sudobash1

Every time I read this story the part that always surprises me again is the units command. Converting from 3 millilightseconds to miles is brilliant, and I am delighted every time that the units command can do this.

Thanks dang. I've always been pretty suspicious of the attribution to Twain. Nice to know where it actually came from.

This strongly reminds me of a bit of humor attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mark Twain.

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For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

> Just imagine a credit card collection company agreeing to come after you, when you made a good faith attempt to close the account.

Given the practices detailed here, I could very easily imagine it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490241

That requires a carrier board though.

This is more like using AUR (except the packages are prebuilt with no way to inspect source). They are entirely user submitted.

No, where I live it is illegal to use a phone for most of those (without hands-free methods). When occasionally I need a map with directions, I load it up and set the phone in place before leaving, so I never need to touch it. Sometimes I ask my phone ("Hey Google") to read my texts if I am on a long drive. But other than that, I never use it. This is the ideal (and again, the law in many places).

I take your point in that the built-in touchscreen is no worse for people who already text and drive, but we absolutely should be aiming for better. I certainly don't want to be forced to use a touchscreen for changing the AC settings, defogging the windshield, etc...

I would suggest that you don't need to count the chickens. You could also just verify that none are left out. There are presence sensors (such as the ones that turn lights on when someone comes into a room, or off when everyone is gone). If you had one that worked on chickens pointed into their run, you could close the door when there are none left (plus a time cutoff if Henrietta really wants to keep her trist with the raccoon).

Certainly, and I imagine that there are plenty that we interact with on a regular basis. For example, door security sensors (like for Ring) will be off nearly all the time. When someone opens the door, they will power up, send a notification, and go dormant again. I don't know if this will happen within a single millisecond, but it certainly could if there was a design need.

For many simple embedded systems that plug into the wall, the "boot" process will happen in under a millisecond. But it will take considerably longer than that for the voltage levels to stabilize.

The real thing which differentiates these from a PC or phone is that they are not running what we would typically call an OS. They may be running an RTOS (a very simplified OS), but for many of them, as soon as they have stable power, they are off to the races (Just like the home-computers of the 80s. Just plug in and go.)

There are still terms of use, which can dictate how you are allowed to use a website. And there are watermarks in the corners.

> this thing can be a portable entertainment solution whether you’re at a picnic...

Absolutely not. Sitting around watching TV is completely antithetical to the whole purpose of picnicking.

I do software contract work for many blind and low vision people, and they also have had great things to say about Zoom's accessibility.

> Can your wife go mountain biking?

This seems a silly question. During the workday, neither spouse can go mountain biking. Outside of the workday both spouses can go mountain biking. This is true whether one or both spouses are wage-earners.

Unless one is pursuing one's own interests on company time, I don't see how being the parent with a career makes it any easier to pursue personal interests.

> Gemini is _incredible_ for accessibility

It depends on how you use it. If you want to make ASCII tables, then a screen reader will not have an idea of how to navigate the table. However a simple HTML <table> is well understood by screen-readers. I would contend that properly structured HTML documents are far better for accessibility.

> fewer old folks consuming resources and providing little value in return.

As a parent living by my in-laws, I can assure you that, far from providing "little value", raising children without support from grandparents would be severely more difficult. Personally, I see generations trying to be independent of one another as a large factor in making modern childrearing increasing difficult.

And this is aside from the knowledge, and labor that would have been so vital in former times. The old woman spinning and knitting is a historical trope, but when you have to hand make all of your textiles, she becomes quite useful indeed.

Every 6 months or so, I get the itch to do something like this. I really wouldn't mind my phone going back to just being a phone (with a decent texting interface). Most of my family and friends just use SMS/MMS. I don't need streaming music on my phone. 99% of the time, I am good enough with directions to not need phone maps. Not having a web-browser in my pocket would eliminate endless distractions.

The "killer-app" that always really stops me is the camera.

Google translate link: https://www-paxo-fr.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=e...

People buying their phone?

Presumably the target audience of federalreserve.gov does. I also know the terms, just from talking to a loan officer while shopping for a mortgage. So calling obscure may be a bit unfair.

Also, bits per second is very familiar to many of us in the HN audience, but that is just because of our particular technical background. It is the same in other technical areas (such as finance).

These aren't the exact rates that ordinary folks will be borrowing at. See credit cards for instance (way higher), or mortgages (a little higher).

Counterintuitively, it is possible for mortgage rates to go down even when the Feds are raising their rates. The interest rates for us normies are dictated in large part to how confident the financial sector feels. If the Fed's raising of the interest rate makes the financial sector feel that inflation is under control, then mortgage rates may go down.

I agree in as much as I prioritize functionality (including responsiveness and lack of bloat) well above a beautiful UI. But I think that most peoples beef with UI/UX is that it often gets implemented at the expense of functionality.

Any UX that decreases functionality is not truly good UX. It is probably just flashy.

Also, personally, I don't entirely agree with your screwdriver metaphor. I have some beautiful old screwdrivers with lovely wood handles that I got as hand-me-downs. I do select them in favor of others for the experience. They are a delight for me to use (but again, most importantly, they are very functional).

Edit: Also, they claim in the title that this is a faster Thunderbird. I would consider that a big plus for functionality.

I use it for the same reason, but also it is worlds ahead of Musescore if you want to put together a songbook (particularly if you also have tex experience). The best advice Musescore has for making a songbook with many scores is to use a PDF editor on the output.

Also as a programmer, Lilypond is programmable, and nearly infinitely customizable (similar to tex). I love that I can write some style information in a "header" and include it in every score. In my current project I am writing a lot of SATB choral songs in book format. But I also want to do a melody only edition. Just tweaking a header file, I can hide all the other voices, no problem.

(I also use Musescore, which I prefer for composition or simple projects. But when I want to output a large finished product, I always go back to Lilypond.)

ArchiveBox can extract text from HTML (and possibly PDFs too). I think it can be configured to extract subtitles from YouTube videos as well. So it can do full text searches. Basically you could have your own, offline & curated search-engine.

I am wanting to do something similar. Archivebox seems to be the best solution for this sort of self-hosted, searchable web archive. It has multiple search back-ends and plugins to sync browser bookmarks (or even history).

I haven't finished getting it set up though, so take this recommendation with a hefty grain of salt.

Sorry, my comment was more snark than content. If tuition was limited to student income the universities would be incentivized to cut departments that don't produce high-income graduates.

There goes philosophy, music, and many other liberal arts degrees.

But you need to make sure to use utf-16 or utf-32 instead of utf-8, or you may be worse off.

An even simpler way would be to include a marker to denote the end of the shell script, and the start of the data. For example, if you put this in extract.sh

    #!/bin/sh
    sed -E '1,/^START-OF-TAR-DATA$/d' "$0" | tar xvzf -
    exit
    START-OF-TAR-DATA

and then run:

    cat extract.sh ../foobar.tar.gz > foobar.tar.gz.sh

You can then run foobar.tar.gz.sh to self-extract. And you still get the benefit of being able to modify the shell script without needing to count lines or characters without sacrificing any compression.

Not OP, but opening almost every link as a new tab, and keeping old tabs around because you don't have a great bookmark organization system.

I am trying to break myself of these habits, but they do have some benefits. For instance when I do a web search on a complex topic, I often scan the results, opening the most promising looking results as tabs. Then I look through the tabs comparing them. The trouble is I never remember to close them when the task is done.