Hacker News: firebones

New comment by firebones in "Since the '60s, Ford has stored cars underground in a Kansas City cave"

firebones — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 03:57:12 +0000

First thing to note is that while the pictures are from the 1960s, the article merely says that Ford uses (and has used, for years) these caves to store cars in transit.

The Kansas City Ford plant manufactures more trucks/vans in a day than it can ship to their destinations, and Ford uses almost any surface lot it can rent (including a nearby amusement park's lot in the offseason) to hold cars until they can be transferred by rail or truck--it's very demand-driven. It's completely natural they'd use these caves as well based on their proximity to the rail and interstate transport near the river.

I don't see in the article anything that implies there's a cache of 1960s cars down there gathering limestone dust. That space would quickly be reclaimed for temporary storage of Transit vans awaiting their buyers.

New comment by firebones in "Since the '60s, Ford has stored cars underground in a Kansas City cave"

firebones — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 03:49:13 +0000

There's a Ford manufacturing plant 3-5 miles from many of Kansas City's limestone caves along the Missouri river. And as the comment-linked video down below shows, these warehouses are vast and even used for commercial businesses. You can play paintball in a cave at Subtropolis.

Not too far away (3-4 hours), the salt mines in Hutchinson, KS store a lot of Hollywood memorabilia.

One big plot point of "The Day After" back in the 1980s was that people sought shelter in the underground caves around Kansas City.

New comment by firebones in "The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable"

firebones — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 03:55:10 +0000

Here's my suggestion.

Find a good audiobook version at your local library through Libby or Hoopla. The one I listened to was about 24 hours in length, but shorter at 1.25x.

After every chapter or so, check out the annotated version here and read/skim what you just listened to: http://www.powermobydick.com/

I found it helpful to listen to the language and flow first, then seek out the explanations in the annotations of the old language or the nautical terms.

This made it far more approachable with respect to the jargon. Helped even this native English speaker!

New comment by firebones in "Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?"

firebones — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 05:30:09 +0000

Strong "I drink your milkshake!" vibes from these proposals.

Both of these proposals require political stability we're unlikely to see over 600 or 50,000 years. You have to be thinking some kind of self-sustaining and monumental Pyramids-type project.

New comment by firebones in "Lumber prices down 11% YoY"

firebones — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 04:08:23 +0000

Same size is important. There's likely also 12-15% shrinkflation that increases this significantly.

New comment by firebones in "Lumber prices down 11% YoY"

firebones — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 04:07:23 +0000

>> $2.50/box today relative to $2.00/box in 2019 represents +25% inflation...so nowhere near purported pre-COVID levels.

Annualized, that is 5.7% inflation. (1.25 increase ^ 0.25 for 4 years elapsed). So not pre-covid levels, but not nominal 25% annual inflation. Still a little over 2x desired annual growth rate.

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: What is the purpose of the “press any key” screen in video games?"

firebones — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 05:03:10 +0000

Have you all read any old Apple II source? One reason very early on was to seed the PRNG (rnd() function) with variable input.

https://www.applefritter.com/content/random-number-generatio...

Maybe it carried over to modernity in the same way the apocryphal pot roast tale did: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so...

Ask HN: What is the cost in time and resources to replicate LK-99 findings?

firebones — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 03:45:05 +0000

Much of the LK-99 discourse talks about replicating results. What is the cost (time, skill, material, equipment, etc.) that it will take to replicate the results? How soon do you think we'll start seeing positive or negative results? And what is the long pole constraint on replication?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916655

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: Anyone else feel like their whole career will just be tech debt?"

firebones — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 02:12:41 +0000

It is certainly worsened by the period of zero interest rates, which fueled a massive viral outbreak of promotion-driven development cultures among most of the largest tech employers. Recent mass layoffs in tech really aren't an antibody--the marauding bands simply reconstitute and find other hosts to infect and value to destroy. It will take a decade for that boom to unwind with a lot of carnage along the way. /remindme 10 years

New comment by firebones in "Have you noticed how, during Apple presentation, all watches always show 10:10?"

firebones — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 01:53:20 +0000

10:10 wasn't always dominant. Look at some print ads for watches from the 1920s and 1930s. 8:18 was used just as frequently if not more so. It's the "other" time where the hands are balanced and equidistant from the 12 and 6. I grew up (pre-web) having heard (probably from some trivia book) the false explanation that 8:18PM was the time of Lincoln's death.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-ten-ten-tenet/

New comment by firebones in "Why do studios use Roman numerals in the copyright notice in the end credits?"

firebones — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 23:19:36 +0000

I suspect it's a little of column A and a little of column B. I asked my pop this question in the early 1970s and his answer was the first part of the SO answer--so that it wasn't dated as old. This predated the internet, predated video and cable TV, and seemed conventional wisdom at the time. I'm inclined to believe that the reason it was used after all those other technical advancements was simply tradition.

See also car model years beginning in September as another shelf-life improvement technique.

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: Best Uses for Old iPads?"

firebones — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 07:33:28 +0000

Dedicated https://www.dartconnect.com/ scorepad.

New comment by firebones in "Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours"

firebones — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 06:34:26 +0000

Very interested if it's my area suburb, as an occasional Enterprise customer.

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: Books about full text search?"

firebones — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:52:04 +0000

I am biased, but building the Intro to Information Retrieval chapters in your favorite language, bit by bit, is really good to get the feel of the tradeoffs for index capabilities.

New comment by firebones in "Twitter to start layoffs -internal email"

firebones — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 02:15:42 +0000

It's typical for unvested RSUs to accelerate and vest on change in control. Based on the 10k, there were about $2.2B worth of unvested RSUs at the start of 2022. Musk's $44 billion likely covered some or all of that (or whatever % vested and/or wasn't already forfeited) so it's unlikely there is any real savings. Unless some of those RSUs converted to Private MuskBucks, then he may be saving something.

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022?"

firebones — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 03:50:28 +0000

Silence by Endo is amazing.

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?"

firebones — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:38:48 +0000

The soundtrack to Railroad Tycoon II was amazing. I miss that game most. Second place might be Falcon 3.0 for Mac and 4.0 for PC. Third place Crystal Quest for the old Macs.

New comment by firebones in "The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges"

firebones — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 23:31:28 +0000

So in that one, with the hand motions and the emphasis on "thread" and "well lit" and the motion across (where the Christmas lights connected the two lamps) they were implying that a thread was hanging from the Christmas lights. But since he said he "tried that" and he had to come up with something else, I assume it's some sort of front facing edifice that allowed him to circle the whole thing with a pencil (at about 85% depth) to sell it. Maybe he technically fooled them since the Christmas lights had nothing to do with it and it was something between the two lamp arms themselves.

New comment by firebones in "The Godfather almost never happened"

firebones — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 02:34:46 +0000

Naw, King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" was totally solid in its own right before the movie. Same with "The Body" and its earlier subsequent "Stand By Me". Both of those from "Different Seasons".

New comment by firebones in "Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard?"

firebones — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 07:15:07 +0000

What you are all witnessing is that the proverbial bus hit. (Was there a proverb about busses?)

This is just a drill. Only a drill. Use your backups.