Hacker News: idlephysicist

New comment by idlephysicist in "Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders"

idlephysicist — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 01:57:14 +0000

I wish that people would just stop looking at their phones while driving.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other"

idlephysicist — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 15:20:50 +0000

I think they mean that because people have been driving automobiles for over 100 years and that proves (somehow) that visual detection works for identifying hazards on the road.

But they seem to be conflating human vision with computer vision.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers"

idlephysicist — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:09:04 +0000

> What are you protecting cloudflare?

A cheeky response is "their profit margins", but I don't think that quite right considering that their earnings per share is $-0.28.

I've not looked into Cloudflare much, I've never needed their services, so I'm not totally sure on what all their revenue streams are. I have heard that small websites are not paying much if anything at all [1]. With that preface out of the way–I think that we see challenges on sites that perhaps don't need them as a form of advertising, to ensure that their name is ever-present. Maybe they don't need this form of advertising, or maybe they do.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/

New comment by idlephysicist in "Go Supply Chain Attack: Malicious Package Exploits Go Module Proxy Caching For"

idlephysicist — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 04:40:14 +0000

It's kind of amazing that this periodic check has not been implemented already.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Toyota reduces price of new hydrogen car with $15,000 of free fuel"

idlephysicist — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:48:17 +0000

Firstly, I love that website. It's simple and informative.

I don't the average mileage or a hydrogen vehicle nor tank size, so I'll take your word on that. Using your numbers and the map I plotted a route that does get you from San Diego to the Oregon border. But you will need a tow truck to meet you at the end, because there would not be enough fuel to get you back to Sacramento.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/p5tgvAkErktL7LTF6

New comment by idlephysicist in "A phishing attack involving g.co, Google's URL shortener"

idlephysicist — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 03:45:58 +0000

Anyone that get’s a telephone call from “Google” should be immediately suspicious. I used to work for a company that paid GCP about as much as my annual salary _every_ month, and we still struggled to get GCP on the phone when we needed assistance.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Ask HN: What is the best terminal emulator for Mac?"

idlephysicist — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:40:02 +0000

I used Alacritty until about 3 weeks ago, switched to Ghostty. I'm very happy with the change.

New comment by idlephysicist in "A rigid but foldable indoor airship aerial system for cave exploration"

idlephysicist — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:08:23 +0000

Fair play to them, it's a detailed paper. But I'm not sure that this would have much practicality in other caves. The terrain just changes too quickly (most of the time).

New comment by idlephysicist in "Passengers at EU Airports Not Allowed over 100ml of Liquids on Cabin Luggage"

idlephysicist — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 15:01:08 +0000

The woeful inconsistency between airport security checks within the same country and sometimes within the same airport, really lends itself to the theory that it’s all a farce.

Travel time makes a big difference too, e.g. at peak times please keep your shoes on.

New comment by idlephysicist in "A network engineer in search of greener pastures"

idlephysicist — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 19:41:25 +0000

I've never come across that myself, but the audacity of some firms is outrageous.

New comment by idlephysicist in "A network engineer in search of greener pastures"

idlephysicist — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 19:39:09 +0000

Part of me thinks that you're right, but I've applied to _so many_ jobs over the years (prior to AI) that use workday and required that I fill in all the info again. I've also never ever heard back from a company that used workday.

Today I will only apply to a job that requires me to make an account (like workday) if at least one of these criteria are met (i) I am exceptionally qualified (in my own eyes), (ii) I have a reference, (iii) I already have made an account previously. Though thankfully there are many (smaller) companies these days (at least in my current field) that don't require me to make an account.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript"

idlephysicist — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:44:23 +0000

Can you explain what you mean when you say "to be sound"?

New comment by idlephysicist in "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app"

idlephysicist — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 02:03:30 +0000

I wonder how many U.S. service persons stationed in South Korea could have been affected by this? Do we know if it was exploited in the wild?

New comment by idlephysicist in "Aggregating all cinema showtimes in Germany with Clojure"

idlephysicist — Sat, 18 May 2024 15:44:35 +0000

Who else noticed the pointers websocket for displaying the mouse pointers of other readers?

New comment by idlephysicist in "XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams"

idlephysicist — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 02:32:05 +0000

Something feels weird about the timezone arithmetic here, though maybe I am nuts. Take this for example:

> Notably, on Tuesday, Jun 27, 2023, we see two commits: 23:38:32 +0800 and 17:27:09 +0300. If we do the math, there is about a 9-hour difference between the two commits.

Putting it all into UTC we get:

    23:38 - 8 = 15:38
    17:27 - 3 = 14:27

That's not 9 hours by my numbers. Or another example:

> Even more damning, on 6 Oct 2022, we see the following: one commit at 21:53:09 +0300 followed by another at 17:00:38 +0800. This is only a difference in a matter of minutes!

Putting it all into UTC we get:

    21:53 - 3 = 18:53
    17:00 - 8 = 09:00

I think these timezones were swapped (accidentally) by the article's author. If we do the calculation again:

    21:53 - 8 = 13:53
    17:00 - 3 = 14:00

That _is_ a matter of minutes.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies"

idlephysicist — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:58:31 +0000

I've physically disconnected the modem in my Audi, though when it goes to the dealer for a service (still under extended warranty) I cannot help but imagine that they download the data.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Trunk-Based Development"

idlephysicist — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 04:21:32 +0000

I agree with what you said but I'd further refine it by saying not just having testing and CI but actually having "high" test coverage and tests that actually test the code.

New comment by idlephysicist in "Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal"

idlephysicist — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 20:07:56 +0000

I was also confused by this, I had always (perhaps naively) assumed that the canal used salt water throughout. I did some searching and found this article.

> Gatun Lake, which forms a key stretch of the canal system and provides fresh water for its locks, saw little rain this year, as El Niño triggered a withering drought.

https://fortune.com/2023/12/04/panama-canal-dry-backed-up-br...

New comment by idlephysicist in "Postgres Incremental Backup"

idlephysicist — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:53:49 +0000

> Got it resolved by reaching out to some high level executive contact we got via our investor.

Oh man that is my nightmare. Nothing says "broken system" like having to circumvent the system to get something done.

New comment by idlephysicist in "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers"

idlephysicist — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 06:03:56 +0000

Maybe we should be writing for the AIs.

Leaving GitHub aside, I generally feel that anything a candidate does that adds friction to the general flow of the process will affect the candidacy of the candidate.

I have no evidence for this whatsoever but if you consider a person with 100 applications in their inbox, and if an AI has pre-sorted 80% of them, then that person is _probably_ more likely to start with the AI sorted applications.