Hacker News: ouchjars

New comment by ouchjars in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

ouchjars — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:40:07 +0000

-o is most characteristic of Australian English but English speakers over the world are familiar with "kiddo", "psycho", and now "doggo".

New comment by ouchjars in "The Elements of Style [pdf]"

ouchjars — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 07:55:44 +0000

Ironically, I'm finding this hard to read without formatting to distinguish using words and mentioning them.

New comment by ouchjars in "When did people stop being drunk all the time?"

ouchjars — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:10:47 +0000

Alcohol does change the surface tension so foaming will be different. Ever seen a security guard shake someone's water bottle to check if it's really water?

The thing that makes beer foam stay there is the protein content. Yeast contributes some, but it's also in the grain. The foam should be less different if you compared something filtered like Heineken and Heineken 0.0.

New comment by ouchjars in "Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”"

ouchjars — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 08:22:40 +0000

As well as the arrows, the buttons are just positioned intuitively most of the time. We usually get two perpendicular kerb ramps rather than a diagonal one pointing at the centre of the intersection. The button for the crossing you want is the one closest to you or facing you when you're waiting at the intended ramp.

The button gets mounted on its own post if there's not a traffic light pole in the right place to piggyback off.

New comment by ouchjars in "Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”"

ouchjars — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 07:48:42 +0000

It even says "The correct answer was zero"!

New comment by ouchjars in "We have to build differently with concrete"

ouchjars — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:22:11 +0000

Traditional masonry construction has the same results in terms of thermal mass. More so, if it's denser and thicker. With the right shading and ventilation it's useful for both temperature extremes. See vernacular architecture in warmer/more extreme climates, or what Federation Square in Melbourne achieves with concrete:

https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2013/09/22...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBWYe99ERqM

Considering active heating/cooling as well as passive, the more thermal mass we have in buildings, the better they can act as thermal batteries for surplus renewable energy.

New comment by ouchjars in "Replacing forks and chopsticks with pincers"

ouchjars — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 04:41:23 +0000

With few exceptions, your cooking oil would have to be smoking profusely before the pan is hot enough to damage silicone. At that point it's not quite hot enough to ruin the Teflon either.

New comment by ouchjars in "Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study"

ouchjars — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 03:35:26 +0000

To some extent, the forced downtime is a benefit. Instantly refeullable vehicles enable fatigued driving. It's not even healthy to be sitting for that long as a passenger.

New comment by ouchjars in "'Freeze-thaw battery' stores electricity long-term for seasonal release"

ouchjars — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:55:41 +0000

Self-powered evaporative air conditioning is an ancient technology.

Air conditioning as we understand and use it today is a gold-plated band-aid over bad design. It's so entrenched you almost can't get a house built any other way.

New comment by ouchjars in "The New York Times buys Wordle"

ouchjars — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:06:01 +0000

> everyone getting the same word on the same day

Not really true as it is, being based on local time. For example, there's only a one hour period each day where someone in New Zealand and someone in Hawaii have the same word.

Fortunatly Wordle clearly signals it with a countdown timer, instead of leaving it up to the reader to figure out what "day" they mean like other daily puzzle sites or people on the internet in general.

New comment by ouchjars in "Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates"

ouchjars — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:09:12 +0000

If you could avoid getting obese with two shots in the arm and wearing a piece of cloth every time you leave the house for a couple years.

New comment by ouchjars in "Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping"

ouchjars — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 06:31:54 +0000

Even if it is "imaginary", there's a positive feedback loop between the belief that supply chain issues exist and changes in buying patterns.

New comment by ouchjars in "The popularity of e-bikes isn’t slowing down"

ouchjars — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 06:24:34 +0000

Stop signs here in Australia, like most of the world, are only placed where the visibility actually makes it necessary to come to a stop. They're far more common over in the US. Pick any random intersection, it probably has a stop sign or four.

If all the give way signs on my commute were replaced with stop signs, I'd sure feel like rolling through them.

New comment by ouchjars in "A DIY E-bike Conversion on the Cheap"

ouchjars — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 07:58:44 +0000

> The thing with riding that on a bike path was that I had no concerns slowing down amongst pedestrians or on blind corners as it was no effort to get back up to speed. I was less inclined on my road bike due to the effort.

Many bike paths seem to discourage slowing down for junctions by putting them in dips - the opposite of how some train stations are on a hump as "gravitational regenerative braking".

New comment by ouchjars in "Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust"

ouchjars — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 07:24:48 +0000

> The recommendations are also getting worse IMO

It seems to me that this happens on a per-user basis as recommendations are overfitted to the recommendations they've already listened to. They overfit so much that if you put a playlist of 1000 tracks you like on shuffle, it will only play the hundred or so tracks the algorithm has decided you "really like", and it will play almost the same selection if you put it on shuffle the next day.

YouTube music (music on YouTube, not YouTube Music) works the same way but less subtly. I had a great few months discovering music through their recommendations, until literally every song I listened to would be followed on autoplay by "Sergio Mendes feat. Black Eyed Peas - Mas Que Nada" or "Funky Destination - The Inside Man (Soopasoul remix)".

New comment by ouchjars in "What3Words sends legal threat to security researcher for sharing an alternative"

ouchjars — Mon, 03 May 2021 07:51:06 +0000

Swahili, which they do support, is the national language of Kenya and a lingua franca in the region. They also have Amharic (Ethiopia), Xhosa and Zulu (South Africa).

I agree that supporting a finite set of languages isn't accessible enough, though.

New comment by ouchjars in "Israel may have achieved herd immunity against Covid-19"

ouchjars — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 16:14:13 +0000

I see it as a feature of Euro English, like writing "XIV century" instead of "19th" or saying "actual" with the meaning of "current". Language change caused by an influx of non-native speakers is not a new thing for English.

New comment by ouchjars in "The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology"

ouchjars — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:53:51 +0000

Rex Krueger has the most budget-conscious channel I know of (https://www.youtube.com/c/RexKrueger). His "Woodworking for Humans" series starts out with just needing three tools and bootstrapping your way to more.

Personally I started with restoring discarded and thrifted furniture. The initial outlay was just for some glue, varnish, and sandpaper.

New comment by ouchjars in "Activists who embrace nuclear power"

ouchjars — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 19:03:52 +0000

South Australia, which generated 60% of its electricity with renewables last year, is installing synchronous condensers to provide some kind of grid stabilisation. (The current conservative government is aiming for net 100% renewables by 2030 and 500% by 2050.)

New comment by ouchjars in "Amazon's anti-union site for its Alabama warehouse"

ouchjars — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 06:13:53 +0000

If you have any of a number of disabilities, that is exactly the case.