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sjf

827 karma · joined September 22, 2007

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sjf··on Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
[The I-80 east has entered the chat]
sjf··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
Why do people put locks on glass doors? Society only works because of the assumption that ~90% of people will follow the rules.
sjf··on Show HN: Searchable library of free audiobooks
There needs to be a column for the name of the narrator. I will listen to almost anything read by a narrator that I like. The LibriVox version of Flatland has long, detailed descriptions of the illustrations, but I've still listened to it several times because the narrator has a great accent.

She's Ruth Golding btw. https://librivox.org/reader/2607?primary_key=2607&search_cat...

sjf··on Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut
I guess you’ve never had the displeasure of using treasurydirect.gov.
sjf··on The Free Movie: Frame-by-frame, handrawn reproduction of "The Bee Movie" (2023)
You’re right, I can’t believe they didn’t cut frames that are totally unrelated, there so many left in that are just scribbles or text.

I just tried making some frames for the dune remake. The editor is so hard to use. I can only draw a one pixel line with no smoothing. It’s really laggy/glitchy. I can barely even make out what the original frame is because it’s in grayscale with an overlay. I got one frame that could have been a landscape of snow and rocks, or it could have been sand dunes, or water. I have no idea, it was just gray and white blobs.

I get that they are going for a retro style, but even MS paint had different size brushes.

It’s such a cool idea, I wish the tooling was better.

sjf··on Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer
My forearms are getting cold just thinking about it.
sjf··on Show HN: Hacker Herald – like HN but with crowdsourced pics and subtitles
The site is neat, but the airport article is really the only one that benefits from an image though. It'd be nice to not have to scroll past logos, stock images, etc.
sjf··on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
Agreed, I have so many services that all want to run their own webserver, db, elasticsearch, etc. I have to start using non-standard port numbers and it’s a burden to have to keep track of them.
sjf··on A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
That is what I immediately thought as well. The problem though is that a perfect hash is still going to be O(key length) for the hash function, which they are trying to avoid.

In theory, if they used a regex it would be using a state machine to do the matching, which should have similar performance to the trie- only O(k) in the worst case. But from what I understand regex libraries don't actually build the state machine, they use backtracking so the performance is no longer O(k).

I'm surprised they couldn't find a performant regex library that already existed that uses state machines. It should have similar performance to the trie. But in reality, the performance is affected more deeply by things like memory access patterns and the performance of specific arithmetic operations, so it's impossible really to speculate.

sjf··on What's in my location history?
A couple of years ago they redesigned the mobile experience for timeline and since then it’s become so unresponsive it’s basically unusable.

I don't know why they needed to kill the web interface if they still let you 'backup' your location history to the cloud.

sjf··on Google no longer developing Material Web Components
They are wearing an eternity collar, which means they are in a BDSM relationship. Wearing something highly visible like that is basically performing your kink in public. There is much more discrete jewelry they could wear. I don’t think it’s appropriate for a work place even in 2024.
sjf··on Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider
Find me a printer that’s more reliable than a phone.
sjf··on Ask HN: Advice for leading a software migration?
I’ve seen this happen in situations where the migration is totally invisible to users. My last team is five years into an opaque database migration that seems to only expand in scope. It’s just a symptom of the migration being more difficult than originally expected usually combined with losing momentum or leadership support. Obviously no one originally intends to keep maintaining both system indefinitely.
sjf··on Ask HN: Advice for leading a software migration?
I support everything in this comment.

After more than a decade at large sw companies, I can count on one hand the number of migrations where the legacy system was ever able to be turned down. I’ve seen migrations drag on for years, to the point where most of the team has turned over. I’ve seen them become a three-way migration because the second version was deemed insufficient so a third solution was introduced.

Absolutely put your most senior devs on this; maintain as much support from management as possible; budget for much, much more time than you think; you need full commitment or you are going to be maintaining both systems indefinitely.

sjf··on The curious case of the missing period
The modern version would seem to be every platform expands until it includes instant messaging.
sjf··on Can I take ducks home from the park?
Legally? No, you cannot possess any part of a undomesticated bird under the Wild Bird Conservation Act.
sjf··on GitHubGuessr
You should exclude unit tests. And the package line from Java files.
sjf··on Common mistakes in salary negotiation
3% of a big number is... still pretty big. It's easily going to be five figures in most markets.
sjf··on Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode
Do you actually have any evidence for this? While having zero personal projects is probably a red flag, in my last job search I saw almost no clicks on links to projects. From personal experience, most hiring managers are so busy they barely even read the resume. They are definitely not going to comb through someone's github submissions.
sjf··on Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.
sjf··on Air quality monitors: paying more does not get you more accuracy
I have the Airthings view plus. It measures PM2.5, PM1, CO2, VOC, Radon. It was kind of expensive but I am happy with it.
sjf··on What to do about aggressive moose
It's from the credits of The Life of Brian by Monty Python.
sjf··on Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?
You're not first one I have heard from.
sjf··on Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?
How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?
sjf··on Fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health
Agreed, artifical sweetners, particularly stevia, are the most horrible things I have ever tasted. The first experience I have consuming stevia now makes me refuse any kind of product that is likely to have it without checking the ingredient list first. Side note, I cannot find a protein shake, except for plain protein powder, that does not have artificial sweetners. Please, someone start producing a savoury shake :(
sjf··on Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing
You can choose to have affordable housing, or you can choose have a homeless encampment. The poor people don't just disappear.
sjf··on Google Fi seemingly affected by latest T-Mobile data breach
It's not the same though. You can never do the equivalent of locking your yubikey inside the house.
sjf··on Google Fi seemingly affected by latest T-Mobile data breach
I have used both. During that time I've lost access to SMS due to my phone breaking (twice), I have lost permanent access to online banking because the bank will not accept an international number. I came extremely close to losing access to my entire Google account because I use Fi and you need to sign into Google to activate it on your phone, but you need to be able to receive SMS to sign in to Google.

Meanwhile, I have multiple yubikeys that are as hard to lose or break as a house key. Google is kind of the only site that supports hardware tokens, but you can add multiple to your account. I can't think of a single site that allows multiple phone numbers for SMS 2fa.

sjf··on Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes
I have a yubikey on my keyring. It's superior to sms 2fa in everyway. Its almost impossible to damage a yubikey- phones can easily be broken or stolen. You can have multiple keys linked to your account- Google only let's you have one phone. Yubikey can't be sim swapped. Never needs to be charged or have cell reception, no problems with sites not accepting international phone numbers.

The only downside is that Google is the only site I used that supports it.

sjf··on ‘That girl is going to get herself killed’ (2022)
> had it not worked out, well I would not be around to regret it

The consequences would have been borne by your spouse, family, friends, the rangers who came to retrieve your body. This is such a young male take on dangerous activities.

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