Hacker News: beobab

New comment by beobab in "Airbus pilot tries Microsoft Flight Simulator [video]"

beobab — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:10:49 +0000

I have GamePass, so I thought: "I'll give this a go. How hard can it be? I'm really good in Elite Dangerous."

Turns out: Quite hard. I have a newfound respect for airline pilots.

On a related note, even my RAF cadet experience 20 years ago counted for naught. Whilst I could keep the plane in the air, landing proved the most difficult, and I crashed and bounced and would not have survived without invulnerability switched on.

New comment by beobab in "DikuMUD 3 Is Released"

beobab — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 10:53:19 +0000

Weirdly, my initial thought there was "that's only 9 years ago", and then did a quick double take when I realised that it wasn't.

New comment by beobab in "Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online"

beobab — Wed, 27 May 2020 19:09:01 +0000

They already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.

New comment by beobab in "Ask HN: Has anybody shipped a web app at scale with 1 DB per account?"

beobab — Tue, 26 May 2020 14:13:23 +0000

I learned to always have one database with every custom schema change in, and run my database unit tests (tSQLt is my favourite) on that one database.

New comment by beobab in "Immutable Databases"

beobab — Sun, 24 May 2020 21:04:07 +0000

I remember reading "Heirs of Empire" by David Weber, and it casually mentioned that Dakax had a database that was immutable. I remember thinking that was a good idea, and planned to think about it later, but alas I had forgotten about it by the time I'd finished the book.

[edit: added who's database it was]

New comment by beobab in "The Big List of Naughty Strings"

beobab — Sun, 24 May 2020 20:59:32 +0000

I had to zoom in to 400% to be able to see the detail there.

New comment by beobab in "Show HN: An iPhone app that lets you pick colors and identify PANTONE colors"

beobab — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 14:01:51 +0000

Nice. Bought it and will try it out.

New comment by beobab in "Show HN: An iPhone app that lets you pick colors and identify PANTONE colors"

beobab — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 13:56:51 +0000

The website says: "accurately identifies upto ten Pantone® colors"

What is the ten referring to? Total times you can use it?

New comment by beobab in "Pheromone in baby mouse tears makes females less interested in sex (2018)"

beobab — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 13:29:51 +0000

I can confirm anecdotally that having a baby crying at all hours of the day and the night also makes humans less interested.

New comment by beobab in "Pro drivers are competing with gamers after F1 and Nascar canceled races"

beobab — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:47:07 +0000

I understand what you mean. There's an incredible amount of tactile information in the real world, and I can't help feeling that there's probably almost as much information flowing in as audio or visual (that we as humans can process at any one instant), but I have been unable to find anything to back up my wild hypothesis.

New comment by beobab in "Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates"

beobab — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:51:00 +0000

I never remember to put comments in when I am beer-coding.

Caffeine-code is much easier to follow later.

New comment by beobab in "Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk"

beobab — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 11:42:23 +0000

You still have to know exactly the same amount of information to know if someone is working or not, but you only have to know one piece of information per moment, because "what time is it now?" is the same for everyone.

If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.

Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.

New comment by beobab in "App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested"

beobab — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 14:27:10 +0000

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

New comment by beobab in "Google Maps Hacks"

beobab — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 11:37:40 +0000

One time I had TomTom accidentally switch itself on in my bag on the floor, set to Homer Simpson's voice and trying to redirect me to home.

As I got further and further away the "turn left here" and "turn right here" directions got more and more frequent, until eventually he just started repeating "turn around where possible" until I was able to find somewhere reasonable to stop and turn it off.

New comment by beobab in "Man diagnosed with coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot"

beobab — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 15:36:26 +0000

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"

New comment by beobab in "After 36 years as a paid product, the Micro-Cap Circuit Simulator is now free"

beobab — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:18:37 +0000

You could spin up a virtual machine and try it out on there.

New comment by beobab in "An idea from physics helps AI see in higher dimensions"

beobab — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:09:11 +0000

Sign language (BSL) uses air keyboard for "programmer": https://www.signbsl.com/sign/computer-programmer

New comment by beobab in "Was This the Decade We Hit Peak Free Speech?"

beobab — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 15:12:29 +0000

"If the headline is a question, then the answer is no." - Betteridge's law.

New comment by beobab in "Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis"

beobab — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 14:26:42 +0000

I get a security error clicking the link above. Does anyone have another link?

New comment by beobab in "What is causing the rise of Remote Work?"

beobab — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 12:31:07 +0000

Do you know of a tool which allows two (or more) people to share their screens with each other at the same time?

i.e. A can see (at least) one of B's screens, and B can see (at least) one of A's screens at the same time as talking to them.

That's the tool I'm missing to be able to work productively remotely.