Hacker News: justonceokay

New comment by justonceokay in "Just Bury Your Trash"

justonceokay — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:05:13 +0000

When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head

New comment by justonceokay in "BGP hijack infecting networks caused by a comedy of errors"

justonceokay — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:31:59 +0000

When I was in school 15 years ago, BGP was described to me as a sketchy game of telephone.

“Oh yeah you want to route to a 129.37.x.x address? I know a guy who knows a guy. Said he’s the owner of the whole 129./ block. In fact, he’s my personal friend. I mean friend’s friend… Why don’t I just take those pesky packets off your hands and we walk away”

Has anything fundamentally changed?

New comment by justonceokay in "Urban Congestion Pricing and the Response Times of Emergency Medical Services"

justonceokay — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:56:48 +0000

I think you overestimate the number of people that can work from home. For society to function the majority of us have to actually go to a physical place and do something real with our hands and our time.

New comment by justonceokay in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

justonceokay — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:28:23 +0000

So did you take them and have a bad time? Because they definitely work for me and I doubt a placebo could have such a large effect on the 48 hour stomach pains I used to get alongside my frequent panic attacks.

I find it funny that people complain about emotional blunting when that is the entire purpose of the drug. I would prefer not to live on the razors edge ever again. I’ve had chronic anxiety and depression ever since I was a child, though.

New comment by justonceokay in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

justonceokay — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:41:43 +0000

You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“

The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision

New comment by justonceokay in "Peppermint oil reduces blood pressure by 8.48 mmHg in small study"

justonceokay — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:21:09 +0000

Classic xkcd on this topic https://xkcd.com/882/

New comment by justonceokay in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

justonceokay — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:22:16 +0000

To quote Billy Joel: “you can get what you want or you can just get old”

New comment by justonceokay in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

justonceokay — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:55:39 +0000

There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.

Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to

New comment by justonceokay in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

justonceokay — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:53:48 +0000

Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.

Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.

New comment by justonceokay in "And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway"

justonceokay — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:27:33 +0000

Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.

It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.

New comment by justonceokay in "Why some people mow a lawn better than others"

justonceokay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:19:12 +0000

Tends to look strange, though spiraling around the edge twice before doing the usual lines will make your life easier, as you mentioned.

New comment by justonceokay in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

justonceokay — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:58:13 +0000

There’s the cost of supplies used during transport. Also the cost of maintaining potential supplies like blood even if they go unused. EMTs may make $23 but they are also getting benefits and have other overhead, making their real hourly cost probably closer to $50/hr minimum. There’s insurance, which I bet is out the wazoo expensive for ambulance. Ambulances have to be maintained and I would guess have much more regular service than your car at home. Ambulances have to be stored somewhere and secured-access parking isn’t cheap. Many ambulance rounds-trips can be well over an hour considering so many of us live far away from urban centers.

Is it $2600? Probably not. But I think you are low-balling pretty significantly.

Put another way, just getting a plumber to vibe to your house is gonna cost you $200 easy. It’s within reason that an ambulance ride might cost much more than that.

New comment by justonceokay in "Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?"

justonceokay — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 20:08:04 +0000

Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era

New comment by justonceokay in "Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?"

justonceokay — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 20:05:57 +0000

Where are you that the average person wants to go back to farming?

New comment by justonceokay in "Doing nothing at work"

justonceokay — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:04:44 +0000

Anecdotally I know of an engineer in the Excel team. They would keep around a list of low priority security bugs. When they wanted to do improvements on the system they would attach it to one of the security bugs “nearby“ because the change would become approved much more easily than just fixing the problem itself.

New comment by justonceokay in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

justonceokay — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:11:35 +0000

How do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?

New comment by justonceokay in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

justonceokay — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:10:55 +0000

One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.

New comment by justonceokay in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

justonceokay — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:13:54 +0000

Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong “lowest common denominator” problem that plagues almost every subreddit.

New comment by justonceokay in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

justonceokay — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:38:40 +0000

You might be surprised to hear that there are great engineers who are also good at people skills.

New comment by justonceokay in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

justonceokay — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:22:01 +0000

> I think I have just too strong of a mask for anyone else to truly pierce.

And a flair for the dramatic!