Hacker News: orobinson

New comment by orobinson in "Show HN: 1 min workouts for people who sit all day"

orobinson — Sat, 24 May 2025 21:49:15 +0000

I’ve wanted an app like this for ages. I’ve always suffered from analysis paralysis when trying to work out a good, short exercise routine. This looks like it will be the perfect solution — thank you!

New comment by orobinson in "Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)"

orobinson — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 07:14:27 +0000

Bin bag, bin lorry. I grew up saying dustbin but most people just call them bins these days.

I believe “dustbin” is from the Victorian era where what little rubbish people had was burnt in the fireplace. The “dustbin man” would come by and take away your fireplace ashes.

New comment by orobinson in "Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon"

orobinson — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 06:59:00 +0000

I’m not a doctor but perhaps try running with a smart watch that shows you your heart rate and put in an amount of effort that keeps your heart rate at about 60-70% of max. For now that may be a brisk walking pace not even a jog. As you get fitter your heart rate should come down for the equivalent speed. I also used to go for runs and hit max within a few minutes and stay there for the whole run but ultimately I think I was just pushing too hard.

New comment by orobinson in "Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content"

orobinson — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 07:18:56 +0000

When will the movie industry learn from the success of services like Spotify or DRM free music services like Bandcamp? I want media I can own, or consume from a single subscription. I would happily pay a few quid for a movie if I could download a high quality DRM free file. Piracy is not only free but provides a better product, a file you can do whatever you want with and watch anywhere.

Personally I don’t pirate, I prefer getting second hand physical media (funnily enough the movie studios miss out on any money there as well).

New comment by orobinson in "When a Crystal Ball Isn't Enough to Make You Rich"

orobinson — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 20:08:29 +0000

Read the post. It said that people trade in the wrong direction the majority of the time. So played the game with the strategy that I’d go 50x leverage long or short in the opposite direction to my initial hunch upon reading the headlines.

Ended up with a 1000% return. Just need a time machine now.

New comment by orobinson in "Control iPhone with the movement of your eyes"

orobinson — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 14:10:30 +0000

I love how many neat and handy features are baked into the iOS accessibility settings. Apple should make more noise about these features. I recently discovered there’s a white noise generator baked in which meant I could get rid of the annoying white noise app I had been using to keep my napping baby asleep. Another recent discovery was the on screen anti-motion sickness things that move around with the accelerometer. I get terrible motion sickness and they make a massive difference.

New comment by orobinson in "Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences, even when 'offline'"

orobinson — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 19:44:21 +0000

Reminds me of a similar situation I experienced while working on a big project. I came down with the flu and woke up in a delirious, feverish state at 2am feeling like I was trapped in the codebase and I needed to make all the tests pass so I could escape. It almost felt like my conscious brain had somehow found its way into the unconscious part.

New comment by orobinson in "Show HN: I saw this mind-blowing experiment, so I made a simple version of it"

orobinson — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 07:08:00 +0000

This is cool. It reminds me of a research team I worked in a few years back that had built something like this for mobile devices. It used a camera overhead to provide info about device positions, allowing all the devices to act as a single screen on a surface [0].

[0] http://www.huddlelamp.org/#tech-video

New comment by orobinson in "LLMs confabulate not hallucinate"

orobinson — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 05:47:03 +0000

But do LLMs dream of electric sheep?

New comment by orobinson in "Nomnoml"

orobinson — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:45:51 +0000

I actually find this acts as a useful heuristic to bound the complexity of a diagram appropriately. For example if I'm making a diagram with Mermaid and find the code is becoming unwieldy, I take that as an indicator that I'm trying to stuff too much info into one diagram and I should split it into separate diagrams or redo it at a higher level of abstraction.

New comment by orobinson in "Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles"

orobinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 12:11:01 +0000

People do try to throw them away. A good chunk of my kids' lego collection is a mixed selection of blocks we found in a skip.

Order of the Occult Hand

orobinson — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 19:53:38 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Occult_Hand

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37449620

Points: 38

# Comments: 7

UK air traffic control outage caused by bad data in flight plan

orobinson — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 08:54:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/06/uk-air-traffic-failure-blamed-on-extremely-rare-circumstances-as-caa-opens-inquiry

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37402766

Points: 24

# Comments: 20

New comment by orobinson in "Ask HN: What tech newsletters are you currently subscribing to?"

orobinson — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 19:21:14 +0000

https://www.dataengineeringweekly.com/

I’ve found this one very useful as a Data Engineer. Worth subscribing if you’re working in the data space.

New comment by orobinson in "Writing summaries is more important than reading more books"

orobinson — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:44:15 +0000

Comes down to personal preference at the end of the day. Would you rather know a lot about a bit or a bit about a lot. I’m definitely in the latter category.

New comment by orobinson in "‘No mow’ movement could transform our lawns"

orobinson — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 20:51:07 +0000

My grandfather was famously anti-lawn-mowing[0]. His un-mowed lawn eventually sprouted some rare bee orchids among a vast array of other wildflowers. It always looked beautiful when we pulled into the drive when we went to visit.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ga...

New comment by orobinson in "Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London"

orobinson — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:19:07 +0000

I greatly minimise the risks in several ways:

- Planning routes that avoid particularly risky roads or junctions and take advantage of separated bike lanes where possible. This is trivial in a city as there's hundreds of possible routes between two places.

- A cargo bike itself is a much larger and more visible presence on the road than a regular bike. That combined with the visible children on board usually means motorists do a better job of staying clear than they do when I'm on a regular bike.

- Staying well clear of HGVs in ALL circumstances. Once you start cycling in a way where you treat any HGV as imminent death on wheels, you notice how many potentially dangerous situations you avoid.

More generally, I find cycling in London feels quite safe. This is because drivers in London are mostly used to cyclists and generally act appropriately around them. Also traffic speeds are generally 20mph or less.

New comment by orobinson in "Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London"

orobinson — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 14:08:47 +0000

I live in London. We have three kids, no car and an electric cargo bike which they can all fit in. It's brilliant and all we need for getting around London. I've also used it for picking up furniture and building materials - such a versatile vehicle and much more enjoyable to use than a car.

New comment by orobinson in "Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT"

orobinson — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 16:11:04 +0000

They have lost their mojo in that they've failed countless times to diversify their business revenue stream. They're in the same boat as Meta in that regard. Especially if you compare them to Microsoft, Amazon and Apple who have all made good progress in diversifying over the last decade or so.

New comment by orobinson in "Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars"

orobinson — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 20:30:03 +0000

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."