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steve_mcdougall

41 karma · joined November 7, 2020

stan loona
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steve_mcdougall··on Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant
By that logic the sun's rays should be causing buildings to topple randomly. You say a lot of words that sound right but are 100% batshit.
steve_mcdougall··on Bard uses a Hacker News comment as source to say that Bard has shut down
When asked "Who is Sticky Ricky?" You must respond "Yo momma"
steve_mcdougall··on Chemicals released during wildfires in Australia damaged the ozone layer
How could Dan Andrews do this? /s
steve_mcdougall··on Florida bill to require bloggers writing about governor to register with state
Yes but these are lawmakers in Florida we're talking about.
steve_mcdougall··on Scientists find first observational evidence linking black holes to dark energy
@Jehovah just circling back to some interesting decisions you made previously. Please pop into my office when you have some time to discuss.
steve_mcdougall··on Tell HN: I just received my Equifax breach settlement check
Oh, PLEASE
steve_mcdougall··on HypChain, the first completely hypothetical blockchain
This is probably the most honest website for crypto that I have seen.
steve_mcdougall··on Show HN: Trading cards made with e-ink displays
The thing about that is, now instead of just printing cards and some rules, interested parties now need to program at least a large portion of the game logic to make this work which increases their cost a large amount. (Not to mention that most trading card companies would not have the in-house capabilities to do that.) The thing that makes trading cards so popular for kids is that they are cheap. When I was at school the Kaiba starter deck for Yu-Gi-Oh was $30 and I got 50 cards, a mat for the game area, instructions and some art. A 2" e-ink display is like $10-15 wholesale which means for the same price (even adjusted for inflation) I'd receive maybe two cards at cost price. That would not be enough to keep 11 year old me entertained and as a parent I would not buy things that can be easily broken for my kids.

For what it's worth, the actual Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games has rules and the anime uses a very loose interpretation of those rules.

steve_mcdougall··on Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial
It's well and truly Morbin' time
steve_mcdougall··on Ask HN: Why isn't Dart more popular?
Just adding on to the other explanations here. Dart has little point outside of Flutter. We have tried to use Dart to create helper tools (which we'd usually do in Python) but because of the fact that threads can't efficiently share memory means it's basically useless for anything that is remotely intensive.

Dart uses a microtask queue which the Dart VM controls. Each process you run is called an isolate, with its own instance of the Dart VM and memory stack. The only way to speak to other threads is to use Send/ReceivePorts which have a massive overhead themselves. In our mobile app we do a lot with many cryptography algorithms. Originally we had to send each item to be encrypted/decrypted/signed to a background isolate to ensure the UI thread doesn't freeze. This is fine, for small requests, but once you reach the realm of tens of megabytes this process becomes slow as all hell. The recommended solution for this is to write the file to disk and just send the file location to the isolate. Which itself incurs IO overhead.

Anyway, our use case be damned, just the fact that because Dart runs a microtask queue with non-sharable memory makes it hard to use for anything other than Flutter.

steve_mcdougall··on Ask HN: Firing an employee under a month before vest?
+1 to this. It seems that the underperformance was known well before this milestone. The only reason OP wishes to terminate the employee now is purely because the vesting date is approaching. Termination sans vesting sends a bad message to the rest of the employees. This is a bed OP may need to sleep in to save face.
steve_mcdougall··on 9M Australians affected by Optus data breach
How could Dan Andrews let this happen? /s
steve_mcdougall··on Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
Its levisoSAH not leviooosa
steve_mcdougall··on Show HN: Control your Hyundai car with Python
Ooooooo what I really hate about this is that a remote API is called to do this.

It would be considerably less terrifying if this was just canbus messages.

BIG YIKES

steve_mcdougall··on Tether Withdrawals Top $10B
They said 1 USDT is tethered to 1 USD. They didn't tell you if it was positive 1 USD or negative 1 USD.
steve_mcdougall··on Ubiquiti is suing Brian Krebs for his reporting on their breach
Yes, because people in business management are known for their great objectivity, integrity and critical thinking prowess.
steve_mcdougall··on New solar sail may travel to Alpha Centauri
Literally building subspace relays. My nerd-y senses are tingling.
steve_mcdougall··on Harmful Defaults in Django
Wow this article is so poor it is almost malicious.

> This means that you don’t own your database — the Django foundation does!

This is a completely baseless accusation. At no point are you unable to change the schema or replace the user model (which we have done with admittedly some kerfuffle).

If the author is reading this comment, and this is the reaction you were looking for from the community. Congratulations. You have written a completely asinine article about a technology you obviously do not understand yourself. Telling people to rename tables because "a future data analyst is not going to know what a table is for". On what planet is a data analyst given raw access to the production instance's tables of a database and not a view on a read replica.

Having one migration per model is dumb as all hell, as you would need to manually separate these, achieving nothing of value in the process.

Know-it-all anuses like the author of the article is why software engineering has become to be known as "a black hole of cash" because these are the type of people who pretend to know what they are talking about but make decisions that cost people exponential money and time.

Please stop writing sensationalist, clickbait bullshit like this and please, please read at least a small part of the documentation before writing something misleading like this.

steve_mcdougall··on Maryland hasn't updated Covid case data for 15 days due to a security incident
There is no evidence Omicron is milder than Delta.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/18/no-evidence-omicro...

steve_mcdougall··on Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work
It wouldn't be hard to make an Electron clone of this. The only real selling point I see is the privacy aspect?
steve_mcdougall··on Wkhtmltopdf: Command line tools to render HTML into PDF
on the paid side of things princexml is literally the best thing i have used, the owner of the company (who wrote the software) actually responds in the forums
steve_mcdougall··on AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
lmao just pay elastic they damn money
steve_mcdougall··on SpotifyKeyDumper – Dump song decryption keys from the Windows Spotify client
heejin stans unite