oblib

I grew up working on cars, repairing them, modifying them, and building them from the ground up, including race cars and advanced driving systems for severely handicapped folks that drove while sitting in their wheelchairs. Did that until I was in my early 30s.

I've worked with and for some fairly famous racers. Tony Nancy, Sonny Easly, Larry Fullerton to name a few. Built custom driving systems for Teddy Pendergrass and Jill Kilmont (and a few 100s of others. I learned a lot very fast doing that.

Safe driving requires the ability to predict what drivers around you will do. Almost everyone of those folks I met who were involve in a crash were at least partially responsible and most often distracted by something.

When those touchscreens first came out I was stunned because there is no way a driver can focus on those and driving at the same time. That's obviously impossible and it only takes a second of driver distraction to get into a crash situation ("accident" is not a valid description for this).

A driver can learn how to change the radio station on those old manual push button/twist knob interfaces while keeping their eyes on the road. But you cannot do that with a touchscreen (even though the original Apple interface used those physical interfaces as a design model for their graphic interface widgets).

And some of those screens are obnoxiously huge and are not very intuitive. So the root of the problem is the driver must focus on the screen to find the option they want to interact with and that is a huge distraction from "driving" the vehicle.

So what's really concerning is their are there a fast growing number folks who think they can safely use them. A quick search on that brought this up: "a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) indicates that distracted driving-related fatalities are on the rise, increasing nearly ten percent from 2018 to 2019." []

Fair to say close to nothing is being done to address that.

I started building my 1st custom car for myself when I was 14 years old and had it street legal and registered shortly after I turned 16 and got my license. It was a "Hot Rod 50 Ford" coupe with a 350 Chevy engine and auto trans. I lived in LA and there was a vibrant "Street Racing" culture there, but I never raced. By then I'd already seen so much death and injury from car crashes that I knew every car on the road with me was dangerous.

I am 63 years old now. I have never been in an accident. Never gotten a moving violation citation, or any kind of "ticket". It's not been difficult but I have had to dodge a few car and truck sized bullets over the years.

[] https://www.dkinglaw.com/distracted-driving-increasing/

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/09/556701181/touch-screens-are-d...

That link goes to a post that takes content I submitted here just a bit ago and is republished without any attribution to HN, and in fact it even has a link to re-submit it here to HN, and I suppose attribute it themselves.

I made my own weather app using NOAA data. You can check it out here:

https://azartiz.com/mildred/

That simple app provides a lot of data for where I live.

If you follow the urls in the source code and do a little sleuthing you can change them for any lat/long or area you want.

I use a Mac for development and maintaining web apps I've made. BBEdit is awesome and I spend most of my time using it.

I rarely use Safari to test my work though. I loaded it last week to do some testing and it won't let my app open a new window to display a document a user creates and wants to print from the app.

Apparently Apple felt that feature is so misused or dangerous they had to prevent users and websites from using it. It's the only web browser I am aware of that does that.

I'll likely be moving to Linux as well at some point in the next few years.

Same thing would happen if they taxed tomatoes at a grocery store like they tax weed. I'll be growing my own soon here in Missouri and likely won't be buying any weed from State regulated and taxed businesses.

I have no problem with those businesses at all, but the taxes on weed are crazy high. It's akin to having a mafia shaking down a businesses for a cut of their sales.

On the plus side most of that under the table money is staying here in the States now as opposed to to going to Mexican cartels and most of it is still being taxed when it's spent at local stores by home growers who sell to friends.

Meanwhile, if I buy a $1,000,000 yacht I can write that off my taxes entirely:

https://www.siyachts.com/yachting-news-and-events/buy-a-yach...

I made one of those using a single 20"x20" filter on the intake side of a cheap 20" fan like that to use in my home office over 5-6 years ago. I use blue masking tape painters use to attach it to the fan. That tape comes off very easy and the filter does capture a lot of dust and smoke resin.

I'm really not seeing much advantage for building a box that uses 4 of those filters though. I doubt that increases the amount of air filtered much at all. You could run it longer before needing to change the filters, but we're talking just a few minutes of time at best and probably closer to no time saved at all, or increase in efficiency.

I have one of those sitting in my basement collecting dust. I think I paid around $1200 for it. It was by far the worst new Apple computer I've ever bought and the quickest to be obsoleted.

I released my first "SaaS" back in 2002. It's always been a "web app". And, yeah, as I've developed new features and made structural changes I've introduced bugs that had to be found and squashed.

But it's gotten a lot better over those years as web tech and my skills have progressed and users have influenced what I worked on since that first release. I have users that have been using it for most all of those years now and consider them friends.

I made a version that runs offline. The user has to install CouchDB on their desktop pc to use it. I made it easy for them to set up and explained the benefits, and I thought they were huge, but no one wanted to do that.

I've also had users who stopped using it call me a year or more later asking if I could send them their data, and I could, and did, and didn't charge them anything because it's a trivial task. They were very grateful.

So, no. I don't really think about it that way. But I'm old. I can recall the days of getting excited when a magazine I paid to subscribe to showed up in my mailbox and walking to the local library to find a book to bring home and read.

I was talking about "Big Business and Human Values" and how it was when Sears left those behind at their retail outlets their downfall began. And I think how the Sears catalog was a business model predecessor to Amazon is pretty clear.

I wonder what one could do with a Raspberry Pi and this?

Everyone should make a point to read "Don Quixote".

> For every random "expert" who is right there are likely millions of wrong ones.

That's fair to say. But it's always best to be curious and open to learn from others. Years ago an older friend of mine gently chided me by telling me "You can learn something from everyone".

I needed that at the time and it truly changed me. I started looking for that to see if it was true and found it is. You still have to sift out the bullshit, and fair to say that's truer now than back then, but it's worth the effort to look for it.

You did a great job of summing up what I felt after reading the article and then reading comments here. I've lived long enough to see things that folks have pointed out get scorched by naysayers and later confirmed to be true.

One example that's stuck with me over the years is where Monarch Butterflies spend the winter. When I was growing up we were told "No one knows", and that was true. Then, in the 1970s, some guy and his girlfriend, who were not scientists, (Kenneth C. Brugger & Catalina Aguado) announced they'd found out where they migrate, high up in the mountains in Mexico, and they were immediately trashed by "professionals" who were quoted in the "News".

At time it seemed very odd to me that they were so quickly and harshly dismissed by the "experts" who hadn't been able to find or confirm where they went.

I prefer to keep an open mind, and in this case it's not a huge leap for me to believe there may be something to this. I wouldn't recommend folks start smoking tobacco but it's worth more study.

There is still vastly more that we don't know than we do know about biology here on earth and that will be the case for at least a very long time and quite possibly, and most likely, our entire human existence.

Sears had pretty much the 1st crack at creating an "Amazon" and blew it. I mean, it's fair to say the "Sears Catalog" was the blueprint for that.

My wife's grandfather, Theodore Houser, was the CEO of Sears in the `50s. He wrote a book called "Big Business and Human Values". The last CEO had nothing close to "Human Values", and Sears didn't last long after they started ignoring his advice.

Elon Musk would do well to read that book.

I've posted links that got buried and shortly after the same link, or the same topic from a different source, made the 1st page.

I posted a link to an article on cannabis preventing Covid infections just a bit ago and it was buried in just a few minutes on "New" page.

I do a search for a URL before I post a link here and only post it if it's not been submitted already, but often it gets buried and someone else will post the same link a bit later and it makes it to the 1st page. But I don't feel link I've been cheated when that happens.

I suppose dang could write a routine to check for that but it'd probably take a lot of resources and not really improve anything for the end user. I think what gets noticed here is a bit random and may be curated. For example, my link to the cannabis article is interesting to me, but it barely skirts the edges of the main focus on computer tech here.

Was this a public school you went to, and where was it? No school I ever attended here in the U.S. would put up with anything near what you describe.

This feels like it's missing context.

I got pretty good at avoiding fights with bullies and dumbasses. And I never started a fight. I always made an effort to avoid fighting.

But I did become a "fan" of boxing at a very early age and studied how boxers fought. How they setup opponents, threw punches, and especially how they avoided getting hit. Most kids don't do that so it's pretty easy to gain an advantage. And bullies tend to leave kids alone who they know will fight back.

I grew up in some pretty rough neighborhoods so I was motivated to learn.

My advice is teach your kids how to fight.

I grew up with 2 brothers and lots of cousins and learned how to fight by watching boxing on TV.

I fought my 2 year older brother to a draw when I was 6 years old. I dropped a 15 year old kid who was way bigger than me and bullying me by kicking him in the balls that same year and then stood over him while he was on the ground writhing and crying in pain and told him he was lucky I wasn't kicking his face in. He never came near me again.

By the time I started school kids in my neighborhood knew I would fight and when I started Jr. High kids in school already knew I would fight, and I was not a big kid, I was pretty small compared to most kids my age.

When I was 14 a kid I didn't know and was way bigger than me hit me in the head with a hockey stick at a city park and knocked me out cold. When I came to he was skating away from me. I skated as fast as I could, caught up to him and jumped on his back and knocked him down and I started wailing on him. I really don't remember how but I ended up sitting on his chest slugging him in the face as hard and fast as I could when I started hearing people yelling "Stop! Stop!" and realized there was a crowd of people watching me.

When I was in my late teens I started taking MMA classes. That taught me how to use an opponent's force against them and when I was 21 I literally bounced a guy who'd been pestering me for years to "wrestle" off his bedroom ceiling. He was in my face pestering me again so I gave him and little shove and he came back trying to shove me as hard as he could, so it was mostly his energy, I just redirected it. He was in shock because it happened so fast. I was stunned at how well it worked.

When people know you will fight back they tend to not mess with you and getting hit is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You'll heal up. Not fighting back sticks with you and hurts forever.

Bullies will only keep bullying kids who don't fight back. I taught my 5 kids this and none of them were bullied in school.

I've only had one account here. The highest match has a 0.624 score and the lowest a 0.572. I'm not sure if that means I'm unique or common but I'd like to know.

I think I saw that the first time when I was about 11 years old, so around 1970. Before that I grew up watching the TV show "Combat" and show like that were all I really knew about our Military.

I was stunned at how they portrayed the insanity and ineptitude of our Military Officers and politicians. They made it look so crazy and believable at the same time. But what was really stunning was someone had the balls to make it.

In that same sort of genre Kelsey Grammer in "The Pentagon Wars" (1998) is pretty good too. I haven't watched either of those for a long time but think about it now and then.

The most impactful thing I've worked on was vehicle driving systems for quadriplegics. I worked with 4 others and the owner of the business on that for about 12 years back in the 70s-80s.

We basically took new Ford Vans and modified them and installed what we called a "Zero effort driving system" and then trained the user how to drive it. At the time there was no other vehicle they could drive. We shipped our vans all over the world.

I'd have to agree that may be a good model for some endeavors and the military is a very good example. I have doubts about it being good for Twitter, but maybe aspects of SpaceX would work well with it.

"I can see that the approach is worth trying" - It's been tried since forever and literally goes back to the beginning of slavery.

I have walked away from several employers who berated their employees. And I didn't wait for them to berate me. I wouldn't never put up with any kind of strong arm tactic that threatens me. I would always make the choice to leave as soon as that was attempted.

I used it like I would an encyclopedia and it provided some interesting info. The results were sparse but still informative.

I ate the raw honey :D

Well, as I said, I had it for around six months (or more) and it was getting worse the entire time, and after just a couple weeks of taking the raw honey it was gone. Same with my neighbor.

So it was not, and did not, get better on its own.

You can ignore what I've shared here if you want, or you can choose to learn something from it. I am very grateful for the person who told me about.

I'll chime in for raw honey even though it's not a plant. About 12-15 years ago I started getting pain in my right shoulder. This went on for about 6 months. My wife and friends and my doctor told me it was "bursitis" and I'd need an operation to get rid of it. Back then going to the doctor was the leading cause of avoidable death so I wasn't keen on getting that operation (it's now the 3rd leading cause of avoidable death).

I was whining about it one day to a friend of mine who was in his 70s and had been a pilot for the military and flew missions all over the world. He learned on lot doing that. He told me "Raw honey will cure that if you take a tablespoon every day for a few weeks" and explained it was actually an infection that the honey would kill.

He was right. I bought some honey from a local bee keeper and it was exactly two weeks later that the pain was entirely gone. Right about that time a neighbor of mine stopped by and mentioned he was going to the hospital for an operation for the same thing in two weeks. I told him about the honey and he got some from the same bee keeper and it cured him too.

Most doctors won't tell you raw honey will cure that. Most probably don't even know it will.

I started using Thunderbird when my old Mac's "Mail" app basically croaked. I bought a newer used Mac a couple months ago and got the latest version of both Thunderbird and Apple's Mail app.

Both of them were much easier to set up, and Apple's Mail app is a lot better now in that regard so I used both of them for a few weeks and Thunderbird won me over.

Fair to say that after using it for so long it was more familiar but it's noticeably faster and the latest version has updated the UI and it's very clean and compact.

I don't use the calendar, but I do think the new design is a big improvement and it's great to see they've been working on it.

Your comment cracked me up!

I still have one too. It was pretty to look at but probably the worst new Mac I've ever owned. Within a year it was obnoxiously loud and pretty much obsoleted after just a couple years.

In contrast, I bought a new "Late `09 Mac Mini that I just replaced with a used late 2014 Mac mini about 2 months ago. That `09 was a real workhorse for a lot of years.

The `14 only cost me $330 at OWC with 16GB RAM and is running the latest versions of the software I use and the only software I needed to pay for an update was BBEdit, and that only cost me around $35. I think I paid around $1200 for that G4 "Silver Door" tower.