Hacker News: pascalmahe

New comment by pascalmahe in "Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it"

pascalmahe — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 09:09:29 +0000

The Galahad scene about the Castle of Anthrax? The animated butts in the transitions?

New comment by pascalmahe in "Tesla is shifting from nickel to iron cathode on standard range car's batteries"

pascalmahe — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 16:26:29 +0000

Well, TIL. Though it might not be so clear cut: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen... (article from 2018).

New comment by pascalmahe in "Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders"

pascalmahe — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:48:14 +0000

I've heard that this will be a disaster for amateur astronomy. Yet Starlink is claiming that their mitigation techniques will avoid the problem [0]. I can't tell if their claim is sound. Can someone with expertise weigh in?

0:https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...

New comment by pascalmahe in "Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories"

pascalmahe — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:45:49 +0000

I recognized the name from the game Stay?[0] A very good game I heartily recommend if you're into fantasy.

0: https://ejadelomax.itch.io/stay

New comment by pascalmahe in "In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice"

pascalmahe — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 14:05:12 +0000

Parent said nothing about only men being interested in controlling women. On the contrary, liberation of women can be liberation from mothers, mother in-laws, grandmothers...

New comment by pascalmahe in "In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice"

pascalmahe — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 14:03:41 +0000

That's because men are not victims of a system tailored to others' needs. Women are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India

New comment by pascalmahe in "In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice"

pascalmahe — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 14:01:08 +0000

> Liberating women from what exactly?

Take your pick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_women_in_Indi...

New comment by pascalmahe in "Introduction to Window Functions in SQL"

pascalmahe — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 13:39:19 +0000

Could you please develop how to do paging with window functions?

It's been some time since I've done serious work with SQL yet I remember that all paging solutions I've found (eg. top results on SO) are always platform-specific so having a platform-independent way of doing it would mean I could finally try to remember it.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Code Points"

pascalmahe — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 09:45:17 +0000

Lots of game codepoints. I'm especially impressed with the mahjong set. Less so with the dominoes, they seem near-unreadable in any size below 14pt.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Roof blows off new Tesla Model Y"

pascalmahe — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 14:51:44 +0000

I'm genuinely curious, could you explain how the touchscreen is a disaster?

I haven't seen a Tesla interior so when you say "all controls" it's a bit concerning. I'm assuming you're talking only of non-driving related control...

New comment by pascalmahe in "Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades"

pascalmahe — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 09:12:53 +0000

Not on the same scale but, in France, fire alarms are tested every first Wednesday of the month at midday sharp. Though you don't hear them from everywhere so it can still be quite a shock after a few years of not hearing it.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories"

pascalmahe — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 13:55:17 +0000

Always impressed by Mel's story.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Oil Is the New Data"

pascalmahe — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 13:19:06 +0000

Good on you for knowing already. But not everyone knows or knows how deep the rabbit hole goes. And articles like this are good reminders or good ways to learn.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Tesla’s competitors find that going electric has its own set of problems"

pascalmahe — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 10:23:23 +0000

My French bias is going to show but I wonder how Renault's Zoe is doing. It's been out for 6 years. Granted, Renault is completely absent from the US market and the car is uh... really not marketable for the US (it's tiny).

New comment by pascalmahe in "List of Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler"

pascalmahe — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 14:18:31 +0000

22 recorded attempts in 12 years. But is that a lot or not? Do we have comparable lists for Stalin, Mao or FDR? Otherwise it's just a single data point.

Though I'll concede that having the list for him and not others does point to more attempts...

New comment by pascalmahe in "Cédric Villani: mathematician challenging to be Paris mayor"

pascalmahe — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 10:00:09 +0000

For the racism part: France, as an ex-empire, is very attractive to its former colonies' students. And we have agreements to make it easier for them to come. So we get many students from Africa or the Middle East, often on merits and/or scholarships. In my engineering school, there were students from Turkey, Sudan (might be South Sudan now)...

Raising the price of tuition will mostly impact people from these countries rather than people from other European or American countries.

New comment by pascalmahe in "I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator"

pascalmahe — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:48:07 +0000

Thank you for this!

Especially this part:

>SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.

I'd seen Monica Cellio's resignation and the general reaction when SE announced the new CoC and was really weirded out when all the answers to said CoC were of the "but do I _really_ have to use people's pronouns? And what if they post it after/elsewhere? Can I be punished for that?" variety. It looked (to me) like everyone was trying to avoid a weirdly specific case.

Knowing that's what happened to Monica Cellio makes it a lot clearer.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Why is Middle School so hard?"

pascalmahe — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 07:20:20 +0000

In France we have them. There's "école primaire" from 6 to 10 (5 years), "collège" from 11 to 14 (4 years) and "lycée" from 15 to 17 (3 years). Anecdotally, most people I spoke to felt that middle school years were the hardest: figuring themselves out, low popularity but high-stakes social games. High school was somewhat easier, people have found their cliques and the pressure from the harder work and longer hours left less time to play social games.

Off-topic but I have to get it off my chest: the years from middle school onwards have the dumbest names in France. They're named by counting backwards to the end of high school. So you start at "sixième" (sixth), go up to "cinquième" (fifth)... all the way to "première" (first), which is the before-last year! The last year is, of course, "terminale" (last, as in 'last in a series'). I'd love to convert to a sane naming scheme.

New comment by pascalmahe in "France Set to Roll Out Nationwide Facial Recognition ID Program"

pascalmahe — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 11:58:46 +0000

I don't know much about infosec but I know enough to see that this tool is not ready. It's really scary. Also the fact that it's not discussed much, here in France. It's the first time I've heard of it. From a country that has had a government agency for protecting digital liberties since 1978 (which made laws about what data you can and cannot keep as a software provider) it's a big change of direction.

New comment by pascalmahe in "Looking Back at the Snowden Revelations"

pascalmahe — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 09:58:45 +0000

As someone not from the US, the passages about how easy it was are clear reminders that just because only the NSA got caught, does not mean only the NSA was doing it. Even if they have by far the biggest budget...