Hacker News: Qwertystop

New comment by Qwertystop in "Category:Obsolete occupations"

Qwertystop — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:46:53 +0000

I saw that in Pratchett's _Snuff_; I thought it was a joke, an exaggeration!

New comment by Qwertystop in "SoftBank Is Selling Wag Stake Back to Company"

Qwertystop — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 19:31:55 +0000

I have difficulty seeing Unicorn (the scooter company) here as anything other than an intentional joke on current VC. They call it Unicorn, they put nothing into actually making a product, and they close up shop immediately after spending all the money on growth -- unlike with Wag, that really doesn't seem like something accidental.

New comment by Qwertystop in "No to Chrome"

Qwertystop — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:46:07 +0000

GPS-enabled devices are the first such improvement to have a novel downside: you can now be tracked, whether you want to be or not.

New comment by Qwertystop in "No to Chrome"

Qwertystop — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:19:38 +0000

You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?

New comment by Qwertystop in "Young people in U.S. dying at high rates"

Qwertystop — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 20:50:28 +0000

Are food trucks not "the familiar"? In my experience, if there's a food truck, I can find it in the same place at the same time, either daily or weekly, all year round (unless it's seasonal, i.e. catering to college students or not something people want much of in winter).

I currently go to a food truck once a week or so because it provides a hot lunch, of reliably decent quality, both faster and cheaper than nearby sandwich places. Other food trucks I've seen at other places and other times of my life have followed similar patterns, and if I've gone to them it's for similar reasons.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Boeing faced ‘limited’ safety review from NASA while SpaceX got full examination"

Qwertystop — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:06:09 +0000

I'm not sure the "independent thought" bit is justified; if you can't distinguish between illegal and legal things, or can't manage to not do illegal things that are fairly easy not to do, it seems reasonable to question whether you can be trusted to keep (information requiring a clearance) secure.

New comment by Qwertystop in "The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest: 2019 Winners"

Qwertystop — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 14:33:03 +0000

I prefer the Lyttle Lytton[1], personally. These get kind of long.

[1] http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

New comment by Qwertystop in "The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA symbol, /ɧ/ (2016)"

Qwertystop — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 21:29:03 +0000

IPA seems to describe areas as far as I can tell; each consonant is how-do-you-make-the-sound and where-is-the-sound-made, not specific frequencies, charted on a grid. The vowel chart is "where is your tongue in your mouth".

New comment by Qwertystop in "Lockout-Tagout"

Qwertystop — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 14:07:21 +0000

I'd guess you could get zapped if you accidentally touch the metal part of the bulb (or the socket) while unscrewing the old one or screwing in the new one.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Boeing faced ‘limited’ safety review from NASA while SpaceX got full examination"

Qwertystop — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:48:23 +0000

Presumably, because it's (technically) breaking federal law, and someone who breaks federal law probably shouldn't have a federally-granted security clearance.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices"

Qwertystop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 21:26:26 +0000

Specifically on Pokemon (so Game Freak), not everything Nintendo's done. Grandparent specifically said "the Pokemon team"

New comment by Qwertystop in "Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices"

Qwertystop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:05:25 +0000

And the later ones (and all the 3DS ones) have the option to do that perpetually in the background, which would probably be why this issue comes up here instead of on other local multisystem Switch games that only do it at specific times.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices"

Qwertystop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:04:03 +0000

They've always been pretty conservative as far as game design goes; somehow I doubt they'd be pushing any boundaries on the backend.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices"

Qwertystop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:02:29 +0000

So, is the Switch (in certain circumstances caused primarily/only by this game) breaking 1, or is the Roku breaking 2? Neither seem to have broken either until this particular interaction.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Pokemon Sword and Shield Are Crashing Roku Devices"

Qwertystop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:00:23 +0000

The Switch is capable of communicating both over an existing network through a wired or wireless router, and through wireless peer-to-peer communications with other nearby Switches. Previous Pokemon games (and other games on the Nintendo 3DS) have used local wireless as a constant background feature in this manner, but to my knowledge, most Switch games that use local wireless only do it at specific times (when playing multiplayer) instead of always-on in the background, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that only the Pokemon game causes this problem, or that it would be heard by nearby devices on other networks. Other games would break it only when someone is actually playing local multi-system multiplayer Smash Bros or something, which is going to be rarer and you're probably less likely to be trying to use the Roku at the same time.

The only thing I would find implausible about breaking Rokus by proximity would be why the Rokus are picking up the communication from a Switch, when presumably they didn't break whenever someone used a 3DS within ten yards (or we'd have heard these complaints years ago). But that could easily be down to changes in protocol by Nintendo between the two systems, such that one is ignored and the other is mistaken for relevant data.

I don't have a Roku or an easy way to inspect nearby wifi packets, so I can't easily test this theory.

New comment by Qwertystop in "Cops are making fewer arrests since N.J. got rid of cash bail"

Qwertystop — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 21:41:51 +0000

If the victim is yourself, either you were coerced (and the coercion should be the crime) or you consented (and it shouldn't be a crime). If I kick myself in the shin, is that battery, now?

New comment by Qwertystop in "PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub"

Qwertystop — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:13:31 +0000

Not anymore, is it? Last I heard they were in pretty significant legal trouble due to not actually having the 1:1 real-doller backing they claimed to, or other assets of equivalent value, among other issues.

New comment by Qwertystop in "PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub"

Qwertystop — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:08:30 +0000

> There are other cryptocurrencies (eg Tether) that follow USD (eg 1 Tether is almost always equal to $1.00 USD), to avoid issues with volatility.

One of us is behind the times on Tether; last I heard they were in pretty significant legal/financial trouble re: money laundering, not actually having most of the backing dollars they claimed to, and possibly market manipulation.

New comment by Qwertystop in "PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub"

Qwertystop — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:06:14 +0000

At a guess, people are less likely to make a fuss about fraud when they're embarrassed to admit they were trying to buy such things.

New comment by Qwertystop in "‘Juice Jacking’ Criminals Use Public USB Chargers to Steal Data"

Qwertystop — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:56:41 +0000

> I thought essentially no one uses mini-A or micro-A, so I don't know why you would want that. I thought USB 3 was just about faster data. If a cable always blocks data, then I don't see any use for USB 3.

Presumably, if fernly wants a mini-A, it's because they do use it and that's why they want it. USB 3, I would assume USB-C was meant, and that becomes an issue of plug shape.