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orobinsonon Show HN: 1 min workouts for people who sit all day

I’ve wanted an app like this for ages. I’ve always suffered from analysis paralysis when trying to work out a good, short exercise routine. This looks like it will be the perfect solution — thank you!

orobinsonon Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)

Bin bag, bin lorry. I grew up saying dustbin but most people just call them bins these days.

I believe “dustbin” is from the Victorian era where what little rubbish people had was burnt in the fireplace. The “dustbin man” would come by and take away your fireplace ashes.

orobinsonon Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon

I’m not a doctor but perhaps try running with a smart watch that shows you your heart rate and put in an amount of effort that keeps your heart rate at about 60-70% of max. For now that may be a brisk walking pace not even a jog. As you get fitter your heart rate should come down for the equivalent speed. I also used to go for runs and hit max within a few minutes and stay there for the whole run but ultimately I think I was just pushing too hard.

orobinsonon Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

When will the movie industry learn from the success of services like Spotify or DRM free music services like Bandcamp? I want media I can own, or consume from a single subscription. I would happily pay a few quid for a movie if I could download a high quality DRM free file. Piracy is not only free but provides a better product, a file you can do whatever you want with and watch anywhere.

Personally I don’t pirate, I prefer getting second hand physical media (funnily enough the movie studios miss out on any money there as well).

orobinsonon When a Crystal Ball Isn't Enough to Make You Rich

Read the post. It said that people trade in the wrong direction the majority of the time. So played the game with the strategy that I’d go 50x leverage long or short in the opposite direction to my initial hunch upon reading the headlines.

Ended up with a 1000% return. Just need a time machine now.

orobinsonon Control iPhone with the movement of your eyes

I love how many neat and handy features are baked into the iOS accessibility settings. Apple should make more noise about these features. I recently discovered there’s a white noise generator baked in which meant I could get rid of the annoying white noise app I had been using to keep my napping baby asleep. Another recent discovery was the on screen anti-motion sickness things that move around with the accelerometer. I get terrible motion sickness and they make a massive difference.

orobinsonon Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences, even when 'offline'

Reminds me of a similar situation I experienced while working on a big project. I came down with the flu and woke up in a delirious, feverish state at 2am feeling like I was trapped in the codebase and I needed to make all the tests pass so I could escape. It almost felt like my conscious brain had somehow found its way into the unconscious part.

orobinsonon Show HN: I saw this mind-blowing experiment, so I made a simple version of it

This is cool. It reminds me of a research team I worked in a few years back that had built something like this for mobile devices. It used a camera overhead to provide info about device positions, allowing all the devices to act as a single screen on a surface [0].

[0] http://www.huddlelamp.org/#tech-video

orobinsonon LLMs confabulate not hallucinate

But do LLMs dream of electric sheep?

orobinsonon Nomnoml

I actually find this acts as a useful heuristic to bound the complexity of a diagram appropriately. For example if I'm making a diagram with Mermaid and find the code is becoming unwieldy, I take that as an indicator that I'm trying to stuff too much info into one diagram and I should split it into separate diagrams or redo it at a higher level of abstraction.

orobinsonon Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

People do try to throw them away. A good chunk of my kids' lego collection is a mixed selection of blocks we found in a skip.

orobinsonon Ask HN: What tech newsletters are you currently subscribing to?

https://www.dataengineeringweekly.com/

I’ve found this one very useful as a Data Engineer. Worth subscribing if you’re working in the data space.

orobinsonon Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

Comes down to personal preference at the end of the day. Would you rather know a lot about a bit or a bit about a lot. I’m definitely in the latter category.

orobinsonon ‘No mow’ movement could transform our lawns

My grandfather was famously anti-lawn-mowing[0]. His un-mowed lawn eventually sprouted some rare bee orchids among a vast array of other wildflowers. It always looked beautiful when we pulled into the drive when we went to visit.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ga...

orobinsonon Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

I greatly minimise the risks in several ways:

- Planning routes that avoid particularly risky roads or junctions and take advantage of separated bike lanes where possible. This is trivial in a city as there's hundreds of possible routes between two places.

- A cargo bike itself is a much larger and more visible presence on the road than a regular bike. That combined with the visible children on board usually means motorists do a better job of staying clear than they do when I'm on a regular bike.

- Staying well clear of HGVs in ALL circumstances. Once you start cycling in a way where you treat any HGV as imminent death on wheels, you notice how many potentially dangerous situations you avoid.

More generally, I find cycling in London feels quite safe. This is because drivers in London are mostly used to cyclists and generally act appropriately around them. Also traffic speeds are generally 20mph or less.

orobinsonon Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

I live in London. We have three kids, no car and an electric cargo bike which they can all fit in. It's brilliant and all we need for getting around London. I've also used it for picking up furniture and building materials - such a versatile vehicle and much more enjoyable to use than a car.

orobinsonon Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

They have lost their mojo in that they've failed countless times to diversify their business revenue stream. They're in the same boat as Meta in that regard. Especially if you compare them to Microsoft, Amazon and Apple who have all made good progress in diversifying over the last decade or so.

orobinsonon Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

orobinsonon Tell HN: Repurposing old iPads as home security cameras

A smoker friend of mine used to carry around one of those little camera film canisters to put his cig butts in. Obviously being careful to extinguish them fully first beforehand so the plastic didn’t get melted.

orobinsonon The iPhone Keyboard – Make It or Break It (2022)

The iPhone autocorrect has got noticeably worse over the last 4 years or so. I’ve been an iPhone user since 2012 and I’m sure it used to be so much easier to type on despite having a significantly smaller screen.

The thing that grinds my gears most is if something happens to be an apple trademark, it will auto capitalise it. For example “power nap” (the name of a feature on macs) becomes “Power Nap”.

I’ve seen a few people saying that the iPhone typing experience has gotten worse lately. I wonder if there’s any analysis to back this up or if Apple are aware?

orobinsonon ‘That girl is going to get herself killed’ (2022)

There was a good discussion about this a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32933603

orobinsonon The problem with dependency injection frameworks

Yes I’m aware. My point was it’s not that concealed once you’ve invested the time to read the docs and peek at the code of whatever framework you’re using. The time to do that is nothing compared to the time saved using these frameworks.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking Harry Potter wrote Spring Boot.

orobinsonon The problem with dependency injection frameworks

> I need to know everything that’s going on in my code. I need simple, straightforward function calls. Nothing else! I want to be able to start at main() and trace through the code. I want to look at callers and find where every parameter came from. Reading code is hard enough already. Magic frameworks make it harder.

But these frameworks aren't magic. They're just code. Sure it means you have a bit more code to read through to work out what's causing a problem but it's still just code. The time cost of potentially more difficult debugging when things go wrong is nothing compared to the time saved not having to wire things together manually.

I also find DI frameworks actually encourage good design by making it easier to write small, single purpose classes. You don't need to spend time working out where to initialise them so they can be passed to all the dependent classes.

orobinsonon My bad habit of hoarding information

Goodreads and its “Want to read” shelf is good for this approach with books. I just add any book I see someone recommending to that list then when I need a new book to read I can pick from there. The ratings on there are handy for sanity checking if a book is worth your time. I’ve found anything with a score of 4.0 or above is usually worth a read.

orobinsonon Java is in decline, and there's data to prove it

I’ve been working almost exclusively with JVM languages for 6 years but have probably written less than 1000 lines of Java in that time. Almost all my work has been in Kotlin and Scala.

Given the clear pattern of Java decline and Kotlin growth combined with the near seamless interoperability between Java and Kotlin, I expect Kotlin will slowly but surely take over during the next 10 years.

orobinsonon Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)

It didn’t really capture me when I first read it but it’s one of those fictional worlds that stays with you in a haunting kind of way. Reading this short story gave me a similar vibe and I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover at the end that JG Ballard was the author. I’ll have to give The Drowned World another read one day.

orobinsonon Ask HN: What is your system for dirty dishes?

> even if getting the pots and pans sorted out delays dinner by a minute or two

Ha I do this too whereas my partner will happily come in and start cooking despite the kitchen being messy already, much to my chagrin.

orobinsonon Merry Christmas, HN

Free/Libre Open Source Software.

“Libre” is French for free as in freedom so it’s sometimes added to emphasise the “free” means freedom of use not necessarily free in price.

orobinsonon Riffusion – Stable Diffusion fine-tuned to generate music

I’d been wondering (naively) if we’d reached the point where we can’t see any new kinds of music now that electronic synthesis allows us to make any possible sound. Changes in musical styles throughout history tend to have been brought about by people embracing new instruments or technology.

This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in ages as it shows we may be on the verge of the next wave of new technology in music that will allow all sorts of weird and wonderful new styles to emerge. I can’t wait to see what these tools can do in the hands of artists as they become more mainstream.

orobinsonon AWS and Blockchain

I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.