Hacker News: acoster

New comment by acoster in "The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100"

acoster — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:30:49 +0000

IIRC, that's the movie they play on loop at the kids section of Landesmuseum in Zürich.

New comment by acoster in "The Jeff Dean Facts"

acoster — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:43:52 +0000

IME Sanjay responds to CLs way faster than I expected.

New comment by acoster in "RE2 maintainer Paul Wankadia died"

acoster — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 04:43:46 +0000

One of the comments mentions he had a heart attack a few weeks ago and was recovering at home when he passed.

New comment by acoster in "Good news against dengue"

acoster — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 06:49:30 +0000

Butantan is not a company, but a public research institute run by the Brazilian state of São Paulo.

New comment by acoster in "Henley Passport Index – The number of countries holders can travel to visa-free"

acoster — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 09:59:31 +0000

Some South American countries under Mercosur, which is being slowly replaced by the Union of South American Nations.

New comment by acoster in "Henley Passport Index – The number of countries holders can travel to visa-free"

acoster — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 09:54:55 +0000

You could add a fourth under certain conditions:

Say one parent is German and the other is British, and the child was born in Brazil. If the kid is entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, they get to keep all four.

New comment by acoster in "DHS proposes to repeal Work Authorization to Spouses(H4) of H1B visa holders"

acoster — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 09:25:33 +0000

There are French and Italian speaking regions too (well, there's Romansh, but that's tiny).

But in all seriousness, in the main cities you can get by speaking English.

New comment by acoster in "Nuclear War Survival Skills (1987) [pdf]"

acoster — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 08:56:56 +0000

In Switzerland every 10 years the government sends residents within a 50 km radius (previously it was 20 km) from nuclear power plants a pack of iodine pills (https://www.naz.ch/en/themen/jod_tabletten.html)

New comment by acoster in "Apple Monitoring Blood Glucose"

acoster — Tue, 23 May 2017 08:19:26 +0000

There were also some privacy/bureaucratic slow downs (my girlfriend had to sign a monster of T&C regarding data sharing with her doctor).

New comment by acoster in "Apple Monitoring Blood Glucose"

acoster — Mon, 22 May 2017 09:23:17 +0000

My partner is type 1 diabetic, and CGMs were a game changer for her (they started rolling out in Switzerland last year).

She's been using the FreeStyle Libre (https://www.freestylelibre.co.uk/libre/), which uses NFC and on select markets has an Android app available, but here we still have to use the handheld reader.

New comment by acoster in "Orkut shutting down September 30"

acoster — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 11:54:02 +0000

It probably relies too much on internal technology that is not open source.

New comment by acoster in "The Windows ecosystem reboot is bad news if you plan to move country"

acoster — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:46:08 +0000

I've moved my Apple account between 3 countries now - while I can't update some apps through iTunes, the updates are always available on the devices themselves, and if I try to buy an app purchased in another country, it downloads it without any hassle.

The Mac App store is a bit different - you cannot redownload apps purchased on another country (so when I reinstalled Mac OS and needed to install iPhoto, I had to revert my account to the previous country).

New comment by acoster in "Prime number patterns"

acoster — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:01:16 +0000

Those are called Mersenne Primes, and are in the form 2^p - 1, where p is a prime number.

New comment by acoster in "Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time"

acoster — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:15:21 +0000

Yes - June the 30th has a leap second ( http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat ).

New comment by acoster in "Occupy George"

acoster — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:12:48 +0000

This is more an annoyance to the 99% that gets such bills (many places don't accept defaced banknotes).