Hacker News: etskinner

New comment by etskinner in "Surprise, pay $1000"

etskinner — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:42:09 +0000

Presumably they wanted feature parity with Github Actions. If you have lots of workflows already defined in Github Actions DSL, you're not going to want to port them. And even if you do port them, the activities available in the place you port them aren't going to be the same as Github Actions; there won't be feature parity.

New comment by etskinner in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

etskinner — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:13:15 +0000

I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter

New comment by etskinner in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

etskinner — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:50:25 +0000

Once all cars are autonomous, that day is certainly coming. Even before then, it's very likely we'll see platooning in the future, even if there are still some human drivers.

Also, this already exists in some places. Look at a video of how to cross the street as a pedestrian in Vietnam: You literally just start walking across and people weave around you. Or look at driving in India and similar places.

All I'm saying is never say never

New comment by etskinner in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

etskinner — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:15:52 +0000

Seems to me that law enforcement officers should be required to carry liability insurance that they personally pay for. Have a lot of settlements / claims? Your insurance rate goes up. That happens enough and now it's not economically feasible to hold the job

New comment by etskinner in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

etskinner — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:27:17 +0000

They only open-sourced the external surface, not the internals, so it doesn't help repairability much

New comment by etskinner in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

etskinner — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:01:34 +0000

$41k doesn't sound that cheap to me, for what it is

New comment by etskinner in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

etskinner — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:57:18 +0000

Backup cameras don't require touchscreens, they just require a screen in general. Lots of makes are getting by with just putting a little 3" screen in the rear view mirror or similar

New comment by etskinner in "America will come to regret its war on taxes"

etskinner — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:10:14 +0000

Most people suggesting taxing the rich more aren't saying that the middle class should pay very little tax

New comment by etskinner in "1D Chess"

etskinner — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:01:45 +0000

Mancala is roughly 1D too!

New comment by etskinner in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

etskinner — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:26:06 +0000

"They" has always (in our lifetimes) been used to refer to a singular person of unknown gender. For example "someone left their coat here. They must be cold"

New comment by etskinner in "Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone"

etskinner — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:32:22 +0000

Grandparent comment was being sarcastic

New comment by etskinner in "Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone"

etskinner — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:03:30 +0000

I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"

New comment by etskinner in "France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app"

etskinner — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:52:27 +0000

Strava just happens to be the most popular run tracking app. If they banned it, another would take its place. If anything, they should be working with Strava to create an incognito mode. At this point, the US military should be willing to spend millions of dollars supporting that one feature

New comment by etskinner in "QGIS 4.0"

etskinner — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:17:53 +0000

Why did you need circular maps?

New comment by etskinner in "How long do job postings stay open?"

etskinner — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:15:41 +0000

Meta is short for metagame. In videogames, and even in some sports, there are decisions made above/outside of the typical strategy of the game which players call metagame. For example, drafting players in football is metagaming. Or choosing what pickleball paddle to use is metagame.

An expanded view of that is that there's usually a "current" meta strategy that people tend to adhere to, kind of like a convention. And if you stray from that, you lose, even if your strategy would succeed in a vacuum.

For example, if the current meta is for employers to mainly use referrals/networking to hire, it would be a bad strategy to apply to postings.

New comment by etskinner in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

etskinner — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:43:38 +0000

This sounds hard to believe. Adding anti-counterfeit messures to the bills that have them ($10s and up?) can't be that expensive compared to the value of the note, why would they make two different versions?

Not to mention, that would break fungibility.

Can you provide a source?

New comment by etskinner in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

etskinner — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:57:29 +0000

The opening paragraph is very telling; the author doesn't seem to understand typical pro-level parametric CAD programs available on the market:

> I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click around for an hour, export an STL, realize the bolt pattern is 2mm off, repeat.

This doesn't make sense. When you realize the bolt pattern is 2mm off, you just edit that dimension and let the CAD program recalculate. You don't need to click around for an hour again. That's the beauty of contstraint-based parametric modeling as opposed to, say, modeling in Blender.

The author's program is akin to writing vim to replace Publisher. They're solving entirely different problems. Not to mention, this code-as-model paradigm already exists: OpenSCAD

New comment by etskinner in "Self hosting my media library with Jellyfin and Wireguard on Hetzner"

etskinner — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:34:55 +0000

The problem seems to be, as a producer, if you don't publish your music there, people won't find it or listen to it, at least not in the viral way that other artists are able to find success.

Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.

New comment by etskinner in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"

etskinner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 05:53:07 +0000

In fact it is already built into Acrobat: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/protect-documents/re...

New comment by etskinner in "Claude in Chrome"

etskinner — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:53:23 +0000

Do you have evidence that it saved more people than it poisoned?