Hacker News: _0nac

New comment by _0nac in "What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft"

_0nac — Sun, 12 May 2019 06:44:07 +0000

It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.

A Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life

_0nac — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 02:24:22 +0000

Article URL: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670642

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by _0nac in "Haversine Formula"

_0nac — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 20:04:01 +0000

https://openflights.org/ uses the Haversine formula (and much more!) to not just compute distance, but plot great circle flight routes on a world map:

https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/js/great...

There are a lot of interesting edge cases regarding routes that cross the dateline, the North Pole, etc. Most of the code was taken from Movable Type's incredible library of lat/long code:

http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

New comment by _0nac in "Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google"

_0nac — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 03:27:44 +0000

Does your codebase date from 1995? Because some of Yahoo's does. Time to send Jerry a nastygram about not adequately preparing the codebase for arbitrary color changes 25 years ago?

New comment by _0nac in "Moving from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine"

_0nac — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 06:11:22 +0000

If you can't wait for their teaser of "In a future post, I’ll cover the migration process itself", the GCP site has a hands-on tutorial of migrating an app which may prove interesting:

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/migrating-ruby-on-rails-a...

Disclaimer: I work for GCP and wrote most of that :D

At the end of the day, Heroku and GKE are rather different beasts with different philosophies, so migrations are never going to be 1:1. I expect this to become simpler over time as tooling matures though, eg. using https://buildpacks.io to build Docker images instead of having to craft them by hand seems promising.

New comment by _0nac in "An American Citizen Was Forcibly Drafted Into the South Korean Army (2015)"

_0nac — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 10:29:34 +0000

There was no mistake: by Korean law he's Korean and thus has to be conscripted. Of course it sucks that he wasn't aware of this, but the letter of the law was followed here.

New comment by _0nac in "US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max"

_0nac — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 10:28:02 +0000

That initial A320 flight was a demo flight for journalists where the pilot was intentionally pulling stunts like flying very low in front of spectators. Turns out he was flying lower than intended and basically plowed into the forest at the end of the runway. There was a long, still unsolved debate about where the A320 reacted correctly to the pilot's eventual commands to rev the engines and pull up, but ending up needing to do that was definitely not the plane's fault.

New comment by _0nac in "The head of luxury at Facebook and Instagram"

_0nac — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 11:27:13 +0000

People who don't signal wealth tend to like to think so, but it's been fairly exhaustively demonstrated that signaling wealth with visibly branded clothing does get you better treatment in all sorts of things, including job interviews.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/10/wearing-expensive-brands-of-...

And yes, in some circles ostentatious signaling will be counterproductive, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

_0nac — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 05:31:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/aydqig/is_it_a_duck_or_a_rabbit_for_google_cloud_vision/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335363

Points: 260

# Comments: 88

A Newly-Generated Create-React-App 2.1.5 App Has 1,568 Dependencies

_0nac — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 22:40:07 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1097307043881308161

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19195148

Points: 276

# Comments: 126

New comment by _0nac in "The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety"

_0nac — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 01:11:24 +0000

Please have a read of the article before downvoting: it's not some random neoliberal "unions are evil" rant, but a very coherent explanation of how seniority-based pay works and how the system is set up to ensure senior pilots get paid $300,000 while juniors get $16,000.

New comment by _0nac in "The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety"

_0nac — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 23:19:02 +0000

Two words: unions and seniority. Here's a good intro:

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

It's also worth noting that this is largely a US-only phenomenon. It has led to a lot of junior US pilots heading overseas to fly with other carriers, most notably in the Gulf, although that party is slowly starting to wind down.

New comment by _0nac in "The Route of a Text Message"

_0nac — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:10:42 +0000

Wikipedia goes into this in some detail, but it really is pretty much the canonical example of a protocol designed by committee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

Here's the technical spec, which manages to combine the single bit level detail of old school telco with the enterprisey goodness of SOAP.

http://www.qtc.jp/3GPP/Specs/23140-6g0.pdf

For example, this is how you say "OK" in MM7:

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"
    Content-Length: nnnn
    
    
    
       vas00001-sub
    
    
    
      5.6.0 
      1000 
      Success 
      041502073667

New comment by _0nac in "The Social Credit System in China [video]"

_0nac — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 22:44:09 +0000

A lot of the comments here seem to be based on speculation, not the actual content of the video. A few key points:

* There is no one system (which is why the title is "The" Social Credit System, the scare quotes are there on purpose!), but ~70 local experiments, with the talk focusing on three of these (~19:45)

* Alibaba's Sesame/Zhima system is not government-accredited (~26:00) and has a lot of shopping/loyalty card features (pay with Alipay, earn points!)

* The current systems have many crippling flaws, like rich people being trivially able to buy their way to good scores to paper over their sins (~35:00)

* Some type of nationwide system is likely to be rolled out nationally at some point, but the details are still very fuzzy (~49:00)

New comment by _0nac in "Show HN: Visalist – Find visa requirements for countries around the world"

_0nac — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 16:49:38 +0000

Interesting, but how do you keep this up to date? These requirement change constantly and the only reliable source I'm aware of, Timatic (which is what airlines use), is copyrighted and quite tightly locked down.

Wikipedia does crowdsource this info fairly effectively though, sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_c...

New comment by _0nac in "I Put Words on This Webpage So You Have to Listen to Me Now"

_0nac — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 04:12:07 +0000

Shallow typing? Seriously? Next you'll be telling me you use Dvorak. Deep hyping is where it's at and both flopnar and ropjax excel at that.

New comment by _0nac in "I Put Words on This Webpage So You Have to Listen to Me Now"

_0nac — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 23:58:00 +0000

This is totally obvious submarine astroturfing. Christine is a paid shill of rilkef, whose VC fund lead investors drink the same brand of organic kombucha as Zuckerberg. Don't be fooled: flopnax, not rilkef, is the consensus way to do containerized federated blockchain service hybrid ML at web scale.

New comment by _0nac in "Toronto’s Tech Industry"

_0nac — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 12:03:26 +0000

Though it sometimes seems like it, Toronto didn’t become a worldwide tech hub overnight. In fact, it was a years-long process that led to Canada’s biggest city being mentioned alongside tech markets like New York and Silicon Valley.

Yeah, I'm going to need a citation for that being a thing even now. London, Berlin, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Singapore... but Toronto? Srsly?

New comment by _0nac in "Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?"

_0nac — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:52:38 +0000

Totally unsurprising if you've ever worked with Oracle. The layers upon layers of legacy cruft are plainly visible even in simple things like the GUI installers.

New comment by _0nac in "Japan's Hometown Tax"

_0nac — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 20:23:36 +0000

I see a lot of moaning about inefficiency here, but here's a point of comparison. During the Bubble years in the late eighties, when many rural areas were feeling left out, there was a scheme to give basically every municipality in Japan a large lump sum of money ($10m?), no strings attached, except that it had to be used for building something new.

This, as you might guess, was an incredible waste of money. Many podunk towns built flashy "multi-purpose halls" (多目的ホール) perfect for all those symphony orchestras just dying to perform in the middle of nowhere. More memorably, the town of Utazu, Kagawa purchased a solid gold toilet...!

http://english.cri.cn/6909/2010/09/09/1901s593626.htm

https://www.emporis.com/buildings/191596/gold-tower-utazu-ja...