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richx

337 karma · joined May 24, 2017

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richx··on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.

But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands:

Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real breaks. Simple solution is to force breaking from time to time (I.e. breaking in neutral). Another aspect is, that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check. This avoids that they will fail it, because the car will be repaired before it is checked by the independent inspection. This is not mandatory for Teslas.

richx··on Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
I like Thunderbird, it’s a great tool for private use. One killer feature I always missed (not sure if it exists today by default in Thunderbird), is the great calendar integration of outlook. I use the calendar a lot, during work but also to organize our family. It’s super important for me to able to send invites to co workers and my wife :-)
richx··on NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966
I can recommend watching the excellent movie War Games, quite entertaining and still relevant. NORAD plays an important role in it.
richx··on Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
I work on business software.

I think one very important aspect is requirements collection and definition. This includes communicating with the business users, trying to understand their issues and needs that the software is supposed to address. And validating if the actual software is actually solving it or not (sufficiently).

All of this requires human domain knowledge, communication and coordination skills.

richx··on Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
This is what the DOGE guys don’t understand: even if it seems you can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the detail.
richx··on Reentry of International Space Station Batteries into Earth's Atmosphere
This is a map of the affected area in Germany. It seems to miss Berlin, but many large cities in the Ruhr valley are affected.

https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Krisenmanage...

richx··on Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G12 laptop review: First major refresh in three years
I am using X1s since 10 years, different generations. The only one I really disliked was the one with the F1-F12 function keys were no real buttons, more like a touchbar. That was pretty bad as a software developer! I think they introduced it because Apple MacBooks had it as well, thankfully for one generation only.
richx··on Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
Seems so, the official owners manual foresees some maintenance, but there is no regular service schedule.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E95DAAD...

Edit: interestingly, the German link seems to show something else: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/de_us/GUID-E95DAAD...

richx··on Air Canada apologizes, women kicked off flight for refusing vomit-covered seats
Similar issue, different solution: https://airlive.net/news/2023/09/05/delta-flight-dl194-retur...
richx··on Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile
Why didn’t you just ask the kid what it is doing and where it is living?
richx··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
My Ampler electric bicycle: https://amplerbikes.com/

It’s such a great vehicle, I smile every time I can ride it. It also helped me to use the car less.

Im also pretty happy with my Plumelabs Flow, a small device that constantly measures air pollution. We used it to find a new and better home:

https://plumelabs.com/en/flow/

I also replaced my Android HTC U11 with an IPhone XS. I was always an Android user, but to be honest, I think IPhones are much better.

richx··on The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook
I love VBA, it’s so easy and powerful. My first job was being a developer/consultant at a big 4 firm, developing a disclosure management software with VB6. It even had a ORM to map objects from SQL queries. It was lightning fast, Office integration so superb. Later it was ported to .NET with a proper client/server architecture, still it never reached the speed and simplicity of the VB6 version.
richx··on Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?
One of the reasons might be, that the SEC mandated all filers to submit the reports in XBRL Format starting in 2009 (foreign private issuers using IFRS followed 2017). It’s called Interactive Data by SEC and requires to tag each and every value with an XML element to give it an accounting meaning. The XBRL tools have not been able at that time to convert PDF or InDesign files, so all reports look rather ugly since then. I’m head of development team that invented a PDF Tagger; we sold it like warm bread during last month, because all EU listed companies are also mandated to submit iXBRL now. Btw, the cover page always looks that ugly because it must be the „form“ template from SEC.

Here is a link to a more pretty report, also having XBRL tags: https://www.gleif.org/assets/components/xbrl-viewer/gleif-an...

richx··on Germany: 'Colossal' cyberattack knocks out Funke news group
How bad must their IT system be, when they are not even able to write and publish articles?
richx··on Chrome unlikely to support XPath 3.1
I don’t agree. Never touch a running system! I think you have no idea in how many software implementations XML plays an important role. Just because it’s not hot and fancy it does not mean it’s bad.
richx··on Chrome unlikely to support XPath 3.1
Is it an attack vector? Can you elaborate further?
richx··on Chrome unlikely to support XPath 3.1
I’m wondering which security risks they mean. I don’t see any security risk in XML itself, maybe it’s related to some XPath or XQuery functions?
richx··on Chrome unlikely to support XPath 3.1
The European Securities and Exchange Commission (ESMA) has just now mandated all listed companies in the EU to publish their annual financial statements in XHTML instead of PDF or paper. Combined with XBRL taxonomies it’s a very powerful structured format. Please don’t forget that XML is widespread in business applications and I haven’t seen any similar powerful replacement for XML validation and XPath. Please let me know if you know one.
richx··on Completely Silent Computer
I have a completely silent PC from Cirrus7. I'm pretty happy with it. But it does not have dedicated GPU like the one in the article.

https://www.cirrus7.com