Hacker News: durkie

New comment by durkie in "Do we just want slaves?"

durkie — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:17:42 +0000

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goomba+falla... Maybe

New comment by durkie in "HPV vaccine cuts risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30"

durkie — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:38:17 +0000

Why does that seem important? The “in mice” one makes sense (such results might not be the same in humans), but is there a reason to think that results achieved here in England couldn’t happen elsewhere?

New comment by durkie in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

durkie — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:04:05 +0000

They may have requested to be anonymous

New comment by durkie in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

durkie — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:09:25 +0000

i believe it is self-declared.

New comment by durkie in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

durkie — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:35:37 +0000

It’s a common thing for speakers of Singaporean English to end sentences with la/leh. But no idea if that’s what’s going on here.

New comment by durkie in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

durkie — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:46:41 +0000

i have questions about this! is there a way to get in touch with you?

New comment by durkie in "I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models"

durkie — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:48:20 +0000

Seriously. I feel like “performative” gets applied to anything imperfect. They’ll never stop 100% of murders, so these laws against it are just performative…

New comment by durkie in "An Indoor Beehive in My Bedroom Wall"

durkie — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 05:43:13 +0000

There are bee diseases that are so serious (American foulbrood) that if your hive gets it then the dept of agriculture will come out and not leave until you burn the affected hives. It is super infectious and can cause massive commercial damage if allowed to spread.

New comment by durkie in "OpenPlanetData – Free Daily Planet OSM PBF and GOL Indexed Snapshots"

durkie — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 19:15:43 +0000

Wow this is my first time hearing about the Geodesk format. It seems super useful...I do a ton of OSM data processing, and I can't really do anything with it until it's loaded in to PostGIS, so this would save a ton of time/storage space over that.

New comment by durkie in "RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines"

durkie — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 22:30:49 +0000

From the way you described it, it sounds like there were openings and Biden appointed folks to fill those openings.

How is this different from any president filling any vacancy? By nature of the vacancy being filled, a future president won’t be able to fill it.

New comment by durkie in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten way better"

durkie — Sun, 18 May 2025 18:57:28 +0000

I was looking to use this with the iOS Books app, but I can’t share text to your app from there (but something like safari works). Any idea why?

New comment by durkie in "Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax"

durkie — Fri, 09 May 2025 19:54:36 +0000

Same! I reach for crystal when I need something that is going to perform faster than ruby, but man I get my hand slapped constantly when writing it.

New comment by durkie in "Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?"

durkie — Tue, 06 May 2025 11:54:12 +0000

This is mentioned in the John McPhee book referenced elsewhere in the thread, because there is actually an answer: when the cantons stopped fighting and Switzerland/Helvetica Confederation was formed, the Swiss finance/banking system developed to handle all the money being brought in by those folks acting as mercenaries and being paid to fight other people’s wars.

New comment by durkie in "Serving Vector Tiles, Fast"

durkie — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:41:42 +0000

another option that would have been interesting to see here is serving PostGIS GeoJSON export -> tippecanoe encode. Tippecanoe is super fast, parallelizes well and built solely for generating vector tile data (with lots of configurable options that PostGIS lacks)

New comment by durkie in "Why Ruby on Rails still matters"

durkie — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 13:19:59 +0000

https://www.todayintabs.com

New comment by durkie in "The Myth of Bananaland"

durkie — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:37:52 +0000

What is amazing to me is that this post references an "epidemic of slipping on banana peels", was posted within a day of a wonderful (33 minute long!) video about the history of slipping on banana peels, and neither references the other! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8W5GCnqT_M

New comment by durkie in "OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles"

durkie — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:07:29 +0000

Yes, they could. You can attach whatever metadata you want to a vector tile feature.

New comment by durkie in "OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles"

durkie — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:36:23 +0000

Something like https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl can serve raster tiles from a vector tile dataset

New comment by durkie in "Biological Miracle – Wood Frog"

durkie — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 03:31:26 +0000

A great book about how animals survive super cold winters is "Winter World" by Bernd Heinrich.

Bernd is a super fascinating biologist who really dives deep in to things. At one point in the book I think he was talking about chipmunks surviving winter, and it goes really fun on the first principles. Something like: "chipmunks have a surface area of X m^2, and need to maintain an internal temperature of Y˚C. If the outside temperature is -40˚C they therefore they need to consume Z calories per hour just to maintain body temperature. Their favorite food are pine nuts from the white pine tree. The pine nuts each have B calories, so the chipmunk will need to eat D of them per hour. How many nuts can a chipmunk fit in its mouth? Well I found a dead one and shoved pine nuts in to its mouth until I couldn't fit anymore, and managed to get 17 in there. That means..."

New comment by durkie in "Automattic–WP Engine Term Sheet"

durkie — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:07:38 +0000

But the software is called WordPress. How else should they say that they can host WordPress on their site without referring to it?

This feels like if you were to go after someone advertising themselves as a "Honda repair shop".

The sibling comment of "The WordPress Theme Portal" makes more sense as it might imply "The (Official) WordPress Theme Portal"