Hacker News: drivebyadvice

New comment by drivebyadvice in "'Green roads' are plowing ahead, buffering drought and floods"

drivebyadvice — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 22:56:38 +0000

Ironically, it's regulation that made them like this. Obama-era emissions rules stipulated that trucks had to get a certain fuel economy, unless they were heavy duty trucks, which did not have the same requirements. The option was to either make all trucks less capable to meet requirements, or to start selling almost every truck as a heavy duty truck. Nobody would want to buy a truck that cost just as much or more while delivering less, so everybody got jacked up mega trucks instead.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth"

drivebyadvice — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:22:24 +0000

Trick I learned from an old wrench: overestimate time and cost, then when you deliver something in half the time and half the cost they'll think you're twice the mechanic.

I'm not sure that's what NASA does, but it certainly doesn't hurt their PR.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Men should abstain from drinking at least three months prior to conceiving"

drivebyadvice — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:16:05 +0000

Makes you smarter too. Your brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells, and alcohol tends to kill the weakest brain cells first. It's like culling the herd, you speed everything up.

(.../s)

New comment by drivebyadvice in "There Once Was an Empire"

drivebyadvice — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:09:58 +0000

Interesting to see you guys talking about this, I just read something with Adam Curtis where he was describing Britain right now as being like the USSR before it collapsed. Disillusionment, lack of vision for the future, a growing sense of nihilism.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Australia to ban engineered stone"

drivebyadvice — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 05:11:01 +0000

The talk in the trade is that asbestos is way overblown and it mostly affected people installing it in ships for the Navy. They worked in tight spaces with lots of asbestos in the air, lining the ship and its pipes with it, all day every day.

I don't know how true that is but I've heard the same exact story from several different contractors. I do know that getting those linoleum/asbestos floor tiles ripped up will cost you a lot to get somebody to do it for you, but there aren't any real safety precautions you need to take since it isn't getting airborne, it's basically just pure profit for the contractor.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Where do journals go to die?"

drivebyadvice — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 03:00:58 +0000

I keep reading this submition's title as "Where do journalists go to die?" Like there's some obscure place that aging journalists make a pilgrimage to after they've completed their final article (probably their obituary) to lay down and breathe their last.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "23andMe updates their TOS to force binding arbitration"

drivebyadvice — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:31:18 +0000

>there is also always the specter of future uses against your interests.

This. The danger isn't even necessarily that we gain some crazy ability to predict things about a person from their DNA, but that people believe that it can be done accurately and that police, courts, government, marketers, etc believe it as well.

Police don't need much convincing if it gets them a conviction. Courts will already admit evidence from forensic labs which have been proven to fabricate evidence. Governments will let just about anything fly if someone donates enough, and if marketers are convinced that it might work, there will be no shortage of cash for campaign funds.

Currently, to my knowledge, you can take somebody's DNA and do just about anything with it without their knowledge or consent, and there seem to be a lot of well-monied interests with a stake in keeping things that way.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Switch off bad TV settings"

drivebyadvice — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 01:03:47 +0000

Don't forget the sleep timer. Such a simple QoL improvement, and none of the TVs I've owned in the past 10-15 years have had one. Seems like every TV had it when I was a kid (or at least a good sized portion did).

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Tesla Cybertruck payload capacity 29% less than promised"

drivebyadvice — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:38:38 +0000

Not sure why this was down voted. If you're hauling, the lightning gets very little mileage. If you've got a camper trailer, you're not going far from home, even if the campsite has chargers (lol). Compare with a regular truck, where you can haul something as far as you can drive. Got to take something to the hazwaste dump that's hundreds of miles away? Lightning is a non starter.

This isn't to say Lightning is all bad, but it's a fundmentally limited product right now compared to a real pickup. It's almost like what's suited for an urban lifestyle isn't for everyone.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "How Gödel's proof works (2020)"

drivebyadvice — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 16:06:18 +0000

There's better resources if you just want to know about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem tbh. GEB is neat because of all the other ideas he ties into it.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Can we deter tech monopolies through reformed open source software development?"

drivebyadvice — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 20:27:31 +0000

I think decentralized networks essentially provide another opportunity for businesses. Look at email, or web browsers and how centralized they are now.

Make an app for a decentralized protocol, add some polish and maybe give something away with it which is cheap at scale (storage, bandwidth) as the loss leader and establish dominance.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns"

drivebyadvice — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 21:51:44 +0000

> Citrix [...] hospitals

My stomach just turned.

New comment by drivebyadvice in "Ask HN: How do you keep going without burning out?"

drivebyadvice — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 07:57:35 +0000

The metaphor I use to think about burnout is imagining your energy as a lithium ion battery. You can occasionally charge it to 100% and run it down to 0% without any real degradation, but if you start doing that every day it won't hold a useful charge after a while. Keep your charge between 20% and 80% if you can.

Also helps to maintain pretty firm limits on work time and not-work time, or even just having a small window of your waking day where you're on Do Not Disturb.