Hacker News: dubya

New comment by dubya in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

dubya — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:25:56 +0000

Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting.

New comment by dubya in "OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund 'AI Literacy' in Schools"

dubya — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:40:33 +0000

David Byrne seems to like it: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03...

I haven't seen his actual slide deck anywhere online though.

New comment by dubya in "Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)"

dubya — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 01:35:13 +0000

I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.

I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.

New comment by dubya in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

dubya — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:30:16 +0000

Definitely Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI.

New comment by dubya in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

dubya — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:42:26 +0000

Non-admins getting prompts for system and app upgrades is mildly annoying. The bigger one in a family setting is the clunky sharing. There's no good way to share a photo library or music library between users. The Unix version of making a folder shared by a group doesn't usually work for Apple apps.

New comment by dubya in "Welcome (back) to Macintosh"

dubya — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:05:53 +0000

In the past, MacOS has automatically made a folder of incompatible software that it leaves on the desktop. Little Snitch seems like something that could have been tested.

New comment by dubya in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

dubya — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:52:55 +0000

Both outlook.office.com and mail.google.com use much more memory and CPU than any "fat" client, and are constantly changing little things about the UI. Safari now often closes outlook automatically on an M5 Mac because it's using significant amounts of energy.

New comment by dubya in "More Mac malware from Google search"

dubya — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:04:03 +0000

Well, Tahoe doesn't work on 2019 iMacs, and that chart shows the early 2020 Macbook Air isn't eligible either, so support duration varies a bit.

New comment by dubya in "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"

dubya — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:02:00 +0000

For math, the AMC 10 and AMC 12 tests have 25 questions each, some of them quite challenging. Both are high school level math, no calculus. Search "2025 amc 10" for this year's problems and solutions.

New comment by dubya in "Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously"

dubya — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 14:38:03 +0000

I sympathize, but just happened to listen to this episode over several days. The discussion actually adds a lot to the paper, and they seem very qualified to critique it. One of the guests(?) has written several esolangs. There must be a way to generate a transcript.

Slight spoiler: they have lots of criticisms of the paper.

New comment by dubya in "The Hacker Folk Art of Esoteric Coding"

dubya — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 02:29:24 +0000

My guess is Richard Kaye, "Minesweeper is NP-complete", but it's paywalled. Certainly the paper is listed somewhere on https://minesweepergame.com/math-papers.php

New comment by dubya in "Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50B"

dubya — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 04:21:57 +0000

Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, Pinball Construction Set on an Atari 8-bit. Maybe EA was just the distributor though.

New comment by dubya in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

dubya — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:19:52 +0000

I’d suggest Octave over Matlab, because current Matlab has tons of distracting AI and autocomplete front and center. Probably really helpful for getting a plot just right or implementing an algorithm from a paper, but not so good for learning the basics.

New comment by dubya in "Formatting code should be unnecessary"

dubya — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:16:02 +0000

I've seen the reason, I just don't find it convincing. I would like to omit these commas, but also use the formatter sometimes, but that's not really an option. It's frustrating since 'uv format' will omit them for older python versions, so the logic is there.

Something between "everything fits on one short line" and "every argument gets its own line" would be nice too. Spreading a function definition or call across ten lines when it would fit on two or three doesn't feel like an automatic win.

New comment by dubya in "Formatting code should be unnecessary"

dubya — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 02:44:26 +0000

I want to like Black (or rather, uv format), but the mandatory trailing commas weird me out, especially in function definitions. It always looks like an error to me.

New comment by dubya in "Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)"

dubya — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:27:44 +0000

Target has the distasteful feature that in-store prices differ from online prices. So if you go and browse you pay more than you would by ordering online and driving to the same store and picking it up. Maybe you could argue for the online price?

New comment by dubya in "Republicans in Congress Want a Flat $200 Annual EV Tax"

dubya — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:13:54 +0000

Tennessee also introduced a $100 annual fee that includes plug-in hybrids.

New comment by dubya in "Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?"

dubya — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 15:26:53 +0000

Gas pumps at the local grocer play beeps when you hit a key (consumer loyalty # entry), but with a random delay. It's maddening how much harder this makes typing. OTOH, these pumps don't have video ads yet.

The EU's Share of Apple's Global Revenue

dubya — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 20:08:47 +0000

Article URL: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/eu_share_of_apples_revenue

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39832265

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by dubya in "As solar capacity grows, duck curves are getting deeper in California"

dubya — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 16:20:59 +0000

Screens should come with the rental, but adjustable window screens are easy to come by if this is a problem you have.