Hacker News: donkers

New comment by donkers in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

donkers — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:44:35 +0000

That’s how megacorps are. VW has almost 700K employees. Enforcing a company culture on that scale is a very diffuse and difficult thing. If you are evaluating whether you should trust a company based on their ability to enforce values throughout all their orgs, you really shouldn’t trust any company unless it’s a tiny one where this sort of thing can be a lot easier to hold the line on.

New comment by donkers in "Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95"

donkers — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:56:39 +0000

You might need to update your filters. Using AdGuard Pro on iOS I’m not seeing any ads.

New comment by donkers in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

donkers — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:47:58 +0000

The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles:

https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...

So my vote is for working as expected.

New comment by donkers in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

donkers — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:51:35 +0000

Why would it break the laws? Per the article it uses the heat from sunlight to do some of its work, it's not some kind of magic fabric.

New comment by donkers in "Waymo Premier"

donkers — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:29:59 +0000

Both things can be true. People can have exaggerated fears about the dangers of transit (especially compared to driving, which people seem to pretend is relatively risk-free), and the crazy / shady folks on transit can still be a problem and still need to be addressed.

I can only speak from my own experience riding transit in Seattle for 9 years. I've never had any issues. Sure, there are sketchy characters, but I've never been bothered, and never had anyone bother me. I definitely see news stories about bad shit happening on transit, but when you look at the number of people riding transit vs the amount of bad things that happen, and you look at the number of people driving and how many people die or get seriously injured in the city daily from car-related accidents, it's a no brainer. You don't see people dying on transit every day, but car-related fatalities are a daily occurrence.

New comment by donkers in "Waymo Premier"

donkers — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:34:17 +0000

How often do you think that happens to transit riders? Your concerns seem overblown. And by driving, your odds of getting hurt or dying in a car accident go way up. You’re trading one set of risks for another, not eliminating risk entirely.

New comment by donkers in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

donkers — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:22:52 +0000

I use Loop silicone earplugs, they’re reusable and washable. Used to use the disposables but got tired of the waste.

New comment by donkers in "Ask HN: How have you spent time outside work for the past couple of weeks?"

donkers — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:17:00 +0000

I started walking every day for at least an hour in my neighborhood parks, on a nearby trail, or just the sidewalks in the neighborhood. I use it as meditation time and don’t engage in any distractions like music or podcasts. Just me and the present, mindfully observing the world around me and my own thoughts as they pass through me. It has had incredibly positive effects on my mental health.

New comment by donkers in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

donkers — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:54:04 +0000

> relatively dull intellect

You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:19:46 +0000

The organizers are also participants, but yes, there is a large overarching Org that manages the overall infrastructure of the city and that certainly isn't every participant. It's not realistic to expect 70K people to all band together to organize and negotiate contracts for large scale shared services like toilets and medical and things like that that end up costing millions in actual money changing hands, not to mention things like coordinating with the government for the permit and regulatory requirements, dealing with the numerous law enforcement agencies on playa, managing the airport, running the DMV, running Burner Express buses, etc., especially when these things need to be planned out way ahead of time. For a small scale event, sure, that can work, but it doesn't scale up in any reasonable way. So when I read communal trash, I'm thinking of a scenario where the Org has to contract with and pay a few million dollars to a waste management company to haul out a lot of dumpsters to the desert and haul them back to civilization to dispose of garbage, with a corresponding increase in ticket price and an increase in the problems that I mentioned before. For camp-led garbage disposal, I don't think there's anyone necessarily against that on a small scale, and sure, neighboring camps in theory could band together to come up with a solution together, but at the end of the day that adds a lot of coordination and complexity on top of an already complicated logistical nightmare. Camps are welcome to use outside services on the approved list to come up with something if they wish. It sounds like you haven't been to the Burn if your reference is Japan / Taiwan - you should go (it's a wonderful time) and I think you'd understand pretty quick why what you're suggesting wouldn't really make sense at that scale.

Here's the list of approved providers:

https://burningman.org/black-rock-city/preparation/infrastru...

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:20:59 +0000

> Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.

My Coachella comment was more in response to your suggestion that even infra for food and shelter should be provided. FWIW I also love Coachella, but that's because I love music - many people there sure don't follow leave no trace principles and that doesn't sit well with me either.

> How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?

I think it's a spectrum. From completely no services at all to everything provided. My view is that providing things like toilets and medical services are something that we all (or at least most) agree makes the city a better place with no real downside. Trash is more complicated - I believe that does compromise the principles too much because of how people behave if dumpsters were to exist. I think people would be more irresponsible than they are now, because "someone else will take care of it" on playa. You also end up with tragedy of the commons problems like some camps dumping way more than others and perhaps filling things up so much that other camps can't even dispose of their stuff, and at that point how do you enforce or manage that? You could start charging by volume or something, but then that just starts to degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it, even if it means that sometimes people do the wrong thing. How we manage the problem in Reno, I'm not sure - TBH, if people started getting in trouble for doing it in a real way, like getting charged with illegal dumping, that'd be fine with me. It would certainly be a disincentive to do it once enough Burners get in real shit for doing irresponsible things like that. I'd have no sympathy for them, that's a personal accountability thing.

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:42:18 +0000

The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?

If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Fri, 08 May 2026 02:59:55 +0000

It’s run by a literal non-profit. You clearly have no clue what the event is like or how it’s managed.

Edit: You can even see their financials here

https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public...

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:31:40 +0000

Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:22:05 +0000

There are some shitty Burners and those cause the most visible problems, but there are a lot of conscientious ones too (I think it’s the majority of them). Painting them all with the same brush isn’t quite right, a lot of us work hard to do things the right way (like spending hours in line to pay to dump trash at the Reno municipal transfer station). I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though, besides lots of public shaming. It’s hard to avoid having any jerks in a city of 70K people.

New comment by donkers in "The Burning Man MOOP Map"

donkers — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:20:05 +0000

I had a Home Depot employee cut them for me before purchase, they have a big thing that does it with no effort at all.

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:05:50 +0000

Consent is involved, everyone is a volunteer and willing participant. If you don’t want a hug or kiss or whatever you don’t get one. I fail to understand how this makes it anything but “free hugs”

New comment by donkers in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

donkers — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:51:39 +0000

There’s a lot of fairy shrimp that live there and wait for the right conditions to come out. I think there’s a camp dedicated to them.

New comment by donkers in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

donkers — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:19:39 +0000

There's a lot of people even in here who don't seem to get it, who call it a "simple" task to do the port and are confused why this is a bad thing at all. A lot of people in the industry (and perhaps everywhere) have a hard time with ethics and doing the right thing.

New comment by donkers in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

donkers — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:08:32 +0000

Way to dunk on a whole group of people there. As an engineer turned PM, some of us are intelligent and logical and don’t want to do this stupid shit. And some engineers should never be PMs, I’ve seen some real disasters where engineering tried to play that role.