mechanicalpulse

I'm reminded of a Final Jeopardy! clue from a few years back --

> As of 2013, this 3-letter verb common in sports, theater & politics has the largest entry in the online OED.

The correct response? What is "run"?

The site was assembled using webpack and at least one element has a `data-react-helmet` attribute, so my guess is it's a React or React derivative such as Next.js. You're right -- it's not progressive enhancement and it's not necessary to present a simple tutorial.

Maybe there are other reasons, though? Maybe Ben wanted to learn the framework? Maybe Ben wanted to integrate a storefront and a comment section -- which he has done via Shopify and Disqus -- and his choice of framework made that easy due to the existence of official React libraries from both vendors? Maybe Ben's using cloud-native serverless deployment tools alongside his React application because some of the derivative frameworks like Next.js do really well at minifying, compressing, caching, and serving only the content that's needed?

I can understand the purist argument -- I really can, especially from a security standpoint given what we've learned in the past few years about cache-timing side-channel attacks -- but is it possible that Ben is simply a fan of learning and he's as excited about building a web application in React as he is about building an 8-bit computer from scratch?

> Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point?

It seems spiteful, but it strikes me as an interesting illustration of how the robustness principle could be hacked to force change. It’s a descriptivist versus prescriptivist view of standards, which is not how we typically view standards.

Great read, though I am compelled to comment on this ad-hoc date/time conversion:

    $ date=$(python3 -c 'import datetime; print(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(1707074879).isoformat())')

Consider reaching for `date` from GNU coreutils instead:

    $ date -Is -d @1707074879

Fewer keystrokes, faster execution, and the output includes the TZ offset.

> So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?

I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.

In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.

That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.

Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?

Edit: s/Columbia/Colombia/; s/expensive/expense/

I had the same thought. Backing up a boat is already difficult enough; I would require mechanisms for making alignment easier else I’d have fits. Since parallax will affect the observed alignment, it doesn’t have to be prefect. Perhaps a few strategic markings on the driveway (behind the fence) and/or cameras on the trailer would be sufficient.

> That is not how HOAs work. They have a very defined set of rules, and a very defined process for changing and enforcing those rules. You are not at the mercy of anyone.

This. I live in a drama-free HOA and appreciate it for what it is and does. I had to review and agree to the covenants of my HOA as a condition for closing. The rule most likely to be in violation here is something along the lines of “only operational automobiles in good condition are permitted to be parked in the driveway; any boats, recreational vehicles, broken down or unsightly vehicles must be behind a fence”. The whole point is to maintain a clean, safe, attractive, and ultimately desirable neighborhood so as to protect property values on behalf of the association’s members.

Although this homeowner’s actions are characteristic of malicious compliance, I believe the net effect is precisely in line with the stated purpose of the HOA: in compliance with the rules, an elegant mural depicting a pristine boat now adorns a new fence that restricts sight of and access to a boat of unknown condition. Anyone driving by looking to buy might come away with a chuckle and the sense that the neighborhood is committed to maintaining a safe and attractive environment for homeowners.

I appreciate this quote, but after looking into it, I must offer some correction regarding attribution.

Félix Revello de Toro is a Spanish artist born in 1926. He specializes in portraits of women, including a 1965 one depicting a woman curled up on a chair with her head tilted down so as to permit her long black hair to hang down and obscure her face.

Jamie Anderson is the author of the blog "All My Loose Ends". The quote in question is an amalgamation of excerpts from a 2014 blog entry about loss:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200720034003/http://allmyloose...

> Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it?

Both, I believe. See also linguistic descriptivism versus prescriptivism. And the words cromulent and embiggen.

I enjoyed the names and headlines on the bathroom reading materials. The free look mode on the cam is fun.

I believe the best herbicide for many situations may very well be patience and elbow grease.

Disclaimer: While I am an avid gardener and I enjoy learning about the agricultural sciences, I am a computerologist, not a botanist, biologist, or chemist.

I don't know all there is to know about herbicides. I know there are broad-spectrum herbicides and selective herbicides, but I am only aware of two of them by name.

There's the well-known broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate, of course, but it is absorbed by foilage and has low persistence in soil. This is why the application instructions typically say to apply in sunny weather when the winds are light and rain is not expected for several days.

Then there's tebuthiuron, another broad-spectrum herbicide. It's been almost fifteen years, now, but there was a famous case of landmark oak trees in Auburn, Alabama, being poisoned with Spike 80DF -- a specific formulation of tebuthiuron made by Dow -- by a rabid sports fan upset by the recent success of a rival. Because tebuthiuron is absorbed through the roots, has high persistence in soil, and inhibits photosynthesis, the trees were assured to die. My understanding is that this is an industrial herbicide, though, and may be difficult for consumers to obtain. It's banned in the EU.

Don't do what I did, which is to throw caution to the wind in frustration.

I was successful in killing a tree under my roofline. It was planted less than a foot away from the foundation and was difficult to prune due to its location amidst yews and aborvitaes. The trunk grew to about 3" in diameter before I decided to cut it down. I cut it down to about an inch or two above the ground. It was nothing if not insistent, though. It continued to put out new shoots and I would cull them and/or spray it with glyphosate when I noticed it. After a couple of years of this dance, I escalated things. I cut the trunk down beneath the surface so that no part of it was above the ground. I doused it with a number of chemicals based on advice I received. Eventually, it stopped putting out new shoots. Over the next few years, though, the pair of healthy, well-established arborvitaes about ten feet away on either side began to brown and die. I think it's quite likely that whatever I did to rid myself of the tree also contributed to the demise of my arborvitaes.

If I had to do it over again -- having the benefit of hindsight as well as the patience that comes with age -- I would have tried to suffocate and starve it instead of saturating the soil with something that may hang around to impose unintended consequences. Perhaps I would have had success cutting it beneath the ground and capping it with a sturdy container impermeable to light, water, and air. I would have periodically removed the cap long enough to eliminate any new branches or shoots that should threaten to breach the barrier. I would have done this until it exhausted all of its energy reserves trying to reach the light.

Cellulose is constructed from chains of glucose -- probably the most common carbohydrate produced via photosynthesis. Plants synthesize carbohydrates, store them in tissue, and later metabolize them via respiration. If one is both diligent and patient in limiting the plant's capacity to photosynthesize and respirate, I am sure it will eventually die.

Glucose photosynthesis: 6CO₂ + 6H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Aerobic respiration: C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ → 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + ATP

Good luck with your tree!

It's you. :) More magnanimously, you caught the story for the first time this year. I seem to come across a story about it every year around this time ever since first learning of it a couple of years ago through the Tennessee Naturalists community I follow on Facebook. As the tree spreads, so too does the knowledge of its unflattering qualities. Awareness efforts are likely to continue until community leaders take action.

Yes. It was a bug in bash -- the Bourne again shell -- that permitted the execution of arbitrary code by embedding a function definition into environment variables. It was a Big Deal because it was remotely exploitable in systems that set environment variables according to user input before executing the shell -- the most severe was probably the Apache HTTP Server's CGI handler, which sets environment variables from HTTP header data.

I had the same initial reaction, though. "Kubernetes? Shellshock? Oh noes!"

I'll take environmentally responsible planned obsolescence over the current situation.

Nothing lasts. Durable plastic and metal goods become damaged or worn. What then? When repair, reuse, or recycling is not socioeconomically attractive, having some sort of naturally sustainable cycle would be nice, wouldn't it?

Even if I have to buy a new phone case every seven months, if it's part of a sustainable cycle that becomes quite economical due to the massive scale -- wouldn't that be better than maintaining the current production of long-lived plastics?

This strikes me as an example of capitalism learning something from biology.

I often use them in compound keys (e.g., in a flat key space as might be used by a cache or similar simple key/value store). IMHO, they are superior to other common separators like colons, dashes, etc. because they are (1) semantically appropriate and (2) less likely to be present in the constituent pieces of data, especially if the data in question is already limited to a subset of characters that do not include the separators, which it often is (e.g., a URL).

Isn't that a limitation imposed by the POSIX APIs, though, as a direct consequence of the interface's representation of hierarchical filesystems as trees? As you've illustrated, that necessitates walking the tree. Many tools, I suppose, walk the tree via a single thread, further serializing the process. In an admittedly haphazard test, I ran `find(1)` on ext4, xfs, and zfs filesystems and saw only one thread.

I imagine there's at least one POSIX-compatible file system out there that supports another, more performant method of dumping its internal metadata via some system call or another. But then we would no longer be comparing the S3 and POSIX APIs.

The key/value pairs after the "WIFI:" prefix are as follows:

  S - the SSID
  P - the password
  T - the encryption type (WEP, WPA, or blank)
  H - whether or not it's a hidden network

The only required pair is "S"; all other pairs are optional and may be omitted if desired.

I thought primary rate interfaces were 24 channels (23 bearer channels plus one data channel) for a total throughput rate of 1.5 Mb/s, but apparently that’s only the case in the US, Canada, and Japan. European PRIs (E1 vs T1) are as you described. TIL.

That's part of the process, but not all of it. The overall process of water movement through vascular tissue is called transpiration [0]. Yes, capillary action plays a part, but the underlying process is due to differences in water potential. To avoid saturation (which would halt the flow of nutrients), water is released through pores in the leaves called stomata [1], where it evaporates, creating a differential that results in additional water being pulled in from the soil.

[0] transpiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration

[1] stoma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma

Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist. I'm a third-generation home gardener; my grandfather was the youngest of his family and the to leave the family farm in Kansas to go to college. He always maintained a large garden and loved sharing his knowledge along with his vegetables.

Edit: added links and a disclaimer

The Venusians certainly weren't conservationists.

This subject can quickly become a fascinating epistemological journey into solipsism, semiotics, and cognitive biases.

A "lie" implies intent to deceive or mislead, but not all false facts are shared with such intent. You may be interested in Harry Frankfurt's 1986 essay On Bullshit [0] and the 2005 book of the same name, which has been discussed on HN before [1].

[0] On Bullshit: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33605481

> They can’t use foam for flotation at that depth. There is a concrete like “synthetic foam” if you want unpowered rise to surface but it’s expensive. I read early on they wanted carbon to be light enough to get back up by releasing weights on powerloss.

This would make sense. The first bathyscapes (FNRS-2, Trieste) used the same iron ballast method via electromagnets, but bouyancy was provided by an external tank filled with a liquid of lower density than water -- gasoline.

I hadn't heard of the foam before, but I looked to see how modern deep submersibles provided bouyancy. The first one I checked was the one I'm most familiar with from my childhood fascination with the Titanic -- DSV Alvin, commissioned in 1964 and taken by Robert Ballard on the very first expedition to the wreck -- and it uses such a foam developed around the same time. A minor correction, though: the foam is called "syntactic foam"; the term shares its etymology with "syntax": from Greek σύν (sún, “together”) and τάξις (táxis, “arrangement”). These foams are composite materials containing what they call "cenospheres" or "microballoons": tiny, rigid, hollow spheres. Why use a large steel ballast filled with flammable hydrocarbons when you can use thousands of much smaller ones made out of an assortment of materials from ceramic to titanium to polymers?

It’s a common acronym and term in the software product life cycle. It’s been around for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Ge...

Here are some other examples in common use:

https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql

https://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

This reminds me of using a hex editor on the version of explorer.exe that shipped with Windows 95 to change the infamous "Start" menu text to something else. I think the only requirement was that its replacement also needed to be five characters. That's nowhere near as convoluted as changing the startup chime, but amusing nonetheless.

Thanks for the memory.

Yes! I once had a cheap microwave that only had a timer knob on it and I found myself twisting it indiscriminately because all I wanted was for it to be on. Being a mechanical timer, the resolution wasn't good enough that precise cook times were achievable. The power level on that unit was not very good, anyway.

I grew to prefer that method of interfacing with a microwave. "Just go! I don't care about the cook time!" When my wife and I bought our first house and purchased our appliance set, I wanted a microwave that did not force me to go through a timer workflow. Having such a workflow was good, but I also wanted some sort of "on" button on it. We picked out a GE Profile unit that had two user-assignable functions on the main interface. I assigned a "30s cook" function to one of the buttons. This is my "on" button. Additional presses of the button append 30s to the timer. This satisfies most of my needs.

Unfortunately, when I want to reduce power, the buttons that I have to press to do so are not as simple. I start the cook via the normal quick 30s button, but then I have to press the power button, then have to press the down button several times to lower the default power level of 10 to something more reasonable like 5 or 3, then I have to press to confirm that level. This takes precious seconds -- if it's a sensitive item like a small dipping bowl of marinara or something, the adjustment may be too late. Sure, I guess I could go through the full cook workflow, but that's not how I want to interact with it. And you know, if I am expending the time and energy to lower the power level from 10, it is highly unlikely that 9 will be my desired power level. Instead, I wish there was a "halve power level" button on the cook screen that cut the active duty cycle in half. So one press takes me from PL10 to PL5, another press goes to PL2.5, and so forth. Then I'd be happy.

I don't use any of the other features buried in the menus. It's all superfluous.

Meanwhile, my wife just initiated a no-hassle refund of moldy pizza crusts we bought from Wal-Mart. She was instantly refunded online without having to talk to anyone. And there's no need to physically return it. Such bizarre timing to find this posted on HN not ten minutes after my wife told me about the pizza crust thing.

I use fetchmail+procmail for IMAP. I have no problem with freezing or multiple accounts.

Mutt remains my primary email client to this day. I use procmail for filtering and mu for indexing/searching.

I do the same. iOS 15 introduced Focus, which extends the DND functionality to an arbitrary number of configurable “focus” profiles. Each profile may have its own schedule and exclusions by app and contact. It’s fantastic.

I've used trentm's json (formerly known as jsontool) package from npm as my default tool for command-line manipulation of JSON for many years now. It provides CLI arguments for passing JavaScript code for filtering and executing on input. I have resisted investing the time into becoming fluent in jq because I've found that many of the common use cases I have are readily handled by jsontool.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/json

Edit: added more information