Hacker News Reader

mmcgahaon Patients say keto helps with mental illness. Science is racing to understand why

The surprising benefit that I noticed on a keto diet was the lack of joint pain.

mmcgahaon Online used car seller Vroom collapses as sales fall, losses mount

What are you talking about? I did not say everyone likes to haggle. I did not say that haggle free places don't exist; in fact they even exist for cars. Sure people groan about bidding wars but who is asking for fixed price homes? I did not say anything about anyone's negotiation skills.

Maybe I was a little too strong by saying no one complains since I have not discussed haggling with the entire population. Put simply, I hear people complain about car haggling but not haggling for other things.

As far as you thinking not any of what I said is true; I think you read a whole lot more than I wrote.

mmcgahaon Online used car seller Vroom collapses as sales fall, losses mount

It is funny that I always hear people want no haggle cars but no ever wants no haggle flea markets, or jewellery stores, or home buying. Why do folks have such a problem with cars?

mmcgahaon Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop

The first time I saw that laptop was in the bar at a Hyatt. I am sure the lady thought I was a doofus but she was gracious enough to show it to me and let me open and close it a few times. That machine evoked the same feeling of quality that I only got from a few other devices; I put it in the same class as a hp15c, psp or iphone.

mmcgahaon Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

Exactly and this is why CSS grid has changed my life. CSS grid is tables on Wheaties.

mmcgahaon Ode to Internet – V.90 56k dialup modem handshake for orchestra (1996) [video]

It is everything I ever wanted yet I wish it had never happened.

mmcgahaon New evidence that polar bears survived 1,600 years of ice-free Holocene summers

The same people probably are not qualified to call her a quack either.

mmcgahaon IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?

mmcgahaon Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?

What I should have paid for:

UltraEdit

WinZip

Procomm Plus

mIRC

Forte Agent

Eudora Pro

Paint Shop Pro

mmcgahaon How to Perfectly Crack an Egg (With One Hand) [video]

I was a short order (Waffle House style) cook from 15-21 so I got pretty good at cracking two eggs at a time. In my 20s I impressed a lot of girls with that trick. Now we just need a video on how to see the right pan temperature by the oil shimmer and how to flip an egg.

mmcgahaon Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

This is a little different than what you are asking but when I was a kid my C64 would crash if it was on too long and I would lose all of my work. If I ran my mother's vacuum cleaner plugged into the same outlet as the C64 then it would not crash. No I cannot explain it but it worked so that vacuum cleaner would get turned on before I started to save my work to tape.

mmcgahaon At Least 15% of Reddit Content Is Corporate Trolls Manipulating Public Opinion

I don't know 15% may be correct but the problem is that when a large enough number have put their weight behind something the real people fall in line and finish the job.

mmcgahaon Becoming a go-to person gets you promoted

The only time it is rewarding to be the go-to-person is when your job title is Dad.

mmcgahaon US begins review that could eventually lead to PVC ban

Hope we don’t go back to iron. Stuff is rotting away in my mothers home and her gaskets get destroyed by the rust and have to be replaced every year. I would like copper but but it is expensive and there are people who complain about the lead.

mmcgahaon LinkedIn shelved plan to migrate to Microsoft Azure cloud

Lift and shift is a sales term to make it sound like the internal team is trying to over-complicate the migration. The sales guy will normally phrase it as "just lift and shift."

mmcgahaon Xorg being removed. What does this mean?

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=sysvinit

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=systemd

mmcgahaon Show HN: A pure C89 implementation of Go channels, with blocking selects

When it said pure C89 I figured it was going to have some setjmp and longjmp going on instead of threads.

mmcgahaon Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

I used to work with a smart guy who had what I think is the real answer to this problem. All documentation is maintained by the newest member of the team. The new guys job is to solve all of his issues with the documentation and if he has to ask someone then his job is to update the documentation.

mmcgahaon Firefox on the brink?

I have been using FF as my primary browser for a few years now. I have not found any site that does not work but sometimes I have to turn off uBlock Origin.

mmcgahaon 'Safe' alternatives to engineered stone bench tops may not be so safe: study

Along with keeping the blade cool, a wet saw handles most of the dust problem too.

mmcgahaon Forbes built hall of shame for the questionable people on its 30 Under 30 lists

I have never heard this perspective. What are some examples of where he has been mischaracterized?

mmcgahaon Who makes the most reliable new cars?

This pretty much lines up with my bias (OK not Mini or Porsche). I still don't hold consumer reports in high regard though.

mmcgahaon Why did base64 win against uuencode?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Silent-7...

mmcgahaon Web designers should get good training in typography (2006)

I bought The Elements of Typographic Style over 20 years ago. I got about an hour in and never picked it up again. It isn't that the book is bad but typography isn't a topic that I want to self study. I think I could enjoy the topic in a classroom or study group setting but my mind just wonders to other things sitting in a chair reading about it.

mmcgahaon Why is RC Cola popular in Tajikistan?

Someone needs to start importing Moon Pies into Tajikistan!

mmcgahaon Rewrites are Waterfall

I think I understand where the author is coming from. I have not done a lot of rewrites but the largest one I did was an application for maintaining and generating our product catalog. The original design had split North America and international catalogs into different files that were 95% the same and these had to stay in sync. Other oddities of the old system had page numbers manually adjusted when new pages were inserted and a hand maintained table of contents. All together there were 12 different catalogs generated and each one had a manual process of importing new pricing before being generated.

What kicked off the project was a desire to correct the amount of manual labor required for generating new books but as soon as the project was proposed we had a VP that wanted to justify the project by doing something more. Now more was a little hand wavy but the concrete things were color pictures and automatically generating and laying out the entire catalog automatically. The problem was there was no data for either of these task; we had no color pictures and there was no repository of product attributes to automatically lay out the catalog.

The break in the project that made it become possible for success was that the VP with hand wavy dreams left the company and I was able to start work on a rewrite that solved the important pain points without adding the overhead of multiple departments coordinating taking new pictures and and building a PIM with the required attributes.

It has been been five years since we went live with the new catalog and the color pictures are around 50% of the book now, and the PIM has is getting rolled into and entirely different project. If we had waited then we would still be waiting on the benefits that kicked off the project in the first place.

mmcgahaon Not setting up Find My bricked my MacBook

I came looking exactly for this comment to vote up. I am 50 and I sicker up my laptop like a middle-schooler's trapper keeper.

mmcgahaon Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

N100 and N200 systems are perfect price/performance for small servers. I am running a 7-year-old N3710 fanless laptop right now and it performs well enough for a few tiny sites and a postgresql database. I am pretty sure we reached this point ten years ago but I was too numb to notice it but low power devices have become powerful enough to replace the dedicated servers that we were spending tons of money on twenty years ago.

mmcgahaon FreeRDP: A remote desktop protocol implementation

Probably about the same level of smooth as getting X Windows working well on Windows.

mmcgahaon The X220 ThinkPad

Body flex is not an issue that I expected to see mentioned about an X series. I have not had an X series since the X60 but that thing had about as much flex as a brick.