Hacker News: seandougall

New comment by seandougall in "The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword Syntax"

seandougall — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 17:47:39 +0000

> I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon"

I think you may be referring to the promises of ABI stability? They kept promising that "soon" starting around Swift 3 (IIRC) and kicking the can down the road for a while there, but it is stable now on Apple's OSes. But I don't recall seeing promises of source stability back then; they were pretty open about the fact that the language was still evolving.

New comment by seandougall in "Update to L.A.'s stay-at-home orders"

seandougall — Wed, 13 May 2020 00:07:23 +0000

Pet grooming has been classified as essential (by California) since late April. Our local groomer reopened quickly after that. There might be some cities that have other restrictions, but grooming is already open in most places.

New comment by seandougall in "Copyrighting melodies to avoid accidental infringement [video]"

seandougall — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 19:46:01 +0000

You can generally only copyright the parts you change. Sort of like how Disney can copyright their version of Rapunzel, but they don’t own the fairy tale.

(Edit: that’s assuming you’re asking about a derivative work, which I may have misunderstood)

New comment by seandougall in "MIDI 2.0, first major overhaul to music interface standard from 1983"

seandougall — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 22:59:28 +0000

Back of envelope: With running status, a note on message is two bytes on a 31250 baud connection. That means the latency from transport is on the order of half a millisecond. If you’re feeling latency, it’s in the gear, not the protocol. MIDI implementation quality has long been wildly inconsistent, and I don’t see a reason to believe that will change with MIDI 2.0.

New comment by seandougall in "L.A.'s Lost Transit"

seandougall — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 18:09:29 +0000

> it takes 2 to 3 hours to get anywhere useful with it

Everyone's definition of "useful" is different. I personally run into far fewer last-mile issues with Metro Rail than I did with BART when I lived up north. Heck, BART had to run a bus service to OAK until just a few years ago, and they've had a lot more time to sort this out.

> They squandered a huge opportunity to do it right, to dig subways and put the rail on a grade-separated medium. Instead they opt for light-rail that shares the same surface roads as cars, thereby ensuring that the system is a failure.

No, they did dig subways where needed (and where geologically feasible). And they opted to use existing right-of-ways in other areas, so that the thing could actually get built. Look at the Gold Line going through South Pasadena; it cuts diagonally through a fairly dense, wealthy residential area, which it can do because the neighborhood was built up around tracks that were there long ago. Without that existing right-of-way, the whole line would have gone the way of the 710 connector.

New comment by seandougall in "What DoorDash pays, after expenses, and what’s happening with tips"

seandougall — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 05:18:07 +0000

If it’s at all like driving for Uber/Lyft, they likely do both.

New comment by seandougall in "Apple may have to abandon Lightning connector cable"

seandougall — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 05:06:46 +0000

I have small kids who are prone to tripping over cables while trying to squeeze into tight spaces. Lightning connectors handle that stress just fine, but micro USB is no match!

New comment by seandougall in "Apple may have to abandon Lightning connector cable"

seandougall — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 01:19:22 +0000

In my experience, the connector has never been implicated in a failing Lightning cable; it’s always been the cable itself. By contrast, the average lifespan of a micro USB cable in my household is a couple months, before the connectors themselves get bent beyond repair.

New comment by seandougall in "Ever Plugged a USB in Wrong? (2019)"

seandougall — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 19:58:03 +0000

The last thing I would want is a peripheral whose data connection was on a MagSafe connector. It’s specifically designed to be able to disconnect easily by accident.

New comment by seandougall in "The FDA Announces Two More Antacid Recalls Due to Cancer Risk"

seandougall — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 17:32:05 +0000

I'd like to find out more about what kind of setup Grandma has, in that case. I'm sitting here on an unmodified Safari installation, and the top of the window is obscured by a giant floating banner ad, while the bottom is obscured by a "subscribe" banner, which is _itself_ obscured by an oversized cookie notice. All of which leaves less than 80px of height to read the actual article content. Given the nice large font size, that means I can see three lines of text at any given moment. I didn't have the same issue that GP did, but it's definitely true that Wired has been adopting some awful web development practices for a while now.

(Side note: My kids' grandma is a retired software developer. So I guess maybe it's just that the average grandma is more sophisticated than we are?)

New comment by seandougall in "Mazda made its first EV artificially slower 'to feel more like a gas car'"

seandougall — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 01:38:23 +0000

Nah, we’re just jealous because you can fit in those half-size street parking spaces in the Sunset.

New comment by seandougall in "Writing 1/3 in binary (2014) [video]"

seandougall — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 18:06:23 +0000

Same here, for what it's worth -- I got redirected to a fake antivirus download (also in Safari), but only on the first load.

New comment by seandougall in "The StingRay Is Why the 4th Amendment Was Written (2017)"

seandougall — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 05:16:00 +0000

> whether one can trust iOS airplane mode to fully take the phone offline.

I mean, if Apple says airplane mode turns off the cell radio, that’s a falsifiable claim, so you don’t have to take it entirely on faith. It might be possible to hide it in the UI, but you can’t hide a radio signal.

New comment by seandougall in "Windows 95 UI Design"

seandougall — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 05:06:08 +0000

Strictly speaking, they also have to be compiled against a new enough SDK to get Dark Mode support via the native GUI widgets. For apps that need backward compatibility, that can get hairy. (But yeah, that’s nothing compared to what Electron has wrought.)

New comment by seandougall in "Facebook Discovers Fake AI-Generated Profiles"

seandougall — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 05:01:55 +0000

3 Galatians is largely a deprecation notice for all the Old Testament laws (at least in the context of Christianity). But yeah, some people like to ignore that and use Leviticus to bolster their twisted political views, and if you take it in isolation, it does come across as pretty clear-cut.

(edit: and if you accept their four-degrees-of-game-of-telephone translation at face value, as sibling comment points out)

New comment by seandougall in "Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency"

seandougall — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:52:33 +0000

Programmable means something can have bugs. I prefer my celery bug-free.

New comment by seandougall in "Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency"

seandougall — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:50:25 +0000

> We're putting it out there as a toy.

And that right there is the honesty that the rest of this thread is missing.

New comment by seandougall in "Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency"

seandougall — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:03:57 +0000

> Every person to person transaction of the instrument leaves no digital record or footprint

That's true of cash as well, but that doesn't mean it's totally untraceable, as bills still have serial numbers. I think what GP is getting at is, Kong notes must completely lack any sort of persistent unique identifier in order to be an improvement over cash in anonymity. Can Kong make this claim?

New comment by seandougall in "Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”?"

seandougall — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 03:23:50 +0000

Yeah, peanuts really show the quality difference. Half of the fun size Snickers I’ve gotten the past few years have tasted straight up rancid.

New comment by seandougall in "Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible"

seandougall — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 04:13:30 +0000

It did suffice! There used to be a pencil indicator next to the channel name in its usual spot, and it worked great. It maybe could have been more visually obvious, since leaving a draft in a chat so really is a rare phenomenon, but it was still massively preferable to the capricious ordering it does now.