Hacker News: flukus

New comment by flukus in "An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs"

flukus — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 22:21:18 +0000

If something like this is financially viable (doubt) then it sounds like the density already exists and the problem is the restaurants aren't near the people. All the replies are focused on the density you mentioned but mixed use is probably the bigger and far more easily solved problem.

Letting restaurants open nearby to where there are clearly a lot of people is a tried and proven solution, not gadgetbhan for food.

New comment by flukus in "Why are things expensive?"

flukus — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 06:38:09 +0000

Probably quite circular too, the labor costs are high because the housing/COL was allowed to become so high.

New comment by flukus in "Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower case?"

flukus — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 04:10:14 +0000

Flight booking systems still seem to be stuck with it, even newer fields like email are always in all caps.

New comment by flukus in "Three Decades of HTML"

flukus — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 06:35:41 +0000

Mine was around then too, mostly because the geocities page builder applet was such a dog.

New comment by flukus in "FDA considers first CRISPR gene editing treatment that may cure sickle cell"

flukus — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 04:44:17 +0000

A more charitable interpretation might be that getting under the cut off is why it's one of the first treatments available. More treatments will become available as the overall costs start beating out the costs of living with $disease.

New comment by flukus in "Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections"

flukus — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 21:13:38 +0000

> yet we tend to only hear about how humans need to cut back

There's also financial reasons to do so, with livestock the financial reasons are likely reversed.

Beside that, anti-biotics also have side effects that can make you more sick, their use is not just unnecessary but counter productive. Some of the side effects can be serious and long term, like changing your gut bacteria.

New comment by flukus in "HTML Web Components"

flukus — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 23:43:29 +0000

> It's got to be way easier to hire Angular developers than it is to hire someone who wants to eek out the maximum performance with this lightest-weight approach.

I disagree, at least around here. Frontend developers with react/angular experience are a hot commodity and really hard to hire, yet just about anyone from any tech tech can knock out html and some minimal css.

New comment by flukus in "Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly"

flukus — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 20:44:45 +0000

It seems endemic, especially everywhere that's not a product company. I think it was mythical man month (maybe earlier) that pointed out the 90% of the cost of software is in maintenance, yet 50 years on this cost isn't accounted for in project planning.

Consultancies are by far the worst, a project is done and everyone moves on, yet the clients still expect quick fixes and the occasional added feature but there's no one familiar with the code base.

Developers don't help either, a lot move from green field to green field like locusts and never learn the lessons of maintaining something, so they make the same mistakes over and over again.

New comment by flukus in "We are investigating reports of degraded performance"

flukus — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 19:52:52 +0000

If nothing loads nothing gets cached and you can get in a cycle of very slow 404s.

The current abomination I'm working on avoids this by caching the errors and serving them for several hours...

New comment by flukus in "Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium"

flukus — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 20:49:57 +0000

Hiring a car for specific trips is probably much better, depending on the % of those use cases. That goes for other factors like towing capacity too.

Cars are already very expensive for something with such a low utilisation rate.

New comment by flukus in "The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)"

flukus — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:15:48 +0000

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

New comment by flukus in "Write more "useless" software"

flukus — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:32:48 +0000

Almost 20 years ago we had to write our own database with indexing for a software dev class. It was crap by every definition possible

But that learning experience and having a rough idea of what sql is doing under the hood is still useful to me every day.

New comment by flukus in "Waymo Layoffs"

flukus — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 05:14:05 +0000

> If you want to fire people for performance or other reasons, it's true that a great time to do it is during layoffs

That really depends on the jurisdiction, in Australia and mich of Europe you can't replace someone laid off for a certain amount of time.

New comment by flukus in "The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman"

flukus — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:54:36 +0000

I've been through all the ups and downs around Ubuntu and gnome, but at least those changes generally happen at a time of my choosing too. I don't go to a commonly used app one day to do something quick only to find the entire UI was updated overnight.

Of course even the cli world has had it's changes though, systemd alone made decades of documentation obsolete.

New comment by flukus in "Is bin-opening in cockatoos leading to an innovation arms race with humans?"

flukus — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 06:53:21 +0000

Nowadays we shouldn't be allowing cats to be outside unsupervised in any case, they can be devastating to local wildlife, including these clever cockatoos.

New comment by flukus in "Not Your Grandfather’s Perl"

flukus — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 01:14:18 +0000

I deal with so many over complicated enterprise solutions that would be much better with this level of abstraction.

CGI scripts are basically FaaS on your own machines.

New comment by flukus in "Spate of polio outbreaks worldwide puts scientists on alert"

flukus — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:18 +0000

Nothing goes through decades of testing, they go through human trials and then monitor safety at a mass scale for a year or two and then they're done. Same as with the covid vaccines.

New comment by flukus in "Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?"

flukus — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 04:27:21 +0000

> Fraudulent charges can be reversed immediately

This isn't really a benefit, it's a fix to a problem caused by credit cards that doesn't happen at all (or at least rarely) with debit cards.

New comment by flukus in "You Shouldn't Use Manjaro"

flukus — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 03:17:14 +0000

> Which never happens,

It has happened to me, an update broke my sound card and I didn't know until I tried to use it at a time that was extremely inconvenient to me.

> Submit a bug for a DE, and they might tell you to install the newest version to replicate it there (yet you're on Ubuntu...)

Known bugs have known work arounds, I can deal with that. What I can't deal with is surprise new bugs in cutting edge software.

New comment by flukus in "You Shouldn't Use Manjaro"

flukus — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 01:06:13 +0000

I like the polish of manjaro, I just prefer the stability of debian. Polish doesn't mean much when a rolling release breaks your computer.