Hacker News: asteli

New comment by asteli in "The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)"

asteli — Thu, 28 May 2020 16:50:08 +0000

Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well.

https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs

New comment by asteli in "Apple acquires Dark Sky"

asteli — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 17:44:08 +0000

Saildrone's forecast app is like Dark Sky but even better and more beautiful. They don't have an android app yet, just iOS, but I believe one is in development, and they have a full-featured in-browser client. No affiliation, but I know someone who works there who showed me their app.

https://www.saildrone.com/forecast

New comment by asteli in "Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?"

asteli — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 19:00:18 +0000

I work in electronics and laser stuff, where we use german-style compound names like "multi-pixel photon counting" and "erbium-doped fiber amplifier." Even in low-level compute, packages are named descriptively e.g. FreeRTOS. Lots of acronyms, but very few cute single-word nouns to name things. I've only observed that trend in relatively high-level software.

New comment by asteli in "Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?"

asteli — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 21:53:40 +0000

Joke is on me. I picked those nouns at random but Pangolin is a bona-fide frontend framework[1] and Clamp is a text truncating utility.[2]

1: https://pangolinjs.org/ 2: https://github.com/josephschmitt/Clamp.js/

New comment by asteli in "Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?"

asteli — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 22:37:05 +0000

I used to troll my old housemate (web frontend guy) by saying something along the lines of "Oh, Node.JS? Yeah some people I work with use that, but they're mostly moving over to Pangolin with Clamp on the backend." (substituting Pangolin and Clamp for any other nouns)

I don't think he ever caught on.

New comment by asteli in "How to Find New Music"

asteli — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 06:42:22 +0000

Here's a hack I haven't seen anyone else mention:

Look at the calendars of venues that you like. Their whole job is curation, and they book lots of local bands. Throw one song from each band playing at each venue for the next month into a playlist and listen through it a couple times -- almost surely you'll find new artists you didn't know about, and guess what? Their show is just around the corner.

New comment by asteli in "Air-Traffic Control Is in the Midst of a Major Change from Radar to GPS"

asteli — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 22:24:33 +0000

If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm.

New comment by asteli in "So Where’s My Low Voltage DC Wall Socket?"

asteli — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 19:05:04 +0000

Wait, that exists. USB is the standard. The UPS with standardized DC-outs is a USB power bank with integrated pass-through charging.

New comment by asteli in "Jetstar pilots forgot to lower the landing gear"

asteli — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 21:41:05 +0000

The CFI let you do all those things?

New comment by asteli in "Why Child Care Is So Expensive"

asteli — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:47:41 +0000

The aforementioned Swedes appear to be quite content paying their high taxes, given the benefits conferred.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/sweden-competitive-spite-high-tax-... [3] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-09/bernie-sanders-wants-...

New comment by asteli in "Tesla Cybertruck"

asteli — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 05:37:26 +0000

The unpainted steel of the DeLorean made it a pain in the ass to repair. You can't pull dents, apply body filler and repaint, you basically need a whole new panel if you want to restore damage.

New comment by asteli in "What America Lost When It Lost the Bison"

asteli — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 07:32:56 +0000

Apparently 41% of the land in the contiguous US is pasture or grazing land for livestock (548MM acre). Just staggering.

To compare, land we use to grow crops that we directly eat account for for ~77MM acres.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/]

New comment by asteli in "We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus"

asteli — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 19:16:31 +0000

Some venues are better than others. Figure out which places and events have sound engineers that give a shit, and go there.

New comment by asteli in "Battery icons shape perceptions of time and space"

asteli — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 23:28:48 +0000

I do the same kind of resource management with books when I travel. It's no fun to go on a trip with a mostly depleted fiction paperback and end up lugging around dead weight for 5 days out of 7.

New comment by asteli in "Ants trapped for years in an old bunker"

asteli — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 20:18:53 +0000

For the purpose of this exercise, assume a rectilinear ant.

New comment by asteli in "Ants trapped for years in an old bunker"

asteli — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 08:56:44 +0000

One cm^3 of water is 1g. Ant's a lot smaller.

New comment by asteli in "Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming"

asteli — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 01:02:10 +0000

I agree re: power. I do not agree about traction.

Assume you're stuck in mud somehow, a perfect case for diff lockers. If you lock the rotational rate of all your wheels together you are either:

a.) limiting the torque you're applying to the amount the tire with the least amount of traction available can bear before slipping out, or

b.) letting 'em rip and hoping you don't dig yourself down into a hole.

The beauty of having fine control over the power going to each motor is that you can put down the max torque that particular wheel can manage regardless of what the other tires are doing. And you can do so with a granularity that is unmatched by any ICE TC system (which IIRC use the brakes to control torque?)

New comment by asteli in "Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming"

asteli — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 18:54:30 +0000

The people who make money in industries that pollute would love for you to keep buying into the myth of personal responsibility. We saw this with cigarette and drink companies with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign, a wildly successful PR move that shifted the blame for litter 100% to the consumer.

"Vote with your wallet" is valid, but it also takes the heat off of our elected representatives and regulators. We need to hold them to account for their failure to force companies to factor destructive externalities into their accounting. Vote with your vote, to hit companies in their wallets.

New comment by asteli in "Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming"

asteli — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 18:44:26 +0000

Plus, no propshaft or exhaust to get hung up on things, and you can get the CoG lower, improving handling. Plus, a level of traction control that simply isn't possible with ICE. I'm excited.

New comment by asteli in "Canon designed a lens that sucks air to clean sensor"

asteli — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 17:30:54 +0000

I'm getting a kick out of the image of getting spotted by a housemate while walking to the bathroom, fully nude with a DSLR.

"Hey asteli, whatcha doin?"

"Aaaah, cleaning the sensor. Yep. Definitely that."