Hacker News: ptaffs

New comment by ptaffs in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ptaffs — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:29:17 +0000

Browser tabs are the fault here and browsers are trying to be OS environment, so Alt+Tab is useful for major task switching. I agree it's inconsistent and annoying, but I like Alt+Tab as a way to try to find the window I'm writing that email to someone.

New comment by ptaffs in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

ptaffs — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:05:32 +0000

I understood the point of the question was how shells work seems very context driven. An & here means something different to an & there. IFS=\| read A B C <<< "first|second|third" the read is executed and the IFS assignment is local to the one command echo hello this will "hello this", even though in the assignment above the space was important an & at the end of a line is run the task background and in the middle of the redirect isn't. All these things can be learned, but it's hard to explain the patterns, I think.

New comment by ptaffs in "Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)"

ptaffs — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:56:11 +0000

Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac... And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either. I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.

New comment by ptaffs in "Resizeable Bar Support on the Raspberry Pi"

ptaffs — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:42:23 +0000

...and they have time and access to label maker, as opposed to sharpie. That's some dedication to having order.

New comment by ptaffs in "Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.'"

ptaffs — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:08:23 +0000

you, maybe politely, imply the police might abuse these tools, rather than actually they do routinely abuse the tools. For instance, one recent case which isn't speculation: https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caug...

New comment by ptaffs in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

ptaffs — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:13:39 +0000

I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.

New comment by ptaffs in "Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon"

ptaffs — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:58:45 +0000

So, who loses money here and why aren't they upset? And are they important enough to worry the president. Those of us without stock aren't direct victims here, but someone must be. Bosch is mentioned in one story, I wonder what they're doing. My observation is lots of friends of the president are being forgiven crime, such as the J6ers, who if you believe the documentaries were violent toward the police, but the police aren't minding the pardons?

New comment by ptaffs in "Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers"

ptaffs — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:55:48 +0000

And if the user deliberately or accidentally doesn't spend their money, or if the Cafe doesn't attribute spend to the right user, or even that owner begins to resent the further sliver of profit, there's incentive to game the system. Badge might ask users to upload receipt images for disputes, but that's an expensive business overhead. The problem is based on the problem that cafe staff can't or won't gently enforce the social contract that you pay if you take a table, and the proposed system is that cafe staff are doing exactly the same thing and the owner is paying Badge a commission. Might a user complain to the staff that they were "marked" unfairly? We live in a world where store owners add 3% to credit card transactions because of the loss to the Banks but would they want to return to the days of stores managing their own customer tab/lending?

New comment by ptaffs in "Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers"

ptaffs — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:25:21 +0000

>>The laptop workers using Badge pledge a minimum spend. Badge gets a commission of that minimum spend. Cafe owners get more people and revenue, so they are happy to pay that.

A user books a space using Badge, and promises to spend, and the Cafe owner pays Badge a commission on a pledge. This seems ripe for a disputes process (the customer didn't spend) and Cafe owner actually not being "happy to pay that."

New comment by ptaffs in "Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers"

ptaffs — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:45:27 +0000

Yes customers over-staying, complaining, not spending enough seems to be the problem Cafe owners have. One near me had a threatening sign that "if you're sitting, you need to be sipping" (you're welcome, but not for long). The solution of a printed-flyer to tell specific customers to move on seems like the good idea here, and I would think a cafe owner could print a card which says "we need to pay the bills, you've taken this table for an hour, please come get another drink." or maybe ask two laptop users to share one table. Also noteworthy is the Capital One (ING Direct (USA)) model where laptop users are welcome, but the Capital One Cafes are brand enforcing, not profit making coffee shops. This 2005 Slate article is one of my favorite on the topic: https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...

New comment by ptaffs in "VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia"

ptaffs — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:47:22 +0000

DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.

New comment by ptaffs in "My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server"

ptaffs — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 16:45:44 +0000

I agree and piling on. Capitalism is good for those with capital, the wealthy few. Then wonder where they got the capital, and mostly it's something environmentally bad, like the extraction industry such as coal and oil.

New comment by ptaffs in "Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities"

ptaffs — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:45:35 +0000

It's behind a paywall, I think. Do they talk about money laundering? https://alessa.com/blog/real-estate-money-laundering-red-fla... https://trustforlondon.org.uk/research/faulty-towers-underst... https://www.thedailyupside.com/economics/international-econo...

New comment by ptaffs in "In the long run, we're all Dad"

ptaffs — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 16:39:16 +0000

As an atheist, mention or quotes from the bible are interesting to me because they help explain our current culture. I'm just challenging your proposal that (all) atheists are not curious.

New comment by ptaffs in "Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically"

ptaffs — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 23:18:09 +0000

maybe off topic but home ownership is one good and common way to build generational wealth (opinions/citations below) but renting or lease-holding does not realize as an asset which retains its value to be passed to children. (leases can be traded, i suppose, but have a landlord and possibility of termination). But how is generational wealth and social mobility improved or hindered by multi occupancy, high-rise living and city planning such as talked about here?

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/mortgages/articles/this-is-w... https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146960942/how-buying-a-home-...

New comment by ptaffs in "Write your passwords down (2010)"

ptaffs — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:00:27 +0000

This is great until you find a website which requires or disallows select special characters. With so many sites allowing a password reset via email, I wish we embraced the password-less login email "magic" link such as used by Slack.

New comment by ptaffs in "Ever Given report highlights Suez Canal pilots’ role in grounding"

ptaffs — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 19:28:18 +0000

I think you know Bard doesn't. These systems literally make things up in a convincing way. The lawyers who were prosecuted "believed ChatGPT had greater reach than standard databases." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/nyregion/lawyer-chatgpt-s...

New comment by ptaffs in "The origin of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover art (2015)"

ptaffs — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:56:58 +0000

well, that needs to be a t-shirt.

New comment by ptaffs in "Brains speed up perception by guessing what's next (2019)"

ptaffs — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:42:44 +0000

i think this helps explain why "you can't tell people anything" problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35282293 in that "most people aren’t very good at visualizing hypothetical, at imagining what something they haven’t experienced might be like, or even what something they have experienced might be like if it were somewhat different." Because the new information isn't aligned with their prediction. I think this is leveraged in propaganda to move a population to believe something untrue by leveraging a context and amplifying it. Literally enforcing prejudice.

New comment by ptaffs in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

ptaffs — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:05:30 +0000

rent and maintenance if they have branch property, salaries and benefits for staff at least. Banks have a lot of regulation and audit requirements which take work.