Hacker News: aarongolliver

New comment by aarongolliver in "How You Wound Up Playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in Computer Class (2016)"

aarongolliver — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 15:39:47 +0000

I don't think Pajama Sam requires reading, I definitely played it before I could read at least, and probably around the same age as when I was playing putt putt.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Dead Startup Toys"

aarongolliver — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 19:26:52 +0000

soda stream is a lot cheaper than buying bottled sparkling water, and you can make a very good analog to your favorite mineral water / soda / energy drink for even cheaper if you buy the right additives online. They did do a good job of making their luxury version waste most of the CO2 tank because it's impossible to make a good airtight seal.

you can homebrew your own though, and use a much larger/cheaper CO2 source than what they sell at grocery stores, which I'll probably be doing soon.

New comment by aarongolliver in "The Windows 11 insider build is surprisingly unpolished and unfinished"

aarongolliver — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 22:01:26 +0000

much worse than regular win 10 insider builds, not much worse than the other previews for unreleased windows versions. Except for a few bugs in the settings menu which I've figured out ways to work around (couldn't switch easily between stereo and 5.1) I pretty much don't notices the differences between 10 and 11

New comment by aarongolliver in "Introducing Windows 11"

aarongolliver — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:20:43 +0000

You're right! And now I qualify for the win 11 beta. Looks like I got confused between two different security setting pages in the UEFI menu, and had just enabled "the ability for it to use a TPM plugged in to the header" instead of enabling PPT like I thought I was doing.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Introducing Windows 11"

aarongolliver — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 21:05:25 +0000

You probably only have the header on your motherboard, without a tpm module actually plugged in. Mine was like this, and the specs for your motherboard suggest this is also the case for you. You can buy them on online pretty cheap (I got one for $20)

New comment by aarongolliver in "Horseshoe crab blood: miracle vaccine ingredient that's saved millions of lives"

aarongolliver — Mon, 17 May 2021 23:07:42 +0000

If you click the BI link under the image [0] and watch the video they say they're still alive, and that they try to only drain 30% of their blood before putting them back in the ocean. But (paraphrasing) up to 30% don't survive the process and "no one really knows if they even recover down there".

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-horseshoe-crab-blood-exp...

New comment by aarongolliver in "YouTube TV removed from Roku channel store amid Google contract dispute"

aarongolliver — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 17:31:51 +0000

And here's the email sent by Youtube TV

https://pastebin.com/GDUBi14P

New comment by aarongolliver in "How Facebook encodes videos"

aarongolliver — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:41:00 +0000

This is (was?) a big problem with google photos. If you upload a video and immediately share it with someone they'll just see a black screen. A few minutes later they might be able to watch a super-low res encoded version, and only much later does a HD version become available. I started waiting 10 minutes between generating a "share" link before sending it to my family because of all the confusion it was causing.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Facebook Down?"

aarongolliver — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 21:36:31 +0000

Finally a status page that updates the moment an issue starts

New comment by aarongolliver in "Benzene detected in hand sanitizers"

aarongolliver — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 23:03:43 +0000

(USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms).

Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Jack Dorsey is attempting to sell his first tweet as an NFT"

aarongolliver — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 22:59:54 +0000

Seems like that's an ideal problem to solve using a blockchain/smart contracts (a distributed auction). If they can't verify these bids are real & will be paid out that seems like a complete failure of the technology.

Edit: their website doesn't go into detail much at all, so I don't have high hopes for this

New comment by aarongolliver in "AMD Reports Q4/FY 2020 Earnings: Record Revenues Repeat"

aarongolliver — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 18:55:45 +0000

EVGA has a sign up sheet. They'll email you when it's your turn and you have some number of hours to complete the order (don't remember the exact amount of time you get). Note that at this point it'll likely be months before you make it to the head of the line.

New comment by aarongolliver in "In study, acetaminophen makes risky moves seem less dangerous"

aarongolliver — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 05:25:15 +0000

For this reason I try my hardest to buy single-active-ingredient versions of everything. I can keep a list of what pill combos combine into nyquil/mucinex/whatever, and can avoid doubling up on anything unintentionally.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Facebook Profits as Users Are Ripped Off by Scam Ads"

aarongolliver — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 05:09:40 +0000

And acquisitions, which are are frequently paid in part (or entirely) with stock.

New comment by aarongolliver in "I passed 2 AWS Solution Architect exams in a month"

aarongolliver — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 19:34:08 +0000

Certs exist because companies realized they could make further fortunes by acting as the gatekeepers of their consulting ecosystems (and by up-selling enterprise deals with mass certification of the purchasing company). They lock otherwise talented and competent people out of jobs until they pay to take an "exam" for the $CORP approved check mark which gets their resume passed the round of filtering. Sometimes you even have to re-pay for the exam every few years to certify you're "up to date" with the software.

I'm less cynical about certs offered by neutral third parties, or if they are offered free of charge. (If quality versions of those exist?)

New comment by aarongolliver in "Why Concurrency Is Hard"

aarongolliver — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 06:55:05 +0000

I wonder how many years of fork() we had before someone finally had a second core to run things on.

New comment by aarongolliver in "We need physical audio kill switches"

aarongolliver — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 01:12:31 +0000

Klipsch R-120SW

New comment by aarongolliver in "Google TV"

aarongolliver — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 22:29:35 +0000

That's how my LG TV works. The TV shows up in the cast menu just like a chromecast does. Using youtube as an example, it opens up the youtube app and starts the video. You can either use the remote as usual to interact with the video, or the you phone exactly like you would if it were just a chromecast. You can also queue up multiple videos from your phone.

I have a chromecast as well, and I really expected to use it over the built-in apps. But the built-in TV apps really blew me away, much better user interface than I was expecting. I'm hoping this new chromecast/Google TV thingy is as good, I'd really like to disable network connectivity to the TV if possible (but right now the apps are just too nice to give up).

New comment by aarongolliver in "We need physical audio kill switches"

aarongolliver — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 18:24:09 +0000

I have this issue with a subwoofer - coupled with a bad amplifier/grounding/(something?) it creates an immense WOOOOF every time it turns on and off. This causes my house to shake 15 minutes after I go to bed, just as I'm about to fall asleep. Have definitely considered auto-starting something that played a continuous low tone to prevent it from happening.

New comment by aarongolliver in "Mystery seeds: Amazon bans foreign plant sales in US"

aarongolliver — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 21:45:54 +0000

I think this comment has the right idea [0]. Amazon has two problems with seeds:

1. people doing what appears to be a weird scam that involves seeds being mailed across boarders

2. seed sellers on amazon have been flagrantly violate import controls for years.

This new policy seems to be addressing #2, which is important to Amazon now more than ever because of the increased scrutiny caused by #1 making international news.

I've personally bought seeds from Amazon which were declared as "bookmarks" to sneak past US customs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24393395