Hacker News: Jarb

New comment by Jarb in "Potential Employer Cancels Return Flight"

Jarb — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:37:21 +0000

My then-girlfriend had something similar happen to her years ago. She drove around 5 hours to interview at an engineering/architecture firm and was put up at a budget hotel for the night. Although she had to pay for the room in advance, the company said they'd reimburse her for it and the mileage. Of course they did neither and effectively ghosted her after the interview when she tried to recoup her losses.

New comment by Jarb in "Factors in authentication"

Jarb — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:26:08 +0000

Yeah, I realized that recently as well. Apparently when they first rolled out the chip readers, people complained that the authentication took too long (5-15 seconds), so now all you have to do is stick the card in the chip reader, no PIN required (in most stores at least). Brilliant! Consumer behavior effectively turned the chip back into the old mag-stripe system.

New comment by Jarb in "Being Fit May Be as Good for You as Not Smoking"

Jarb — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 22:05:18 +0000

Maybe I'm misreading what you wrote, but how do you societally accept a vice while at the same time stigmatizing it?

New comment by Jarb in "Study Reveals U.S. Consumers and Economy Lose Billions to Occupational Licensing"

Jarb — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 20:29:17 +0000

How do you know what I do? Admittedly, it doesn't happen very often, but you can bet your butt I'll at least take a cursory glance at a barber's licence before I trust him/her with giving me a straight-razor shave.

New comment by Jarb in "Study Reveals U.S. Consumers and Economy Lose Billions to Occupational Licensing"

Jarb — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 19:24:15 +0000

It depends. I would argue for licensing in fields where improper training can affect lives, safety, and welfare, e.g. Doctors, Mechanics, Engineers, Pilots, etc. We need some kind of way to verify that an individual who proclaims to be a professional in potentially harmful fields has received proper training and can demonstrate that they can perform their work safely. I don't know enough about the intricacies of hairdressing, but I could definitely see the case be made for at least some kind of training, given that they regularly handle caustic chemicals (think relaxers), heating devices, and sharp objects (i.e. straight-razors). Maybe a certificate would suffice, but I don't know. On the other hand I would agree that requiring a florist to be licensed, as the article mentions, is probably going too far and most likely used to stifle competition.

New comment by Jarb in "How “One-Plus-Five” Is Shaping American Cities"

Jarb — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:32:46 +0000

Slight rant, but those types of windows were one of the first things that bugged me when I moved over from Europe. IMO, not only are they not as practical, but they also leak more energy than what we had in Germany. You can't poke your head out all the way and need to bend over awkwardly to get some fresh air. It would be one thing if it was only on older houses, but new ones use them as well. By contrast, even my grandparent's house, built in the 50s, had windows that swung open like a door or leaned inwards at ~10°, if you only wanted a little bit of a breeze. They even had windows built into the roof that could be opened either in the middle or from the top, thanks to dual hinges. Best part, the "Rolladen", aka roll-up blinds built into the walls that helped with heat-retention in the winter, provided sound-dampening, and could be automated by a timer. Maybe it's just the area where I live, but I get the feeling that for many architectural features in the states we decided about 100 years that everything is good enough as it is and the only continued innovation was geared towards cutting corners and getting cheaper materials to work. /rant 0 https://goo.gl/images/QS5oJj https://goo.gl/images/1nRYHt https://goo.gl/images/kDVPkv https://goo.gl/images/TfDtoK

New comment by Jarb in "After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning"

Jarb — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:36:50 +0000

I'm simplifying, but Wolfenstein's technique is called Ray Casting, which calculated the player's view by drawing lines from the player's "eye" to objects and walls in the field of view and use that information to calculate distance and perspective. Ray tracing has been around for forever, but was too resource-intensive to use in real-time until recently. It calculates the path a pixel/light source takes, allowing for realistic lighting (including bouncing off of surfaces) and perfect reflections.

New comment by Jarb in "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before"

Jarb — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 21:04:55 +0000

Maybe, but stuff tends to erode and shift a lot over millions of years, possibly smoothing over evidence to a degree where we wouldn't be able to recognize it today... on Earth. However, AFAIK the moon is fairly stable, so if there were prior civilizations, they would have to have been far less advanced than we are. Otherwise they would have surely left evidence of their existence on the moon.

New comment by Jarb in "Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?"

Jarb — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 18:37:04 +0000

Meh. I quit watching some time around 2010, not long after they were butt-hurt about the 200th/201st episode censorship (which, to be fair, was bs), and did some really shitty episodes. The one that comes to mind was the one with weird live-action bits. That really made me think about the show as a whole and how much it had changed. I realized that it had turned into a weekly moralizing/bashing showcase for whatever had rubbed Matt and Trey the wrong way. Instead of Cartman getting his bully's parents killed and cooking them in a chili or Chef singing about eating his chocolate salty balls, it was now about Jimmy (hate that character, btw) doing stand-up or getting a job as uber driver or making a lame LOTR or Batman "parody" without much to say about either genres. While some episodes did hit the right notes on raising awareness on an important issue (e.g. crack baby athletic league, kenny's last will, etc.), I miss the anarchic, crude humor of the first seasons.

New comment by Jarb in "New Roomba Has Persistent Maps, Selective Room Cleaning, Automatic Dirt Disposal"

Jarb — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:25:44 +0000

We have ours run three times a week due to the amount of dust and dirt our two dogs track into the house. And even then the floor doesn't look pristine.

New comment by Jarb in "Penti Chorded Keyboard"

Jarb — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 18:44:36 +0000

This. I work as a sysadmin and the number of keyboards I have to interact with makes using anything other than QWERTY more of hassle than benefit. On a typical day I will interact with my phone keyboard (blackberry priv, hardware keyboard), my primary work desktop, my secondary desktop (used by colleagues sporadically), my gaming PC (used just for gaming), and my personal laptop. Now add the times I have to jump onto someone else's station or a family member's system and the constant context switching is just not worth it. I tried dvorak some years ago, but found it more trouble than it was worth it, since everyone else doesn't use it.

New comment by Jarb in "We're All Subsidizing People Who Use American Express"

Jarb — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 15:57:50 +0000

Thank you, I had the exact same thought.

New comment by Jarb in "Anthony Bourdain and the ‘Silent Epidemic of Male Suicide’"

Jarb — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 18:28:13 +0000

do you have any proof of these claims?

New comment by Jarb in "How Bad QA Killed 2.2M Imperials: A Death Star Post-Mortem"

Jarb — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 18:55:18 +0000

Great article! Can you also do an analysis of the lack of security in that galaxy? Some examples that come to mind are accepting expired "passwords" for access to top secret installations and a seemingly COTS astromech droid (aka mechanic) being able to hack into supposedly secure military infrastructure at least twice.

New comment by Jarb in "Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings"

Jarb — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 20:15:13 +0000

Nice, did not know all that. TIL ^^

New comment by Jarb in "Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings"

Jarb — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 19:09:27 +0000

My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.

New comment by Jarb in "Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings"

Jarb — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 19:01:57 +0000

2 Bed, 2 Bath with a combined kitchen and living room, all for the low, low price of $330k? For what is essentially a double-wide with fancy siding and big windows? Haha, nope. If I had land, I could easily build something twice the size or plop down a mobile home for 1/10 of the cost. But that is the true issue with housing these days: finding affordable, available land in a desirable area.

New comment by Jarb in "Jim Black's Steve Jobs Story"

Jarb — Fri, 18 May 2018 14:07:08 +0000

Thank you, much appreciated! I always wondered if the decision to only have one fire button in Q3A was based off its compatibility with Mac OS, and thus a lack of a second mouse button. Other FPS at the time (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Half-Life) usually had a secondary fire button to allow for alternate weapon functions (e.g. grenade launcher on SMG, zoom on sniper rifle/crossbow, etc), which was mapped to the right mouse button.

New comment by Jarb in "Ask HN: Why does everyone use a MacBook Pro despite saying they suck?"

Jarb — Wed, 02 May 2018 18:04:24 +0000

Windows Defender is built-in and is good enough IMHO. But AFAIK you can still install something else on top, if you don't trust Microsoft.

New comment by Jarb in "Corporate America Is Conspiring to Keep Your Chocolate Shitty"

Jarb — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 20:27:04 +0000

Nope, I don't buy it. I can get Ritter Sport, Kinder Eggs, and other imported Chocolates from my grocery stores that taste just like they do in Europe. That chocolate was shipped over the atlantic in addition to taking the same transport routes as Hershey's does. Conclusion: Hershey's just sucks.