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paavope

89 karma · joined January 5, 2023

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paavope··on Transit rewards
Yeah, the car will be faster, unless there are accommodations that benefit the bus only (like dedicated lanes). But the bus doesn’t have to be _faster_ to be viable to many people: there are other things going for the bus like not having to park, often being cheaper especially if it allows you to not own a car, etc. etc.
paavope··on Transit rewards
> It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving

I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?

paavope··on 9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
FIFA has little to do with “Swiss” or “European” style capitalism and more to do with Gianni Infantino & friends’ style.
paavope··on A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video]
That was a really, really cool read!
paavope··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
It’s possible that many of the Americans commenting here have gone to very different restaurants than locals have in mind, and are basing their experiences on a very different sample. Like touristy places with a patio on the main old town square of (insert European city here)
paavope··on Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
Nobody in this thread is claiming Apple is perfect, just ahead of MS in UI consistency and _less_ buggy
paavope··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
The use case could be e.g. exactly processing an old trove of logs into something more easily indexed and queryable, and you might want to use jq as part of that processing pipeline
paavope··on AI coding is gambling
The good ones have original thoughts and can combine knowledge from different domains in nontrivial ways
paavope··on Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
I think the ”Indian” there referred to India the country and Gandhi’s nonviolent protest as background
paavope··on The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
I think the easy play in that situation is to ask that someone else to show the menu to you
paavope··on Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself
I don’t see any signs of bad parenting here, but a lot of signs of carrying on of a suicidal conversation by ChatGPT indeed, to the point of encouraging the suicide.
paavope··on Show HN: Doxx – Terminal .docx viewer inspired by Glow
I've seen the `itsdangerous` [1] package (which is a dependency for lot of Python projects) raise some eyebrows several times.

[1] https://itsdangerous.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/

paavope··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
Based on my experience living here in Helsinki for 30 years, people drive cars _more_ in the winter rather than less. That’s because the alternative is usually some combination of walking and public transit, and walking is uncomfortable in the winter and public transit is a bit less dependable, too.

But altogether people mostly still use public transit, there’s not a whole lot of driving per capita and the traffic is relatively slow and non-chaotic. I think that’s the core reason for the road safety.

Also, the requirements for getting a driver’s license here are stricter than it sounds like in other countries, with a high emphasis on safety; that probably contributes to the non-chaotic traffic

paavope··on How to Firefox
I use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

paavope··on Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch
I had pretty much the exact same experience with Game Maker too. In retrospect, feels like a very powerful pedagogical tool. Even when I wasn't really trying to "learn coding" but rather I just wanted to make some games, I ended up learning to code

The fact that _most_ things could be done with drag-and-drop, but for some features you had to drop down to scripting, served as a really nice and gentle stepping stone to writing code.

paavope··on Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening
At least in my clique in Finland, BeReal is alive and kicking. Definitely nothing like Instagram in terms of popularity, but quite active
paavope··on Belenios: Verifiable online voting system
So there is a clip of someone dropping multiple ballots in a drop box. Apparently [1] that is not necessarily fraudulent, you can drop multiple ballots from family members.

There were international observers in the 2020 election and they found no evidence of fraud [2], and many mainstream media sources that I hold reliable, (e.g. [3]) fact-check multiple claims of election fraud and nothing has showed up that would suggest that the election was "stolen".

I don't think it is at all preposterous to assume that the 2020 US election was fair, unless you subscribe to a view that the global mainstream media apparatus is in on some grand conspiracy.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-election-ohio-ballots-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55016029

paavope··on Belenios: Verifiable online voting system
No, I haven’t seen evidence of that, and a quick googling for “2020 us ballot stuffing” doesn’t show me such
paavope··on Experts vs. Imitators
IMO Dunning-Krueger has become such a cliche that it’s more refreshing to _not_ read a reference to it in a piece where one could’ve been made. Kinda like quantum mechanics and that stupid cat in a box.
paavope··on America's Booziest and Driest Counties
At least in Finland, no, that wouldn’t be normal. I’m sure there are people who drink a bottle of wine (or equivalent) during lunch, but that would definitely raise some serious eyebrows among most people.
paavope··on Pooled number of deaths by age group in EU
One potential mechanism is people staying indoors more in winter, making all kinds of illnesses spread more easily.
paavope··on Finding the Air Cannon
In this case it’s the fault of the author in either not including all the source code, or having undocumented dependencies
paavope··on Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
I also started off around the same age with GameMaker; if it’s even half as good still as it was in the 2000s, can definitely recommend it!

In the beginning all I did was fool around with the example games and tutorials, and that got me started well. Like taking a bouncy ball game, changing sprites, playing around with changing things in the existing logic and every now and then accidentally stumbling upon an interesting mechanic.

The drag and drop interface is really nice for starting out; eventually I got into the scripting part and found out that I had kinda learned “coding” along the way

paavope··on If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
If I download a song from, let’s say, The Pirate Bay, I never agree to any terms.

Futher, it’s debatable whether clicking “I agree” on a pages-long EULA where there is no realistic expectation that people actually read the text, is really agreement.

paavope··on Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years
> Unlike nuclear, which Finland had to shut down recently because it just wasn't worth the money to keep it running...

What are you referring to here? Nuclear power has not been shut down here in Finland to my knowledge.

There have been times when production has been scaled down because there is temporarily excess energy available, when it is windy (turbines produce more) and warm (warming uses less), but that is a temporary situation.

paavope··on Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100k years
I think the argument was that if the society loses the ability to manage nuclear waste, it would have been due to some societal collapse caused by other reasons.
paavope··on Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English
This feels like such a Microsoft thing to do
paavope··on Venetians are pondering raising their entire city
I’m sure some will move, but that number is going to be closer to 0 than 20M
paavope··on Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs
One can be happy that something exists while at the same time lamenting that the design isn’t ideal

(Edit: though incidentally, it turns out that the inventor of the dishwasher — or at least one of the earliest working designs — was a woman, as the sibling post pointed out; didn’t know that)

paavope··on Most data work seems fundamentally worthless
That definitely goes to the category of products that exist to keep a highly paid data/development team busy
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