Hacker News: eldenbishop

New comment by eldenbishop in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

eldenbishop — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:30:40 +0000

Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything. Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their budgets frozen and lost headcount.

New comment by eldenbishop in "The beauty of finished software"

eldenbishop — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 18:44:41 +0000

Most programmers never get to experience the amazing feeling of being truly done with a software project. I used to work on video games in the 90s which would go into a box and onto a shelf. We did not have updates or patches. The starting, creating and finishing of a concrete and complete project is not available for most programmers today.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Tesla's Model 3 cheaper than Toyota's Camry in California with tax benefits"

eldenbishop — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 23:36:36 +0000

It's satirical but also true. I have a tesla model y. I only use the autopilot feature to quickly take over when I'm going into the U/I to do something complicated... like adjusting the window wipers (buttons are too small for me to hit accurately at speed).

New comment by eldenbishop in "Old man yells at cloud"

eldenbishop — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 06:29:25 +0000

Yup. I recently bought a 4runner, not top of the line mind you, and it cost the same as my wife's Tesla Model Y. Love that thing though ... specifically bought the non-pro model to get the simple three knob climate controls. Ridiculously overpriced but no direct competition in the current US market.

New comment by eldenbishop in "‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers"

eldenbishop — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:40:20 +0000

Haven't heard anyone talk about the Shangri-La diet in ages. I did a slight variation of this for awhile way back in my 30s at it worked great. Recently testing this out with OMAD but haven't been doing it long enough to see if it is workable. I'm in my 50s now and a lot of things that worked wonders in my 30s do not work as well as they once did.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Lucid announces new lower priced sedans"

eldenbishop — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 19:25:50 +0000

Yup. Every page on the PG&E site is pushing moving to electric cars and home charging but actually getting a panel upgrade that can support it has been a nightmare. Weeks between emails, no explanations for what steps we need to go through, now waiting for a few months for a technician to come out to check "flutter" on the nearest transformer. It's been nine months so far and I don't expect to have the project finished over a year from start.

New comment by eldenbishop in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

eldenbishop — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 20:22:32 +0000

LOL - this is good timing. A bunch of my unit tests just started failing due to the recent DST transition. Luckily our CI build servers are all GMT so it only failed on local runs. But even better if this problem went away altogether.

New comment by eldenbishop in "A Padlock I’d Use [video]"

eldenbishop — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 20:35:10 +0000

Interesting. I'd never heard of this sect. Also not allowed to live on the same land as their cattle. Always fascinating to read the rules and behaviors of these outlier communities.

New comment by eldenbishop in "An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep"

eldenbishop — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 18:00:17 +0000

There is a wonderful little game based on this concept called universal paperclips. The AI eventually consumes all the matter in the universe in order to turn it into paperclips.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

New comment by eldenbishop in "Complexities of e-mail validation logic"

eldenbishop — Mon, 24 May 2021 17:31:05 +0000

It's not even about crazy emails. My wife works for an Aerospace company so her work email was blahblah@blah.aero and a huge number of websites still don't recognize that as a valid top level domain.

New comment by eldenbishop in "The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks"

eldenbishop — Tue, 04 May 2021 18:15:10 +0000

You are correct. It's one of many sleight of hand tricks used to exaggerate the impact of beef. For some reason, certain parties don't want harm reduction policies on these issues, they want you to stop eating Beef altogether.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities"

eldenbishop — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 23:25:01 +0000

I ride a bike, around 2000 miles/year and I'd love to be able to spout the statistic their claiming. But please, /they are also stating that driving a car 10KM has the same carbon footprint as sending 800 emails. That kind of claim makes the whole article suspect.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Controversial Programming Opinions (2012)"

eldenbishop — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:48:59 +0000

Sigh. I tried using fizz buzz as an interview question for awhile and never got a single applicant who could solve it. Some just had no idea how to do much of anything but it turned out almost no-one had ever even heard of the modulo operator before.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Quiet route planning for pedestrians in traffic noise polluted environments"

eldenbishop — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 23:24:14 +0000

I have no idea what google optimizes for but it's not time or distance. At least in my neighborhood (San Francisco) it almost alway pushes you onto "main" traffic streets over much faster and more direct routes. It's trivial to just drag the line to a better route and see the time drop by several minutes over just a few miles. And this is not a traffic thing, they are longer even late at night. Maybe some agreement with the district to prefer mandated high traffic areas?

New comment by eldenbishop in "Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?"

eldenbishop — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 17:52:53 +0000

For what it's worth the original close order was supposed to align with bringing the newer Flamanville 3 1,650 MW plant online which would have been a nearly even swap. Unfortunately that project has gone 5x over budget with numerous time delays. Current guesstimates expected it to come online in 2022. This article seems a little disingenuous.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19"

eldenbishop — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 22:44:13 +0000

I take as much as 20 grams a day with no side-effects. It can take your stomach awhile to get used to that much but once it has adjusted its fine.

New comment by eldenbishop in "California car burglaries are at crisis levels"

eldenbishop — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 18:36:25 +0000

This has always been true. If a poor persons bike is stolen, it's a misdemeanor. If a rich person's bike is stolen it's a felony. It's disgusting.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Menlo Park Police used city funds to taxi homeless woman to SF"

eldenbishop — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:30:45 +0000

I think your missing an important detail here. She didn't say she wanted to go to San Francisco.

"she was told that she couldn't remain where she was and was asked where she would go if she could go anywhere other than Menlo Park. She said she recalled that at Ocean Beach there was someplace to wash her hair, so she said she'd go there."

Turning that into "She wanted to go to San Francisco" is disingenuous.

New comment by eldenbishop in "Mourning the End of Paper Maps"

eldenbishop — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 17:11:34 +0000

I own a few Butler motorcycle maps. Phones kind of being impossibly inconvenient on a bike. My riding suit even has a giant back pocket specifically for easy access to a map.

New comment by eldenbishop in "The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi"

eldenbishop — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 23:30:23 +0000

This is correct. I find this excerpt sobering when looking at stats for private planes.

""" Doing the math

In other words, take these comparisons with a grain of salt: In 2013, traffic accidents killed 32,719 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The fatality rate was 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled. Assuming an average vehicle speed of 50 miles per hour (a big assumption), the fatality rate for automobiles translates to 1.1 per every 2 million hours.

Taking the preliminary 2013 fatality rate in general aviation of 1.05 fatalities for every 100,000 hours of flight time and scaling it up to 2 million hours gives a comparison rate of 21 general aviation fatalities per every 2 million hours. This suggests that stepping on a private plane is about 19 times more dangerous than getting into the family sedan. """

from: https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html