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singlow

2,322 karma · joined August 8, 2009

jacob [at] iakob.com

meet.hn/city/us-Austin

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singlow··on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor
Typically it is on the back of the upper arm where it is covered by a short sleeve shirt. Generally it does not get in the way.
singlow··on Ask HN: Who is still programming directly on a server?
I'm sure it still exists, for some specialized legacy systems, but I was describing my first programming job in the 90s.
singlow··on Ask HN: Who is still programming directly on a server?
Unencrypted FTP in our case, over a shared ISDN connection. Copy index.cfm to index.cfm.bak and take a swing. No dev, no staging, just production. We did have regular full backups though. And we took plain text credit cards and put 'em in the database so we could batch them up and send them over a modem to the clearinghouse overnight. Never really got bit bad though as far as we knew and we took hundreds of orders per day.
singlow··on Plastic bag bans work
I think one thing that may be misunderstood is that many of these chains have "reusable" bags that are very hefty plastic bags but are not the very durable reusable bags made of cloth/canvas or materials, the ones which are basically tote bags. I think the people who buy these more expensive bags tend to use them more than 3 times. But the ones that cost 99 cents at the register end up getting repurchased everytime someone forgets their bags. It took me a while to get into the habit and I know I have about 60 of those accumulated from the last 10 years of occasionally forgetting them. The bags I do reuse tend to get used many many times, but the rest might get used just once, because I already have a pile of them. If i remember my bags, I take the nice ones. If I forget, I have to buy new hefty "reusable" bags.
singlow··on After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]
I think its a subset of bugs. A glitch usually is not fatal, allowing the program to continue in a possibly degraded/altered way. In games it most often refers to a bug that allows for some unintended behavior that may be advantageous for certain desired outcomes, although it also can be just a visual artifact or it could get you stuck. But I wouldn't expect it to be used to describe a bug that caused the game to shut down or end instantly.
singlow··on Low-frequency sound can reveal that a tornado is on its way
I believe I did misunderstand. After re-reading I realized the poster could have meant that lower frequencies may be detectable if _produced_ by proper sound equipment, rather than that they are detectable by the proper sound equipment.
singlow··on Low-frequency sound can reveal that a tornado is on its way
What do you mean that it is audible with proper equipment. The definition of an audible frequency is that you can hear it with your ear and the generally accepted minimum frequency for the human ear to hear is 20hz. Lower frequencies might be detectable by vibration in the body but not by the ear.

If you are using sound equipment then you are instrumentally detecting an inaudible frequency.

Am I misunderstanding?

singlow··on A real case of Bobby Tables?
We need you to capitalize that, Mr. Often Truncated.
singlow··on Mechanism behind aspirin protective effect against colorectal cancer identified
Ulcers, bleeding, hemorrhagic stroke, kidney or liver failure, other allergic reactions and interactions with other drugs.
singlow··on Swedish painters trade union to stop all work with Tesla brand cars
Why would europe want NATO if the U.S. acts like Russia?
singlow··on Italy to seize $835M from Airbnb in tax evasion inquiry
I have never seen a statute of limitations that can expire if charges have already been initiated.
singlow··on Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell
> who are you (as a random online service) to assume you can act as my big brother?

They are not trying to protect you. As a card holder you would not be damaged by fraudulant purchases apart from the inconvenience of reporting them. They are protecting themselves because if that transaction is later found to be fraudulant then they will have to return the funds and will likely be unable to recover the product they shipped or other costs incurred.

singlow··on Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California
I think he means it would be better proof if you simply gave an example case which was dismissed because a Judge ruled that it didn't qualify as a civil rights violation.
singlow··on root with a single command: sudo logrotate
Your opening line can easily be interpreted as stating that the stock 22.04 server install has an account with this privilege:

> The scenario is this: a brand new Ubuntu 22.04 server has an account which is restricted to running sudo logrotate .

It might have been better to say:

> The scenario is this: take a brand new Ubuntu 22.04 server and create an account which is restricted to running sudo logrotate .

singlow··on Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
Yes. There are so many details in the story that are unbelievable. I will possibly believe that there was some original true story with some subset of these circumstanced but it got rearranged and exaggerated for effect.

I will never believe that GM sent an engineer to troubleshoot this problem. Maybe in a small town a local dealer's mechanic spent some time troubleshooting but he probably figured out it was based on the short shut off time. Then he speculated that it took less time to get Vanilla than the other flavors? I doubt that is true - most likely it was random. It is amazing how often a random sequence will have an extended sequence that our brains won't believe is random.

Not sure I even believe there was any genuine observation of correlation from the owner. These type of apocryphal technical support stories are almost always formed backward from a problem and someone tries to think of the most insane way it could have manifested. But people love to believe them.

singlow··on Don't fire your illustrator
I don't disagree, but concerning particular trades this is not true. In the mid-19th century there were more than seven thousand blacksmith shops in the US, which employed over fifteen thousand people, but today there are fewer than one thousand professional blacksmiths. Many of the products they produced either have lower demand or are produced by other means. If you consider the entire metalworking industry, we have many more total workers, but very few have the skills of a blacksmith.

The number of people who do the current work of an illustrator might go down eventually due to AI, but there will likely be more total people employed in the process of producing illustrations. It is just likely that fewer of them will have the skills that today's illustrators need, and also likely that fewer of them will command extraordinary wages. Many of the jobs that replace it will likely be closer to the median wage than today.

Also we will eventually turn the corner and start having population decline. For the US this might be just a few decades away. And some time after that, work would eventually decrease.

singlow··on YOLO-Driven Development Manifesto
I understand that if I only live once I don't want to waste the time I have on things that I don't enjoy. I don't understand when it means rushing into something that could cause immediate catastrophic failure.

In this case it is You Only Launch Once. If I can launch 50 times, I might skip a test since I can just launch again with a fix. If I only get one launch, I am sure as heck going to test it a few times over.

singlow··on YOLO-Driven Development Manifesto
I have never quite understood YOLO as it is used. Why would I do something especially risky while realizing I only live once? If I had 10 lives, I would take many risks, but since I only live once, I will try to make a reasonable balance between risk and reward.
singlow··on A world where people pay for software
No human being except you, apparently.

I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.

singlow··on A world where people pay for software
Did the development of Excel 2003 not benefit from all of the work done in the previous versions? Even if it had been a from-scratch rewrite, which it was not, it would have still benefited from the design iteration and experience of the development team in solving the same problems in previous versions. Excel 2003 was not a first-release that was suddenly a refined product that would be useful for years without additional maintenance. I used Excel a few times in the 80s, and regularly through the 90s and early 2000s on Macs and Windows and wrote quite a bit of VBA for them professionally.

What part of my claim is bizarre? My claim is simply that Word and Excel had 20 years of history prior to the 2003 release. Your claim that it was originally written on a different OS is not really a reasonable counter-argument. The Windows version of Excel came out 2 years after the Mac version, so that only knocks the history of the "Windows" version down to 16 years.

singlow··on A world where people pay for software
I think you are confused because the 2003 version of those products had already had as many as 20 years of maintenance, in the form of prior releases upon which they were based. Word was first released in 1983 and Excel in 1985.
singlow··on Kevin Mitnick has died
He did this as an adult while being paid by the bank as security consultant.
singlow··on What AT&T and Verizon knew about toxic lead cables for decades
Maybe they really mean aerosolized particulate lead?
singlow··on FDA approves first nonprescription daily oral contraceptive
It could also be that public familiarity with medication procedures and language has changed over time allowing the FDA to believe that this can be used safely now, whereas the same instructions would not have been as effective 20 years ago?
singlow··on Tax prep firms shared ‘extraordinarily sensitive’ data about taxpayers with Meta
There is no way that google has interest in the effort it would take to try to interpret the custom data that websites insert into custom analytics dimensions in a meaningful way. Their algorithms may track trends for them, but they are not aware of what they actually mean in a semantic way. I doubt that it us useful for them to learn anything from that data that is scoped outside the single account.
singlow··on Shortening the Let's Encrypt chain of trust
I have lots of clothes that I wear that are much older than that. And most that are newer than that use designs from long before 2016. They are only newer because the older ones wore out from use. I can only think of a few articles in my closet that could be identified definitively as newer than 2000 by appearance. I imagine this is true for many men, less often for women I suppose.
singlow··on How VSCode made bracket pair colorization faster (2021)
There is a Microsoft-built plugin called Remote - SSH, which fits into a group called "Remote Development" that includes WSL and Docker versions. It basically runs most of vscode on the remote, and feels just as fast as local on a decent connection. Most of the heavy lifting is done on the remote so things like full project searches, or linting, etc not having to go through ssh to access the files.

I use it for almost all of my development. I launch an ec2 instance with my projects and all of my code and data stays in my dev vpc. I can connect from my laptop or workstation and I can spin up extra dev environments if I am working on multiple projects. Plus, since the projects usually involve a pretty big data set, i don't have to download that locally and it can be replicated quickly within the vpc for each dev environment.

The SSH extension even knows how to forward ports back and you can add/remove port forwards from the vscode ui.

singlow··on Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
So there are some bad lawyers therefore all lawyers are useless?
singlow··on Health Insurance Claim Denied? See What Insurers Said Behind the Scenes
It doesn't have to be a policy. Large beaurocracies naturally tend toward certain behaviors due to natural incentives. You must have policies/regulations to specifically counteract these tendencies.
singlow··on Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
It will create an index if no existing index meets the requirements of the foreign key.
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