HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

thrixton

90 karma · joined May 8, 2020

submissionscomments
thrixton··on ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]
It does depend a lot on the person, but it also depends on the parents. If they acknowledge it and attempt to make it right, that's one thing. However, if they just brush over it and don't acknowledge the child's loss, then it's a totally different case.
thrixton··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
I have 2 3TB WD green desktop drives in my nas that have been running for 12 and 13 years power on time. Both have the disable head parking fix applied. Over the same period I've had 4 seagate nas drives of varying capacity fail. I really have to retire those 2 drives.
thrixton··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
A lot of regional towns don't have mains gas so had to rely on deliveries. Living in outer Melbourne, I've always had gas, same with my friends and neighbours, and have always had gas hot water, stove top and heating, it's been the main heat source all my life, going away now with new builds not allowing gas connections, never mind if we have another massive electricity outage like 2022 when we were lucky to have gas for cooking and hot water, good luck charging batteries off solar in winter in a blackout if you're lucky enough to have proper blackout protection.
thrixton··on Exercise works for depression. So why isn't it treated like real medicine?
I appreciate your difficulties but have always wondered at our lack of support for preventative measures as a society here in Australia and possibly worldwide.

Would a personal trainer or paid or not training buddy or something of the sort help your motivation?

thrixton··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
No doubt preaching to the Choir here but I just generate a new pass phrase and store it in Bitwarden. If course for the non HN audience, much more confusing and dangerous.
thrixton··on Advertise in ChatGPT
That is one of the more horrifying ones.

I wonder if we'll get stealth ads in chat

thrixton··on On cigarettes
Do you think they were really effective or was it more the large price hikes (which have now been undone by vapes and black market cigarettes)?

I guess it might have had an impact but it's hard to tell for me with the impressive mishandling of vapes and now the black market.

thrixton··on Why Does Everyone Hate AI?
Isn't that what they want?

It's only the craftsman that look up to the superstars / thought leaders, everyone else just wants inoffensive competency (and that's OK I guess).

thrixton··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
One thing I have found out immensely useful for is exploring new niche areas.

One example is I got it to setup a new terminal (wezterm) and configure it quickly to my liking. This would have been a lot of googling and reading before, generally too much time for me to invest.

I don't think it's valuable knowledge for me to have apart from a high level to evaluate the possibilities.

thrixton··on Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
Absolutely. Things which used to take me a week to grind through, finding edge cases, trial and error, researching online, now takes an afternoon directing an agent and verifying the solution.

For a generalist, it's a huge force multiplier.

thrixton··on Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s
That's great for those that can implement that, many cant (don't have the time, education, willpower, etc...), maybe the majority.

Given the challenges of rebuilding a proper society, maybe this is a step in the right direction (maybe).

We don't allow kids to have other addictive substances, there's definitely an argument (and the co's agree, with 13 yo minimums?) for restricting an addictive medium.

thrixton··on A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership
In addition, a gut feeling needs to be proven quickly and cheaply, so treat it as an experiment and strictly time-box it and have a measurable goal or milestones which must be met before the path is continued.

Leaders who have too many of these hand-wavey directions that fail, should be relegated to an advisory position to my mind, until they have better gut feelings or can articulate them better.

thrixton··on Hacking the "Bike Angels" System for Moving Bikeshares
I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some people are making a lot of money.

    At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key -­- a reward from Citi Bike—­ to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again.

    By 10:14, the crew had created an algorithmically perfect situation: One station 100 percent full, a short block from another station 100 percent empty. The timing was crucial, because every 15 minutes, Lyft’s algorithm resets, assigning new point values to every bike move.

    The clock struck 10:15. The algorithm, mistaking this manufactured setup for a true emergency, offered the maximum incentive: $4.80 for every bike returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater. The men switched direction, running east and pedaling west.
Nicely done, people.

Now it’s Lyft’s turn to modify its system to prevent this hack. Thinking aloud, it could try to detect this sort of behavior in the Bike Angels data—and then ban people who are deliberately trying to game the system. The detection doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to catch bad actors most of the time. The detection needs to be tuned to minimize false positives, but that feels straightforward.

thrixton··on Ask HN: How do you share and sync .env files and secrets with your team
For .NET env's, we're in the process of putting each element into an AWS SSM secret or non-secret which can then be pulled out to form an appsettings.json.

All SSM parameters will be managed through pulumi.

Pulled via a script run via aws-vault.

Should be fine once the work is done, all

thrixton··on UK electric car drivers should be charged per mile, say campaigners
It's true, externalities such as respiratory issues and climate change caused by polluting vehicles should be priced into schemes such as this.

Not sure why this is an unpopular opinion.

thrixton··on Seven Conversation Hacks
There's also the full-duplex mode where 2 people are talking, but both seem to be engaged in a different conversation.

Communication is hard, tolerance is important.

thrixton··on Google's Pixel 8 series gets USB-C to DisplayPort; desktop mode rumors heat up
It would be great if it turns out to be a better experience than iPadOs, even with a pro.

I've just given up my iPad pro due to it being so limited (no good terminal options, dev tools, filesystem access).

Such great potential from a HW perspective, gimped by lack of features, a 2nd hand cheap 13" touch ultrabook with linux or windows is so much better as an out and about troubleshooting and occasional dev tool.

thrixton··on A self-published book broke 'all the rules' and became a best seller
TLDR; The book is “The Shadow Work Journal” by Keila Shaheen about “Shadow Work” (integrating your Shadow self) based on Carl Jung’s theorys.
thrixton··on The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]
I think it’s more visible now, but as well, I wonder if it’s just that we have more leisure time to actually worry about / deal with it.

Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.

I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.

I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.

As well, people react very differently to similar events.

thrixton··on Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation
How did you go about roasting your own if you don’t mind me asking.
thrixton··on U.S. to require automatic emergency braking on new vehicles in 5 years
My wife’s car has this and it’s not perfect but good enough.

It has known (not published maybe) failure modes such as driving into a roundabout where the car is initially pointing towards the keep left sign (Australia) but then the road turns left. This is easy to remember and compensate for and while unnerving, not generally a problem.

I’m totally in favour of it, especially since rear end crashes are the most prevalent, accounting for 31% of crashes [0], this would avoid a large percentage of them I’d guess. [0] https://www.dinggo.com.au/blog/car-crash-statistics-australi...

thrixton··on Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier
So pricing is 1c / GB-month, compared to S3 IA at 1.25c / GB-month, a decent saving but not massive, no archive or deep archive options though, I wonder if / when these will come.

What sort of negotiated rates can you get from AWS for bandwidth I wonder, at the moment, that’s seems like the only real benefit from CF I think.

thrixton··on Expensive EV repairs and low resale prices following purchase of 100,000 Teslas
There’s been a fair few posts on the reddit ev groups about this, seems to be a good opportunity
thrixton··on The demise of coding is greatly exaggerated
That sounds horrible, personally, when I have my senior dev hat on, doing code reviews is very far down the list of rewarding work. I’d much rather have an LLM that could do that for me.
thrixton··on Postgres is eating the database world
Well supported in EF core, great experience. Having said that, I’ve not used EF core with any other DB so have nothing to compare to.
thrixton··on We built our customer data warehouse all on Postgres
Second this but for Rider, should be the same engine I think.

Jetbrains are really kicking some goals.

Scratch file with a quick query in about 2 seconds is amazing

thrixton··on How Gyms Make Money (2015)
Go sit in the sauna or steam room if your gym has one, that’s where I make a lot of friends (or acquaintances really).
thrixton··on Mercedes gets approval for turquoise automated driving lights
Are you referring to when the headlights are on?

Distinguished from Daytime Running Lights.

Because otherwise this is just wrong.

thrixton··on GM says it's dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because they're unsafe
They don’t all just work, I tried the most popular one (CarLinkIt) and it didn’t work with mine or my wifes phone, I gave up, wireless was not worth it enough for me to go through the hassle of reset this, clear that etc…
thrixton··on Japan automakers play catch-up in EV race
Total fleet will obviously take a while to turnover, 93% new of passenger car registrations in September were PEV, 87% BEV, Norway has long led the world though in this area with very strong incentives for many years.
Page 1 of 4Next →