spanhandler

This thread is a prime example of how one can troll or shitpost on HN, no problem, so long as the trolling and shitposting is sufficiently HN-flavored. By which I don't mean to imply that the moderation or community are systemically or broadly broken, certainly no more so than most communities online, but simply that there are definite gaps in the armor and when they're found you see a kind of mis-targeted immune response amplifying the damage (in fact, that effect is the main way damage is done by such posts on HN)

"First, you'll want to set up a server" and you're already down to well under 1% of the population that'll be interested in reading any further, let alone following through and actually doing it.

I read the post before it had any responses and based on how it read to me then I'd say milofeynman's post is responding to the strongest plausible interpretation, as that's one of the HNest posts I've ever seen, which is really saying something as that's a field full of strong contenders.

Guess that hasn't made it to their "download for linux" page on the main site yet. It still offers the plugins, with an alternate option for the command line tools.

> (from what I've heard 1Password only recently even added a Linux-compatible client).

Just plugins for Firefox and Chrome, AFAIK, actually. And a command line client that's just a wrapper for the website. No full-featured client available. KeePassXC can be a better option for interop with 1pass than 1pass is, on Linux, depending on what you need.

Yep, all those exact reasons are why I noted it's unfair (issue a group of people are facing, not an individual) and would be untenable as soon as it became any kind of system or recurring practice on any scale whatsoever ("there will always be people who will game the system"). Those are precisely the problems with the notion.

> although the circumstances they allow you to help with might not be the exact ones that first attracted your interest and concern.

Yeah, well, I'm human enough to have those impulses but also know it's good to help anyone, really, and that satisfying myself isn't the point. So thanks for the link, I'll check them out.

Heh, think the guy has Venmo? That'd be handy. Yeah maybe I'll try an email tomorrow.

I know it's an idea that would kind of... eat itself, were it reality. And maybe this is some shitty first-world take and I'm an asshole for thinking it or whatever. It's even a pretty unfair idea, really. But every time I read these sorts of human interest stories I wish there were a "send them some money" button. Again, an idea that would ruin itself immediately. I know. But failing that I'd rather not have them reported at all. This case is different, sure, because it's not targeted at an English-speaking audience at all, but we get them in our media, too.

Some of those Yazidis in northern Iraq a few years back? Some of the people trying to get into Greece who got interviewed? Man I wished, as soon as they were someone halfway stable, I could have dropped them some cash. An amount I wouldn't have missed that much would have made a difference. This is an utterly dumb "take", I know, for so very many reasons not least of which is that I could be doing more locally and that's something I actually could do, but it's still all I can think about when I see these kinds of stories. How much help even $100 would be some of these places, if only it could get there. And then my next though is how dumb that is. And that I wish these stories would just go away if I can't do anything about them.

Low- or zero-prep junk food is also incredibly cheap. When I see comparisons done it's usually ingredient costs of healthy food to full-price junk food costs, but that's not how poor people shop for junk food. They go to Taco Bell when the tacos are like 60¢ each or less, through promotions or coupons. They buy Totino's frozen pizzas eight at a time, on sale at half-off. They buy giant bags of store brand sugary cereal and pairs of 3L bottles of store-brand soda, again, on sale. Costco pizzas (they are so cheap on a calories-per-dollar basis, for zero-prep hot food) and bakery items for the enterprising slightly-less-poor who can scrape together the annual fee. Whichever chips or snack crackers are on sale. Off-brand pop tarts—holy crap those are calorie bombs and very cheap and you wouldn't believe how many kids have a couple of those for breakfast most every day. And so on.

Even relatively-healthy-but-not-really-healthy frozen meals can't compete with the outright crap. It's so very cheap.

> And look at any developing nation: everyone is hooked to Coca-Cola.

Everyone (more or less) is outside a few liberal, urban, health-focused pockets of the US, too. Or to sweet tea, or some other sugary caffeine drink. Unless you intended "developing nation" to cover those parts of the US, as well :-)

[EDIT] Not sure what rubbed people the wrong way about this, but if it's the qualifiers then it's my understanding that both "liberal" and "urban" are, independently or together, correlated with smaller waistlines and healthier lifestyles, in the US. Almost certainly including consumption of sugary drinks (indeed, this seems to peak in the "deep red" South, in the US, from what I can find). If that's wrong I'd be interested to know about it.

There are several decent ways to keep oneself in good shape for a few months while gyms are closed. Insisting this is a big, important problem for you while also (apparently) not taking advantage of those options means the way you're presenting yourself in your comment doesn't look so great, to put it mildly.

Yep. Dairy Queen, for instance, had lines of cars wrapping around the building and lining up in the street during the height of our "lockdown". Tons of things were still open in-person, too, like grocery stores, and there was no mask order and maybe 1/4 of people were wearing masks, at best, and almost no employees anywhere. Only exception is that a couple weeks in (IIRC) Costco started requiring them. We didn't get a mask order until a couple weeks after we ended our joke of a "lockdown". The police don't follow the order (sigh) but almost everyone else is, at least. But now everything's back open, more-or-less entirely.

It's no wonder we're still muddling along with this problem, months into it.

> - A successful life often feels like day-to-day failure.

So do unsuccessful lives. And moderately successful lives. This is just a characteristic of most lives, unless measures are taken to overcome the tendency to experience life this way.

Google probably don't want that happening because they use the data to inform decisions for all kinds of other things (search, ad sales, filling in gaps in their creepy profiles of people, maybe even metrics-driven machine-learning-for-web-design, who knows) and are more worried about web site owners feeding them mountains of fake data than about missing stats on some % of ad-blocking users.

That's a damn fine looking list. I cannot understand why people like King Crimson no matter how hard I try, let alone well enough for In the Court... to place at #5, but otherwise, looks great to me.

For anyone starting from nearly-scratch with popular music I'd recommend a chronological approach to lists like this. Don't start at #1—cut the list off with however many you're willing to commit to listening to, then order them by release date, and start at the beginning. For the earliest entries consider hunting down the major influences on their genre or a couple major popular acts from the preceding 10-20 years before them to get a sense of where they came from—maybe a few tracks of ragtime, a crooner or two, a couple big-band acts, some early and mid-period jazz, maybe an album of "standards" or something, a small selection of early rock. That's a decent set-up for starting on 60s-and-on popular music, which is mostly what these lists treat (Kind of Blue is almost always the highest-ranking exception to the "60s and later" rule)

[EDIT] incidentally, I don't see a CSV or Excel export option for the list on this site, even in the list of "subscriber" features that I could unlock by paying $15. I am entirely certain I'm not the only person who needs my lists to end up somewhere like that so I can mess around with sorting, checking-off, and so on :-)

I found Wii Sports gave me nasty RSI in a way I'd never experienced before if I tried to play it "seriously" for any length of time. All that vigorous motion but with no weight or resistance was really, really bad. It also allowed a much faster pace of action than the real sports it mimicked, which probably didn't help—no stopping to fetch the ball or wait for people to get into position in tennis or baseball, for instance.

Waggling the controller with one's wrist was more effective in game and didn't hurt after 15-20 minutes like playing "for real" did. It also wasn't really any more fun than playing with a normal controller—so, fun, but nothing special.

I'd expect to hurt myself trying to get a workout with something like this, based on that experience.

Everyone likes parks and plazas and the occasional wide boulevard, it's when there's a bunch of "green space" of indefinite purpose strewn about, and wide streets with big setbacks everywhere because they "look grand" and not to serve demonstrated human purpose. Utopian city designs and planned cities often suffer from both of those blights.

Like Brasilia:

http://tourplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/brasilia-cap...

https://brasiliaarch638.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/aerea200...

High-rises but tons of wasted space. If they'd just put in a normal allocation of space for parks & plazas and right-sized roads the whole city could be much smaller and everyone would be fairly close to the actual countryside, not just unpleasant strips of green between wide roads.

Once you start looking for it in concept-art type city plans, it's everywhere: way too much purposeless, empty space, mostly in the form of non-park green spaces and too-wide streets and sidewalks. And if you have all those problems, in a real city at least, then you need a ton more parking, because nothing's walkable and the buses are slow (because everything's so far apart), and that's even more wasted space.

IIRC it used to work a lot better (like, a whole lot better) but modern X apps mostly end up sending bitmaps over the wire, rather than native X rendering instructions.

Agree that it works better than other remote desktop options on Linux. Overall though I get better performance with RDP to Win10 running Linux in Virtualbox (!) than any other option I've tried though, including Linux on bare metal with a variety of remote desktop options, and Virtualbox's remote desktop server.

The Beatles — Sgt. Pepper

David Bowie... a different one practically every album.

That seems to be a mistake in a lot of "city of the future" concept art. All that empty space, tons of long strips of green and trees, very wide streets, huge squares everywhere, looks nice on a drawing or a render but is miserable to exist in because it means everything's really far apart and the scale of everything feels overwhelmingly. A lot of naïve attempts at a "green" city design have the same problem—in trying to incorporate all kinds of "eco friendly" green space they make an area less walkable, spread out the urban footprint, and make it a ton less eco-friendly.

The first time I heard of it was the wave of articles a couple weeks back about how it was failing and would probably shut down soon. Suddenly it was everywhere but it was all coverage of how it'd already failed.

There was a Russian travel-photoblogger obsessed with street signs and fire hydrants whose blog I read a lot of a few years back, out of whose very extensive travels a few patterns and interesting observations emerged, one of which was: planned cities are almost always eerily empty, with streets way too wide and not enough in between them, and are typically just about the dullest cities to visit.

[EDIT] and no, I don't have a link, I lost the URL years back and have repeatedly tried to find it again, failing every time.

Not the only comic that puts a bonus in the img tag alt text—I think Wondermark does, and I wanna say that at one time SMBC did that and had the red-button extra panel, both, and it may still. I always check for it when I find a new webcomic, now.

If you want support from an app for piano and especially if you already have a keyboard or digital piano with MIDI out, I would strongly recommend Simply Piano on the iPad. I'm not affiliated, just a very, very happy user with a young kid getting more out of that app than I would have imagined—I started off keeping pace, having played a few instruments but not piano before, but when your kid spends every spare minute on the damn thing it's hard to keep up, after they get the hang of it.

It's not so hot at form—it tries to teach and reinforce it but of course it can't dynamically check that you aren't screwing up—but is great at most other things. Heavy focus on playing recognizable and fun music (they license tons of stuff) to keep up interest, with arrangements adjusted down as necessary. Long, segmented "curriculum" plan with some branches, free play modes on songs you've "unlocked", sheet music available and play modes that scroll the page for you. It's really nice.

> From what I've seen after talking to hundreds of secular homeschoolers and the minimal research done on this topic, kids with 1-2 hours a day of study facilitated by a parent do far better academically than the typical kid in school. They also do a great job transitioning back to school (if you decide to go that route) because they are so independent and autonomous.

We're banking hard on the 1-2 hours a day of direct instruction thing being true :-)

> Have you considered any of the learning tools like Khan Academy that don't need a parent to necessarily sit down with the child and can study independently?

Absolutely, apps and youtube videos are how we're going to handle much or all of "specials" instruction (foreign language, art, music—I wouldn't have counted on it for music except we happen to already be doing that and it's going better than I could have imagined) and probably some of the science and social studies work. We're mostly focused on keeping our foot on the gas for reading and math, at which she's already far "ahead", as far as direct instruction goes—a kid who can read and is curious can cover more science and social studies on their own than they do in school, we both know from experience, so if those two core literacy subjects are going well we reckon no serious long-term harm has been done, even if we somehow fail at everything else.

> Also, if you need a friendly ear, I'd be happy to help you and your partner think this through. I've been a teacher for 15 years in 3 countries, founded 3 startups to support homeschoolers, and most recently led schoolclosures.org and Modulo which are working directly to provide support to families. Happy to help in any way we can.

Oh hey, we based a bunch of our research on a pile of modulo resources you posted on an HN thread some time back! Haha, cool, didn't realize you were you until I got to this paragraph. Thanks for the work you've done, and for your kind offer of support. At this point we don't know what we don't know and our unknowns are down to things we won't uncover until we start trying it, though, I think. Which is very soon. If our Singapore Math books we ordered 2 weeks ago ever show up, that is. :-/

> What is clear but you probably don't want to admit is Apple is not fighting here for your safety but for extracting mroe money, if they were not that greedy Epic,Spotify would not have started this wars and you would have been safe in the wallgarden and extremely satisfied that the other people inside can't escape either.

Why wouldn't I admit that? Of course the situation benefits them. I just doubt there's a way to give me all the aspects of their devices & ecosystem that I value, that doesn't also benefit them. I'd love to see them drop the cut they take, for instance. That being so high benefits me not at all, so far as I can tell.

... and if someone comes out with devices that actually compete with the specific sort of product they offer, including the integrated & closed app store and restrictions on what apps are allowed to do, and takes a lower cut of app store sales, then Apple might have to reduce their cut, too. Or this current scuffle might end up not changing the app store rules much, but dropping the cut they take substantially—personally, that's an outcome I'd love.

> That's not how free market works.

It... isn't? How not?

> Imagine being unable of refueling because your car does not work with standard oil pumps and you had to go to Apple licensed gas station whom Apple charges 30% to.

Then I'd probably buy a competing brand of car, if that bothered me? You know, one of my other choices on the market? Like how there are a bunch of Android device vendors and a couple Linux mobile vendors that I could choose if Apple's App Store model bothered me, rather than being something I actively want? I am 100% not following how this isn't a market working. The choices people are making may not be the ones you prefer—happens to me all the time with markets—but there are choices.

> That's exactly what many want from Apple.

> Change the rules.

Many developers and publishers, maybe. I'm very much unconvinced that's what the subset of users who are aware of this issue in the first place, want, for the most part. I think if it were a major problem for them they'd have bought an Android device, or something else.

> If they can't allow sideloading, they're not as good as I thought.

They do allow sideloading, it's just fairly inconvenient. They can't allow a form of it that's convenient enough to allow other app stores to thrive, without changing the character of the ecosystem for their users. I don't think any amount of being "good" at what they do would change that.

> If Apple sold Android powered iPhones you would still buy an iPhone, you're are buying the brand, not the product.

OK, cool, guess continuing this exchange is pointless.

Maybe they could form a company for this purpose, and then sell a product that fills that need?

Age was it, in part, for me. I used to do lots of hardware and OS tinkering. Now the last goddamn thing I want to do is troubleshoot graphical glitches in x-windows, or try to get my audio to handle changing outputs correctly, or cross my fingers while "dist-upgrade" runs, or fix scaling and font rendering in GTK apps, or whatever, when I'm just trying to do something else.

At some point I became acutely aware of every time I was doing something with a computer that was simply fucking with the computer, and not actually getting anything that I wanted or needed to get done, except to the extent that making my computer be not-broken is required for those things. Around that time I was exposed to macOS and iOS and finally had an actual choice to (mostly) not have to do that when I don't want to, and if I decide I would like to tinker then I can use... any other option on the market.

I'd probably be screwing around with trying to run NetBSD on Android phones and turn them into mobile computers I can plug monitors and keyboards into and embedding RPis and Arduinos in all kinds of crap around the house, if I were 16 again.

At the age I am now, though, you'd literally have to pay me to even think about doing any of that. Even when I screw around with getting allegedly set-it-and-forget-it RPi media projects (think: kodi, lakka) working I usually end up regretting it. I do know how to work with those sorts of things. I also very much don't want to any more, but do still want computer-things doing stuff for me with few or no hassles. Luckily these days you can pay to get that, in some categories at least. Largely from Apple, if you want them to last a while—I do wish they had actual competition in that sense. More options that don't spy (much) and Just Work (mostly), please.