HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jerrycruncher

213 karma · joined April 30, 2015

submissionscomments
jerrycruncher··on Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others
This is a really canonical example of a "Yet you participate in a society. Curious!" post. Well done.

[0] https://imgur.com/we-should-improve-society-somewhat-T6abwxn

jerrycruncher··on Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)
Honestly, the new professor wasn't too far off. I've often referred to "The Little Schemer" as "the best javascript book that isn't about javascript."
jerrycruncher··on World Curling tightens sweeping rules, bans firmer broom foams ahead of Olympics
It's almost certainly related. I wouldn't be surprised if the sleeper hit podcast of the same name[1] that was released last year played a role in resurfacing the issue, too.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1427-broomgate-a-curl...

jerrycruncher··on The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)
What a lovely, sumptuously-written piece. Thank you for sharing!
jerrycruncher··on Americans' new TV habit: Subscribe, watch, cancel, repeat
For me, this pattern is just common sense. I’ve had no more than one subscription active at a time for over two years. I keep a list of things that sound interesting, and when it gets to be more than a couple for a single provider, I’ll re-up. Why keep paying for content you don’t care about?

Of course, if you have kids, I can understand keeping the subscription meter running.

jerrycruncher··on Beautifying Org Mode in Emacs (2018)
> I don't know why.

'Whet' means to sharpen (whetstones are used to sharpen knives, for example), so whetting one's appetite means to sharpen appetite, or to make one hungrier (for knowledge, food, whatever).

jerrycruncher··on The day I started believing in unit tests
Sitting on a call right now where a guy is going on about how excited he is to mock out the entirety of a large e-commerce vendor's platform. It's maddening.
jerrycruncher··on Apple TV Plus is getting a price hike – and other Apple subscriptions are, too
Severance had stronger Philip K Dick vibes than other shows that were actually based on his work.
jerrycruncher··on Why BMI is flawed – and how to redefine obesity
And the people who are more muscular _know_ that BMI isn't going to be accurate for them. The complaints seem to be somewhat bad faith arguments from the population for whom it is accurate, but wishes it weren't.
jerrycruncher··on Upcycled Bicycle Panniers DIY
This is reminiscent of the coroplast fenders and bike bags that Kent Peterson has been making for years:

https://kentpeterson.substack.com/p/coroplast-handlebar-bag

http://www.carsstink.org/peterson/FendForYourself.html

jerrycruncher··on Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
As someone who also loves Bandcamp, I can't help but assume that enshittification is nigh.
jerrycruncher··on Bike tire made from NASA’s shape-shifting metal are now available to buy
Schwalbes are absolutely excellent (I've used the, regrettably discontinued, Marathon Supreme on my commuter for years), but they're still subject to pinch flats if you're using tubes.
jerrycruncher··on Show HN: My husband quit his job to build a new social audio app with Flutter
I don't think you're being overly critical, especially since both user accounts seem to exist for the sole purpose of promoting the project.
jerrycruncher··on Is Babylon 5 secretly the most influential TV show of the past 25 years? (2021)
You're generally correct about TNG, but I think that Worf's development and the machinations within the Klingon High Council roughly constitute a story arc that ran through the series.
jerrycruncher··on FTX’s balance sheet was bad
SBF is more like the reverse Neumann.

Neumann went into WeWork's endgame looking like a fool, and emerged from it a rich wizard.

jerrycruncher··on Aerodynamics of Gravel Bikes
Bottom bracket, the part that holds the axle to which the cranks attach.
jerrycruncher··on Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)
Karabiner Elements[1] should let you remap the Esc key.

And, while I don't have personal experience with it, it does seem like it may allow you to set up locale-based shortcuts, as well[2].

[1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/manual/configuratio...

[2] https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/#international

jerrycruncher··on Amazon intentionally made it hard to cancel Prime subscription in secret project
I've used Capital One's virtual card service many times to close a card associated with a service that would've otherwise required me to chat or call someone to cancel. It's worked extremely well.
jerrycruncher··on The Fireless Cooker That Feeds
There was also an infomercial[1] for a product called "AirCore" in the US a couple decades ago for something similar.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIIWBvgyvmI

jerrycruncher··on Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
And _currently_ involves hiring consultants to force employees to sit through hours of anti-union fear mongering the second management smells a whiff of pro-union organizing sentiment.

The 'American Factory' documentary has a great example of what this looks like in real life. Hearing that Amazon or Google or whoever else worked to convince employees to vote against unionizing is one thing, seeing what that effort is like on the ground is altogether more eye-opening.

jerrycruncher··on Use spacer components instead of CSS margins (2020)
Concurrent with spacer.gif, there was also a `<spacer type="block">`[1] tag that was in use at the time.

Working at a boutique design shop back then, I remember trying endless combinations of the spacer tag along with spacer gifs to try to ship layouts that were at least semi (and hopefully mostly) consistent cross-browser.

Having lived through those web dev dark ages, I'm pretty baffled by the resurgence of 'markup as styling'.

[1] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/html/html_spacer_tag.htm

jerrycruncher··on Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case
The ability to simply cancel any subscription without clicking through increasingly desperate "Don't go!!!" nag screens is easily worth an extra 30% for me, too.
jerrycruncher··on Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
Consensus may take time, but when you're pouring gas onto a fire, arguing that you need to dump out most of the can before you can be sure you know what you're doing isn't a defensible position.
jerrycruncher··on Flutter 2
They are likely referring to developer productivity and perceived code quality, not user satisfaction.
jerrycruncher··on Simple Bank Is Closing
They've been my main bank for a number of years, and I second this.

The APR on their savings account is generally either the best or among the best available, and the small handful of times I've had to call their customer support, they've been a pleasure.

jerrycruncher··on The HubSpot Culture Code [slides]
It's a very recent development in the language; one of the ripples that radiated out from the George Floyd protests.

The NY Times hosted a piece that explains the reasoning behind it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...

jerrycruncher··on Switching from Vim to Intellij
And you don't need to continue your subscription unless you want continued updates. My PyCharm 'subscription' lapsed around two years ago, and I'm only planning on purchasing a new fallback license for the upcoming 2020.3 release because their excellent vim-mode plugin finally supports jump lists, but requires a newer version than the one I originally paid for - and I'm honestly happy to pay them again.
jerrycruncher··on Next.js 10
We used React Router's ssr process described here[1] on my last React project. It worked ok, but there's a bit of hoop-jumping to go through if your pages are populated by async data.

[1] https://reactrouter.com/web/guides/server-rendering

jerrycruncher··on Next.js 10
This is the resource I used (as someone who's been doing web development for ~20 years) to get a a basic understanding of React. It, plus some side projects, was enough to get me up to speed: https://daveceddia.com/pure-react/

I'm sure there are others that are free; but, this is what worked for me.

jerrycruncher··on Mozilla VPN
To add some detail, here, Mullvad allows the creation of accounts for which they truly have zero knowledge: an account number is generated on their site, cash is sent to their office in Gothenburg with a note containing the account number, and Mullvad will add time for that account commensurate with the amount received.
Page 1 of 4Next →