying the mouse pointers of other readers?

Something feels weird about the timezone arithmetic here, though maybe I am nuts. Take this for example:

> Notably, on Tuesday, Jun 27, 2023, we see two commits: 23:38:32 +0800 and 17:27:09 +0300. If we do the math, there is about a 9-hour difference between the two commits.

Putting it all into UTC we get:

    23:38 - 8 = 15:38
    17:27 - 3 = 14:27

That's not 9 hours by my numbers. Or another example:

> Even more damning, on 6 Oct 2022, we see the following: one commit at 21:53:09 +0300 followed by another at 17:00:38 +0800. This is only a difference in a matter of minutes!

Putting it all into UTC we get:

    21:53 - 3 = 18:53
    17:00 - 8 = 09:00

I think these timezones were swapped (accidentally) by the article's author. If we do the calculation again:

    21:53 - 8 = 13:53
    17:00 - 3 = 14:00

That _is_ a matter of minutes.

I've physically disconnected the modem in my Audi, though when it goes to the dealer for a service (still under extended warranty) I cannot help but imagine that they download the data.

I agree with what you said but I'd further refine it by saying not just having testing and CI but actually having "high" test coverage and tests that actually test the code.

I was also confused by this, I had always (perhaps naively) assumed that the canal used salt water throughout. I did some searching and found this article.

> Gatun Lake, which forms a key stretch of the canal system and provides fresh water for its locks, saw little rain this year, as El Niño triggered a withering drought.

https://fortune.com/2023/12/04/panama-canal-dry-backed-up-br...

> Got it resolved by reaching out to some high level executive contact we got via our investor.

Oh man that is my nightmare. Nothing says "broken system" like having to circumvent the system to get something done.

Maybe we should be writing for the AIs.

Leaving GitHub aside, I generally feel that anything a candidate does that adds friction to the general flow of the process will affect the candidacy of the candidate.

I have no evidence for this whatsoever but if you consider a person with 100 applications in their inbox, and if an AI has pre-sorted 80% of them, then that person is _probably_ more likely to start with the AI sorted applications.

Every now and then I dust off Xcode to try and build myself some (pretty simple) native macOS app – just for funsies.

For reference I am a backend dev at a SaaS company dealing primarily in Python & Go, doing HTTP/gRPC services and talking to databases.

Last night I attempted to make a program that would display an image and allow the user to click the image and then display the hex value of the colour under the cursor.

I wanted my application to use a crosshair cursor and after an hour of looking at the docs for NSCursor[1] and stackoverflow I just gave up.

I don't know how someone gets started in this ecosystem but I am sure once you know it this stuff is easy.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nscursor

That was a good article & video, Julia’s linked post was also a great read. Though it goes without saying that getting a professional’s advice on these matters can pay dividends – pardon the pun.

I would love to see a startup offer a budget to new hires to get advice from a financial advisor, of the employees choosing of course. Something like “we offer a reimbursement of up to X for new hires when they submit a receipt from a qualified financial advisor…”.

I think that it would be particularly useful to young hires or those new to startups.

I know that the air accident rate is pretty much at its lowest since records began. I have heard a lot about grounding aircraft in recent years, though being a relatively young person, I am wondering is this new or was this always the procedure?

I know that the air accident rate is pretty much at its lowest since records began. I have heard a lot about grounding aircraft in recent years, though being a relatively young person, I am wondering is this new or was this always the procedure?

I love these well written, slyly comical in a dry way, articles.

> The team DOES NOT use pull requests. Contributors are expected to be socially capable and fully engaged in the inter-personal, realtime communication that supports high-performance, low-handoff work.

I am interested to know more about your workflow given that you do not use pull requests, could you please elaborate on that?

I cannot imagine that you’re all just pushing to master.

I totally agree, I have seen people get so fixated on this in addition to:

- review feedback format

- variable naming

- keeping line lengths to 80 lines

- log message formats (sweet jesus the amount of time wasted debating that alone)

Whenever I see these conventions about commit formatting they generally seem to focus on the first line (notable exceptions being Git and the Linux kernel among others I assume), one line is rarely enough to describe the change – I’m not advocating for writing an essay for a 5 line change though in some cases it might be warranted.

Professionally I rarely see useful commit messages, by useful I mean something that could be read by someone without context and get a general understanding of why a change was made. Frequently I have seen “updates” / “wip” etc. in the master branch. More frequently I see that the quality of commit message decreases with an engineer’s seniority – though like every thing there are exceptions.

I frequently find myself spending as much or more time reading the HN comment section than reading the submitted article/link itself.

I love that the forum where that discussion is taking place doesn't even use HTTPS.

I'm always amazed by the information that can be had in the comments section on this site.