Hacker News: digitallis42

New comment by digitallis42 in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

digitallis42 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 18:49:46 +0000

Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.

You can't tunnel in pea gravel.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Bosch's brake-by-wire system may be the next big leap in automotive tech"

digitallis42 — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:54:20 +0000

A few things:

* Automation (emergency auto braking, full adaptive cruise, autonomy) is here and needs electrical signal input. AEB is very nearly standard everywhere now, so there's an electrical input braking component that has already been added to the system.

* If you look at modern brakes, it's hardly simple anymore. Brake boosters, ABS, master/slave systems. It's run on a corrosive fluid that is water sensitive and uses hard pipe plumbing.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)"

digitallis42 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:13:28 +0000

If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Starlink and T-Mobile open satellite texting test to all"

digitallis42 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:51:09 +0000

I've traveled internationally extensively. These days my phone just works. I have not traveled to Africa or South America though, so maybe we're just doing different traveling. I mention this because you say it should be obvious if you've ever traveled.

My provider is Google Fi.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Order Declassifying JFK and MLK Assassination Records [pdf]"

digitallis42 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:19:52 +0000

That the comment bots are getting better at phrasing things as clickbait?

New comment by digitallis42 in "Sniffnet – monitor your Internet traffic"

digitallis42 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:11:38 +0000

This feels like the same project as ntop. I'm curious what drove this one.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards (2024)"

digitallis42 — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:12:26 +0000

There was an entire skit series, numerous videos and interviews... Just about the only confounder is that he used many voices and accents.

New comment by digitallis42 in "PlasticList's Advice for Food Companies"

digitallis42 — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 18:25:44 +0000

Wood is porous and unable to be fully sanitized, as well as absorbing and giving back off everything from soaps and sanitizers to food flavors. Example: chop a few onions on a wood cutting board. Clean and dry. Then the next day wet your cutting board and give it a sniff. The onion is still there.

It also has trouble with repeated washing cycles as a material.

There's some evidence that biologically, wood fibers will dessicate and shred bacterias, and there's the historical anecdotal evidence of wood cutting boards having been used throughout history, but those anecdotes aren't enough for commercial kitchen operation where food needs to be able to be given to all comers, including infirm, allergic or immunocompromised.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Unitree Robot Off-Road"

digitallis42 — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 20:56:20 +0000

Several moments look like CGI, particularly with how the dust behaves. It's getting hard to believe video like this.

New comment by digitallis42 in "The withering dream of a cheap American electric car"

digitallis42 — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 14:23:31 +0000

If your engine does not require the higher octane, then no efficiency will be noticed and you're just burning money. If your engine is specified to take the higher octane, then you can notice an efficiency bump over running a lower octane fuel in most modern engines. The engine computer will adjust the valve timing to prevent predetonation with the lower octane fuel at the cost of efficiency.

Adding octane to fuel isn't adding a booster. It's adding stability to the fuel so it can be run in a higher compression engine. If your engine doesn't reach that pressure then you'll notice no effect except your wallet getting lighter.

New comment by digitallis42 in "The withering dream of a cheap American electric car"

digitallis42 — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 14:16:38 +0000

Adaptive cruise was still higher end at that time. Certainly not ubiquitous at the mid tier. Heck, it's barely ubiquitous now. Both adaptive cruise and automatic emergency braking are game changer features for safety on the highway.

New comment by digitallis42 in "How I ship projects at big tech companies"

digitallis42 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:41:04 +0000

Search is not Google's golden goose. It's Ads.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?"

digitallis42 — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:10:14 +0000

Depends on your scale. If you're a startup or even just a small side service, performance isn't going to be a bottleneck and you/the org wants the thing to be fire and forget, including bug fixes and especially security patches. A distro takes care of all of those generally and makes sure the dependencies have the same care taken.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Tesla Transport Protocol over Ethernet (TTPoE)"

digitallis42 — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 07:59:45 +0000

I did a skim and didn't see any explanation of why one would want it over TCP. Did I miss, or is it non obvious?

New comment by digitallis42 in "Concord had a dev culture of toxic positivity that halted any negative feedback"

digitallis42 — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:27:43 +0000

I'm not sure it's a play test failure. If it were, you would think there would have been a burst of users and then nothing. It seems to me more like a market appeal failure. I didn't get the sense that anyone was intrigued by the story or characters, and the hero shooter as a genre has Overwatch, TF2, Deadlock and the bodies of Battleborne and others. They didn't showcase any stunning new mechanics in their intro, nor did they manage to make a funny or compelling story.

The marketing seemed to basically rely on "if they see 30s of gameplay, that will be compelling enough".

If we remember TF2, they launched with a bunch of really well conceptualized "Meet the character" videos which built humor and personality into the characters as well as taught some of the mechanics.

Overwatch launched a whole pile of interesting and very fresh player mechanics, as well as about triple the characters available with TF2.

Again, I can easily imagine they had players testing it. I'm not sure they had many people market testing.

New comment by digitallis42 in "The Google Fit APIs will no longer be available after June 30, 2025"

digitallis42 — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:43:48 +0000

They stopped rolling it out, if I recall. The org is on life support at this point.

New comment by digitallis42 in "[dead]"

digitallis42 — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:25:39 +0000

The article makes much noise about severe implications of Fed activities becoming public, but I am struggling to think of one that isn't just exposing an already bad situation? It seems like the citizens should know who is getting money from the Fed, since it's our financial well-being at stake.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Voyager 1 is back online: NASA spacecraft returns data from all 4 instruments"

digitallis42 — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 16:36:31 +0000

They absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.

New comment by digitallis42 in "Ecstasy's path to approval for PTSD treatment faces doubts from FDA staff"

digitallis42 — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:05:45 +0000

For a small therapeutic dose of 150mg (1.5-2mg/kg) the come-down is minimal and presents more as "fragile" and not "depressed". That beautiful sunset really hits you to the core. Wow, there's a lot of negative energy in this airport.

I'm glad it's proposed as a therapy aid. Both during and after a journey having a scribe and guide seem like it would lead to many breakthroughs.

New comment by digitallis42 in "The USDA's gardening zones shifted, this map shows you what's changed"

digitallis42 — Tue, 14 May 2024 11:24:32 +0000

And by "buried" you mean "dedicated a whole screen to it at legible size"? I don't wanna go back and count, but as I was scrolling through the sequence on mobile, it's definitely in there, up front and clear. Maybe you had a different experience of the website?

I appreciate data skepticism, but your point about the 1978 blizzard doesn't really help, as blizzards and snow events in general are not generally associated with extreme cold events.

Also, the site tells you about the changes in whatever place you plugged in. I'm not clear on why you're calling this "hyper-focusing on specific locations". It's literally telling you what's going on in your neighborhood and gives good reasons to even then discount the new number.