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retroafromanon R. Crumb Means Some Offense

Just want to agree, the film Crumb is a wild documentary,and totally worth watching for adults who have any interest in counter culture.

retroafromanon Transforming a Tesla Model 3 into a Pickup Truck

The buckets in the Brat were strictly to get around the "Chicken Tax": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

A protectionist law that favored small trucks built in America. Australia has a long history of loving "utes", the car/truck hybrid: https://www.core77.com/posts/88821/The-Australian-Designer-W...

retroafromanon Why Bother with What Three Words?

I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so it doesn't even make sense that way.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.

retroafromanon Blind: an anonymous, corporate social network

So you're saying it's "'Nextdoor' for work"?

retroafromanon Ask HN: What you watch to laugh?

"Desus and Mero" on Viceland.com. Infectious level laughter from commentary.

retroafromanon Building a Thermal Camera

If you're in the USA, Home Depot also rents them by the hour/day if you don't want to spend the whole amount for something you won't use too often.

retroafromanon Drinking 3-4 Cups of Coffee Is “More Likely to Benefit Health Than to Harm It”

I'm definitely an amateur at understanding biology, but having studied engineering; the inputs and outputs of the human body vary so widely that I have a hard time narrowing down one input to corresponding to one result.

When you think about the air you breathe, to the variety of things you ate (plus the additional microbiomes that inhabit the food, your skin, your gut, etc) it seems like we are just barely really understanding what the intakes to the body are.

Edit: here's a great point to start to think about it: https://youtu.be/bYOIhmZ0Osg?t=41m49s -watch for 10m

retroafromanon Nest launches an outdoor security camera

A hammer drill (even a Harbor Freight one will do fine for a one time project) and masonry bit will drill through brick just fine. Put the line through, use raintight fittings, and then seal the hole with caulk. It's definitely not beyond DIY.

retroafromanon Honda system confused by Alonso taking Pouhon flat

Roadkill did it with both multiple leaf blowers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U81_0waqEWA) and a full small block Chevy engine on a trailer supercharging another one in the car (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPMBR-imqUk).

retroafromanon Ask HN: What are your favorite podcasts?

https://soundcloud.com/bodega-sushi/

Only podcast I listen to, the Bodega Boys, to guys from the Bronx that started out as amateur comedians on Twitter and ended up with a TV show: https://www.viceland.com/en_us/video/thursday-august-10-2017...

retroafromanon Dear Floyd Mayweather, you’re why the SEC exists

50 Cent is another guy who himself has made lots of money [0], and been technically bankrupt [1], but somehow did fine [2].

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/50-cent-tweeting-about-hnhi-2... [1] http://nypost.com/2015/09/05/heres-how-50-cent-went-broke/ [2] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/50-cent-to-end-bankru...

retroafromanon Space Buckets: DIY Indoor Gardening with LED and Arduinos

The subreddit[0] for this is not even remotely veiled cannabis farmers. Every once in a while someone posts tomatoes.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBuckets/

retroafromanon In Search of Chuck Yeager’s Evading Germans 1944 (2013)

Chuck Yeager is surprisingly active on Twitter, answers lots of questions. His replies can be pretty funny, too. https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager

retroafromanon 30K Page Views for $0.21: A Serverless Story

They're cheaper than that, if you're willing to deal with shady(ish) companies: lowendbox.com

retroafromanon Preliminary NTSB report on Tesla crash

You're talking about the 'Mansfield bar'[0], or 'underride bumper' named after a famous case of a celebrity killed by rear-ending a truck.

[0] http://www.sparebumper.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=...

retroafromanon Is there a company that sells meal planning?

Isn't that what Blue Apron is for? https://www.blueapron.com/

Still kind of pricey at $10/meal.

retroafromanon Real-time crash reporting tool Sentry raises $9M

It's a well known phenomenon called the "UNIX beard" [0]

[0] "The length, bushiness, and unkemptness of the Unix beard are all directly proportional to the owner's expertise." Source: urban dictionary

retroafromanon Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

As someone pretty close to this camp, it comes down to your last bullet point - needing to do it, in my opinion. A smaller subset of those people will also learn VBA for the same reason-it helps them get their job done. The benefit those two have is that they are either built in to the tools already (VBA), or a DBA does most of the set up and the used mostly just runs queries against it and doesn't have to worry too much about indexing, performance, schemas, etc (SQL). If I were to try to turn them onto python, it'd be an effort to get it installed and then get them to use the commandline.

retroafromanon An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

This is the best way to describe just about any diet or exercise ideas floated on HN.

retroafromanon Ask HN: Preferred VPS Providers?

lowendbox.com has been reviewing cheap VPS providers for years, and has background on providers as well as current deals.

retroafromanon How Target failed in Canada

True, but again, that assumes they have a picture of the data. If the product was sold online through target.com, a picture may exist somewhere. Otherwise, most company's item master data tables (that I've seen) don't include a picture. Also, they chose not to use data out of the old systems, because they wanted to avoid getting it out of the old and into the new system. This seems like it should've been the easier route but for whatever reason their legacy software probably made it much more difficult than needed.

retroafromanon How Target failed in Canada

There's no real way a turker would know if the data is bad. Really only the merchandiser at HQ who was checking with the supplier would have had the source data (dimensions, units for those dimensions, case quantities, and so on) or warehouse workers who actually receive the product and can physically look at it. Suppliers sometimes change product attributes, quantity per case or pallet, or packaging without giving advance notice so the warehouse often ends up making these updates as they notice them, if they do. Data quality in supply chains is a constant struggle for many companies. It sounds like Target got hit bad with this due to a perfect storm of poorly trained merchandisers and SAP having dummy data that probably looked somewhat reasonable to the untrained eye.

retroafromanon Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

This IIRC is essentially the story reported by investigative journalist Sy Hersh, relying on unnamed sources. See here for the full read: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-...

retroafromanon ChucK: Strongly-Timed Music Programming Language

For some reason, Coursera doesn't seem to have the page up any more, but there was a great MOOC about programming for musicians[0] that featured ChucK as the main language. They even featured the creator of ChucK in some of the videos. He's also the creator of some of the popular Smule Apps for iPhone, like the autotuning app "I am T-Pain"[1], which all feature ChucK under the hood.

[0] https://www.mooc-list.com/course/introduction-programming-mu... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HaIMA9YkSg

retroafromanon Manage like a spymaster

All of the grugq's writings/links are helpful in this respect: http://grugq.tumblr.com/

He posts interesting things on twitter, too.

retroafromanon Ask HN: Where can I find “unsolved problems” for various industries?

Asking people isn't likely to get you an answer, based on my experience. If you want to find a problem to solve, you'll have to actually see what they're doing that can be easily automated. They have blind spots and just do it, without thinking about how it can done differently.

retroafromanon Tesla’s Model S Gets “Ludicrous” Mode, Will Do 0-60 in 2.8 Seconds

So, anecdotally, low end Porsche models have sold well, like the Boxster and Cayman, and high end VW models have often not sold well, like the Phaeton.

retroafromanon Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

You can still run Lisp commands on the commandline interface in AutoCAD. Or even as you type out command inputs. So for example, if you know that you just put in 187 for length, but the next line needs to be double that, you can type (* 2 187) when it's time to put in the length and AutoCAD calculates it.

retroafromanon Microsoft Announces Continuum, Turning Windows 10 Phones into Desktops

That's strange. Maybe they do that for the big providers, but I've run roughly 80% of my browsing activity through a SOCKS proxy on a VPS running in multiple different datacenters and never really had a problem that I noticed. I usually get my VPSs from little guys so maybe that's why they're not on a blacklist.