Hacker News: dripton

New comment by dripton in "Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office"

dripton — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:54:01 +0000

I needed something like this for my basement home office. But I was lazy, so rather than actually building anything, I just bought some color-changing light bulbs ($7 on Amazon including remote) and installed them on the basement stairs. If I have a do-not-disturb meeting, I make the light red.

New comment by dripton in "In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution"

dripton — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:08:36 +0000

This is wrong. Exact weights vary with trim levels, but Model are around 4000 lbs. and Suburbans are around 6000 lbs.

New comment by dripton in "The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)"

dripton — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:47:46 +0000

A great book, but I read it too late, after I had already learned pretty much everything it says the hard way. So it was one of those books I enjoyed because it reinforced what I already thought, but didn't really get much from. Wish it had been written a decade earlier.

New comment by dripton in "NetHack4 Philosophy"

dripton — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:33:08 +0000

Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)

You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.

One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.

Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.

And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.

New comment by dripton in "The R47: A new physical RPN calculator"

dripton — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:59:53 +0000

Cool. I used an HP48SX in college, and when it finally died about 20 years later, bought 2 HP48Gs so I'd have a Lifetime Supply. (1 is on my desk, 1 is still in the box.) But I confess that hardly ever use my real HP48G anymore, because I have the Droid48 Android app, and the 99% perfect calculator that's always at hand is better than the 100% perfect calculator that's on a shelf way over there, most of the time.

So I doubt I'll buy this one, even though I'm happy someone made it.

New comment by dripton in "The seven second kernel compile"

dripton — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:06:56 +0000

It varies a lot depending on how much you have enabled. The distro kernels that are designed to support as much hardware as possible take a long time to build. If you make a custom kernel where you winnow down the config to only support the hardware that's actually in your computer, there's much less code to compile so it's much faster.

I recently built a 6.17 kernel using a full Debian config, and it took about an hour on a fast machine. (Sorry, I didn't save the exact time, but the exact time would only be relevant if you had the exact same hardware and config.) I was surprised how slow it still was. It appears the benefits of faster hardware have been canceled by the amount of new code added.

New comment by dripton in "Smartphones and being present"

dripton — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:33:58 +0000

I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.

New comment by dripton in "Smartphones and being present"

dripton — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:56:33 +0000

The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.

New comment by dripton in "Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models"

dripton — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 15:47:06 +0000

Dumb TVs are still being made. I bought this Sharp commercial TV just last year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCMXNRFH

Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.

New comment by dripton in "Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes"

dripton — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:20:20 +0000

We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't.

I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.

New comment by dripton in "Debian 13, Postgres, and the US/* time zones"

dripton — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 17:11:26 +0000

Istanbul's not Constantinople.

New comment by dripton in "Checking Out CPython 3.14's remote debugging protocol"

dripton — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:37:21 +0000

Yes, the term you're looking for is "reverse debugging". It exists, and it's better.

New comment by dripton in "Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot"

dripton — Thu, 22 May 2025 17:32:44 +0000

Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.

New comment by dripton in "Assignment 5: Cars and Key Fobs (2021)"

dripton — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:28:03 +0000

Yes, many people make many claims. You should think about which ones to believe.

New comment by dripton in "Assignment 5: Cars and Key Fobs (2021)"

dripton — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:53:47 +0000

Consumer Reports buys all the items they review, anonymously.

New comment by dripton in "Preschoolers can reason better than we think, study suggests"

dripton — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:03:27 +0000

I'm amused that the original ageist response ("old people suck") is left alone and the parody of the original ageist response ("young people suck") is downvoted. I would expect a bit better from HN readers, though any community that becomes popular enough devolves to average-at-best.

New comment by dripton in "20 years of Google Scholar"

dripton — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:16:58 +0000

Words great, until a page rejects email with a '+' in it.

New comment by dripton in "We're only beginning to understand the historic nature of Helene's flooding"

dripton — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 17:10:36 +0000

Sure they do. Agnes and Hugo both tracked quite a bit west, for example.

New comment by dripton in "What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care"

dripton — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:39:31 +0000

I installed Linux on a new laptop yesterday, and couldn't get either NixOS or Debian to install until I turned off secure boot. So I guess these distros don't bother getting every release signed by Microsoft.

At least it was easy to turn off. I just wish the error message mentioned Secure Boot -- it took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong. At first I thought I had a corrupt USB stick or something.

New comment by dripton in "IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season"

dripton — Fri, 31 May 2024 17:50:07 +0000

A couple of examples would be reduction of some of the Reagan-era defense spending under the Clinton administration, and partial rollback of some of the Reagan-era tax cuts under the Clinton administration.

Of course these were not complete elimination of programs, but adjustments. And you could argue that there were other reasons besides partisanship, like the end of the Cold War and budgetary issues.