Hacker News Reader

sharpercoderon Uber Bike – A New Way to Commute or Explore

http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-bike-helmet-paradox

This article makes an important point: studies prove people in accidents have significantly reduced head damage. However, not many studies prove that it makes bicycling safer: instead, cyclers are perceived safer, and therefore it is unsafer.

sharpercoderon Uber Bike – A New Way to Commute or Explore

1) it is showing pictures of a human riding a bicycle with a helmet. Please don't promote helmets on bikes: they reduce safety (for people 12+ yo). 2) I get a 404 (NL) 3) JUMP is not linked - I don't know what it is untill I reach the bottom of the page. 4) Although it is mentioned on the page, it is not very clear this is SF only.

sharpercoderon Ten days in Shenzhen

Skype is frankly a disaster. Not only the personal app, also the Skype for Business app. Chatting works, but don't try to use any other functionality, since it breaks so easily.

But first (with great distance) on the list of failed Microsoft products is their accounts. Ever tried to login into msdn? Even our sysadmin who's is daily job is to get this right fails many times. The UX is so confusing and ambiguous, it's not funny. Everytime I need to deal with it I am seriously considering moving away from the whole MS ecosystem.

sharpercoderon The paradigms of programming

And while cucumber brings "computer language" closer to end-users, in practice mostly testers and programmers write it.

sharpercoderon Our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint

My experience is that the best talks have useless slidedecks. That's because the decks support the talk and do not provide a foundation for the talk. Less good talks often use the deck as a documentation platform; in that case decks become much more useful for reading offline. The exception is when decks are commented heavily for people reading it offline. But I don't see this happening often. Usually, comments are used for the speaker to have some information ready when needed during the talk.

sharpercoderon Dark Site Finder: tracking light pollution to find locations for stargazing

You can see most large metropoles having a white core. In Rotterdam and The Hague (Netherlands), this white core is in between.

Very interesting. I live on the southern outskirts of The Hague, Netherlands. Between The Hague and De Nieuwe Waterweg is the Glass City [0] located, a large area (~20x20km) with mainly greenhouses. These greenhouses use artificial light to spur growth in plants, causing the white core in the light pollution heatmap.

When I look out on my balcony to the south, the sky never turns dark. Only when there is heavy rain clouds, the light from the greenhouses dims a bit. The sky is always in an orang-y darkish glow.

[0]: https://translate.google.nl/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre... (translated dutch wiki page, english page is only stub)

sharpercoderon Worked for 52 Years, Still Running: 1912 C-T 4WD Electric Truck

http://documentaryheaven.com/who-killed-the-electric-car/

sharpercoderon German Union Steps Up Fight for ‘Modern’ 28-Hour Workweek

Maybe I should say (and maybe I mean): 5 focused working days.

sharpercoderon German Union Steps Up Fight for ‘Modern’ 28-Hour Workweek

You can try more things and thus fail more often and thus become succesfull sooner.

sharpercoderon German Union Steps Up Fight for ‘Modern’ 28-Hour Workweek

1) I personally need a certain amount of focus to be really productive. Pure focus on one thing with enough "cadence" brings me in the zone. 2) Employers often have the idea as well. Although part-time jobs grow year-over-year, the ones getting promotions are still usually the employees dedicated 40 fulltime. I don't know if this is just a matter of perspective or based on tangible results (e.g. proven better productivity). 3) The "10 000 hour rule"

I should emphasize that the 40 hours should be spend well and the employee should use enough time for relaxation, rest and leasure. 40 hours for e.g. a head of family in busy waters may quickly be detrimental.

sharpercoderon German Union Steps Up Fight for ‘Modern’ 28-Hour Workweek

It has become clear to me that sub-40 hour work weeks don't really work from many perspectives. The most important factor is that many jobs require a minimum degree of attention. More focus does translate into better results.

So instead of sub-40 hour work weeks, we should maybe introduce partial yearly roles. So for example if you want to do 30 hours per week, simply work 3/4 weeks per year (39 of 52), but do work these weeks 40h.

sharpercoderon Hyperloop costs and challenges undermine pinned hopes

Exactly. Building landtunnels uses much more material. This material is expensive; a 100KM+ metal twin tube including foundation is fundamentally more expensive then a railway.

Further, it seems to me the thermal expansion problem (to me the single biggest technical problem) is not an issue either.

No wonder Elon Musk started The Boring Company. Once costs go significantly down to bore tunnels, most land on earth can be used to build a highspeed network on.

sharpercoderon System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

This would aid e.g. the "Stuxnet usecase" once the used computer hardware is known. Precise directional antennas could pick up the signal from a distance.

sharpercoderon How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

The concept of jaywalking is great for busy roads with high speed traffic. 30MPH+ (50KMPH+) roads should become much better and faster by reducing the amount of pedestrian crossing significantly.

Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Cars there should be "guests" catering to the slower non-motorized traffic.

This way we have the best of both worlds: nice & livable urban roads and faster driving in connecting roads.

sharpercoderon Light Traffic

If I'm in a car, I'd like to not brake-accelerate-brake-accelerate but rather move in a constant tempo. If I'm a pedestrian, I'd like a car-less safe environment to walk.

sharpercoderon Light Traffic

On roads where you can drive 30+MPH (50 KMPH+), I would suggest removing any possiblity for pedestrians to cross. Either make the road 20MPH (30KMPH) max where all space is shared with pedestrians, bicycles and cars - or make much better, safer & faster 50KMPH+ roads.

sharpercoderon Light Traffic

A few thoughts on this matter:

1. Roundabouts are safer and better with human drivers but bad from a usability standpoint. It's annoying to drive, slower, and makes people feel nauseous when driving through many. When we have road usage of autonomous vehicles surpassing 50%, I suggest to remove them.

2. Two-Leveled intersections without left turns seem cost effective and highly advantageous in cities. To lower the cost even further, it may be possible to design them for vehicles only (much lower ceilings needed, so much lower cost). Left turns can be achieved (especially in the US this is viable) bu going right three times (going around the block). Two-leveled intersections without left turns can reach 100% capacity in all lanes from all directions.

3. Lane-specific traffic light already may increase efficiency on intersections. Imagine a 2x2 intersection from both directions: the right turns can be green (where cars turn right on the rightmost lane) while through-traffic can use the left lane.

sharpercoderon IoT Sensors Monitor a 1,400-Kilometer Canal in China

iirc, tunnels use this to know where exactly fires occur.

sharpercoderon Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

I have also encountered web forms which must validate my address. Turns out, the backing database did not contain my address. I could not order at the store. After contacting the store, they told me that their data was always accurate and therefore I must be a fraud.

sharpercoderon A Type of Road Junction that Kills Cyclists

I disagree vehemently. While my experience on UK roads isn't that big, I have not seen any well designed bicycle road. Even the roads in the residential areas I've seen are quite bad; small, many cars parked on them (bad for visibility) and of considerable lacking quality. The bicycle roads in London are just lines painted on top of whatever surface the route encounters: curbs, manholes, poles in the middle of the road, pedestrian areas... Sudden and unmarked bicycle road stops where cyclists can't make out where to go. See also: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11985/city-cycling-in-...

No, if anything, UK roads are specifically not designed to handle bicycle traffic. I wonder what makes you think so?

sharpercoderon Announcing the OpenWrt/LEDE merge

I still don't get why no commercial hardware vendor offers products specifically designed for this software. OSS router software for home seems to be far superior then all the proprietary stuff that's out there.

sharpercoderon Tesla Model 3 Sets New EV Cannonball Run Record

I think Model S solved electric driving. Car reviewers seem to think so, the industry seem to think so (most manufacturers announced electrical models). Range, comfort, charging locations, safety, all solved problems.

How is Tesla's supposed claim they solved electrical driving misleading?

sharpercoderon Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

sharpercoderon Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text

> This particular case - finding and replacing certain characters with other characters - is pretty well-suited to the problem, and is probably more readable than a bunch of open code to do the same thing.

No, it is not a good solution to the problem; you ignore my earlier comments. English or latin text is not comprised of the sole ASCII characterset; it contains characters outside this set (quoting other languages, names, imported words for example).

sharpercoderon Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text

* RegEx opens your application up for DoS attacks

* RegEx is not very readable

* RegEx can be (very) slow

* It's not trivial to write RegEx code that achieves your goal in a high-quality way. Often quircks and edge-cases are missed.

I'm not saying that you should never use them, but oftentimes a (much) better alternative of achieving your goals is present.

See https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...

sharpercoderon Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text

Using RegEx is generally frowned upon; RegEx is a bad language to write anything in apart from prototypes. Furthermore, this will not work for most text as even US English text contains special characters. Think paraphrasing other languages, names and imported words.

sharpercoderon Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

I wish content suppliers would listen more to clients. Clients want more content without ads, so why not invest more into offering content without ads?

sharpercoderon An update on Better Ads (Chrome native ad-blocking)

I really hope a service will be created where I can pay for adfree content internetwide.

sharpercoderon I Got Paid $0 from the Uber Security Bug Bounty

Not all drug addicts commit crimes. There is certainly a place in society for people who fill their void(s) by using drugs. You do need to be careful though, not all addicts are crimeless.

sharpercoderon Apple Autocorrects Names of Some Medications to Names of Different Medications

But costs can go above a certain absolute threshold. In this example, the cost may be a human life, which is unacceptable.