Hacker News: daleswanson

New comment by daleswanson in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

daleswanson — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:36:39 +0000

> As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.

> You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.

Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".

New comment by daleswanson in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

daleswanson — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:46:03 +0000

An AI prompt in June 2025.

New comment by daleswanson in "Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads"

daleswanson — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 04:19:26 +0000

Do you think Google suffered any consequences for ignoring their "Don't be evil" motto?

New comment by daleswanson in "RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines"

daleswanson — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:48:58 +0000

RFK Jr believes:

1. That Wifi causes cancer.

2. That there is no vaccine which is "safe and effective".

3. It's unknown if the Polio vaccine prevented more deaths than it caused.

This quote from him seems to summarize his view on vaccines: "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, 'Better not get him vaccinated.'"

New comment by daleswanson in "My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer"

daleswanson — Thu, 08 May 2025 04:10:39 +0000

That's a regional difference in terms. I would generally call a limited access highway, a "highway".

https://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/big-fast-road.j...

New comment by daleswanson in "Annotated Unix Magic Poster"

daleswanson — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:46:14 +0000

I literally just had this printed, following that same blog post. Would recommend Whitewalls, it was a very high quality print. I got the 12x18 size, kind of regret not getting it bigger, but I didn't have the wall space.

New comment by daleswanson in "Some terminal frustrations"

daleswanson — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 04:11:08 +0000

That's how shutdown works on Linux too.

New comment by daleswanson in "Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?"

daleswanson — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 04:39:52 +0000

What do you mean? You can manually run Heroku database maintenance. We just did this recently at work.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-mainte...

New comment by daleswanson in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

daleswanson — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 05:16:08 +0000

Heat pumps are air conditioners that are run in reverse, ie, you are air conditioning the outside. Another way to think of any AC/heat pump/refrigerator is as a heat mover, you can move (or pump) heat from one place to another. So in the summer you move heat from inside to outside, and in the winter you move heat from outside to inside.

ACs/heat pumps are over 100% efficient (in terms of joules of heat energy moved/joules of electrical energy consumed), because they aren't turning electrical energy into heat, but rather using electrical energy to move existing heat.

So, a heat pump should always be more efficient than normal resistive electrical heating, because that is just converting just about 100% of the electrical energy into heat energy. Heat pumps may or may not be cheaper than gas/oil/whatever fossil fuel based heat, depending on fuel and electric prices in your area, and that will likely change over time.

The reason that AC is seen as wasteful/inefficient, I think, is just because historically most places people live, you can get away with just opening windows and being a bit uncomfortable during the warmest parts of the year. The opposite isn't really true, it's not really feasible to live without heat in most places people live. Additionally, heating or cooling in any form is just very energy intensive. So, any "optional" form of that can be seen as a luxury.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of AC, and am not suggesting people should go without it if they need it, just trying to answer the question of why it was seen as inefficient when it is technically very efficient.

New comment by daleswanson in "Rite Aid banned from using AI facial recognition for five years"

daleswanson — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 05:53:11 +0000

How did you notice? Don't they just look like normal cameras with the AI facial recognition running on the backend?

New comment by daleswanson in "Mazda slaps developer with cease-and-desist for DIY smart home integration"

daleswanson — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 01:45:00 +0000

> It would also just randomly forget the resume point, and revert to playing the "first" file on the disk.

Is there any hack that fixes this? It's my number 1 annoyance with my Mazda.

New comment by daleswanson in "Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage"

daleswanson — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 02:49:25 +0000

Freezing is always what you want, that's what they are required by law to provide. There is no law that says they can't also provide something similar and encourage people to pay for that, and that's what locking is.

I recently applied for a credit card and temporarily unfroze (thawed) my credit with all 3 bureaus a few minutes before I submitted the application and was approved.

New comment by daleswanson in "Engineered ‘Superplant’ Cleans Indoor Air Like 30 Regular Plants"

daleswanson — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 02:06:00 +0000

If you're ok with a bit of DIY, I recently got some Qwiic I2C sensors combined with an ESP32 running ESPHome. The Qwiic connectors made the hardware part really plug and play.

I have SGP40 for VOC - https://www.adafruit.com/product/4829 For True CO2 I have a SCD40 - https://www.adafruit.com/product/5187 For dust I have a PMSA003I - https://www.adafruit.com/product/4632

You can buy 1 of these, and add the other if/when you want to measure something else.

This is an ESP32, although I don't have this exact one - https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337

And then ESPHome - https://esphome.io/

ESPHome publishes the data on MQTT, which I then read in Home Assistant.

New comment by daleswanson in "Ask HN: What is your password management solution?"

daleswanson — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 17:50:11 +0000

I recently did a bunch of research into password managers, and went with Keepassxc as well. I'm using Syncthing to sync the password archive across Linux, Mac, Android, and Windows devices. The whole setup is working very well and is all open source.

New comment by daleswanson in "Tesla’s Model S Gets “Ludicrous” Mode, Will Do 0-60 in 2.8 Seconds"

daleswanson — Sat, 18 Jul 2015 01:56:08 +0000

What watchdog do you mean? I've ssh'd into my Mazda3 and was planning on doing it again soon, but I don't know what you mean by that.

New comment by daleswanson in "Sherlock Holmes Is in the Public Domain, American Judge Rules"

daleswanson — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 01:20:19 +0000

See for example, the Star Trek TNG episode that used Sherlock Holmes. At the time, the studio assumed Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, but were contacted by the estate and told they would have to license the character if they wanted to use him again. This almost prevented a follow up episode, and probably did prevent other follow ups to what was considered a good story line.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Elementary,_Dear_Data

New comment by daleswanson in "A map of the epic struggle of FOSS against the Empire of Microsoft."

daleswanson — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:17:28 +0000

It's almost as if it was meant as a joke.