Hacker News: sidlls

New comment by sidlls in "SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'"

sidlls — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 03:03:14 +0000

It wouldn't surprise me. This city is corrupt as hell.

SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

sidlls — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 03:20:29 +0000

Article URL: https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-running-on-floppy-disks-but-city-fears-catastrophic-failure-before-upgrade/14624828/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39957909

Points: 91

# Comments: 238

New comment by sidlls in "The appendix is not, in fact, useless"

sidlls — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 01:42:08 +0000

I must not be human. For factual information of this sort I just prefer the information. The story is irrelevant and usually too mundane to be bothered with

New comment by sidlls in "The appendix is not, in fact, useless"

sidlls — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 01:40:06 +0000

I always thought this was for two reasons: one as you say is to show the plumbing works, the other is because not passing the meconium (combination of stuff ingested while in the uterus) indicates other more serious conditions might exist

New comment by sidlls in "We've already seen category 6 hurricanes – scientists want to make it official"

sidlls — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 03:46:53 +0000

I’ve been in cat 1 and cat 2 storms. They’re awesome in their power for destruction. I’ve evacuated from a category 4 storm, which did a huge amount of damage in the city when it hit.

A category 5 storm is essentially going to destroy everything in its path already. What good would adding a 6th category do?

New comment by sidlls in "Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]"

sidlls — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 06:48:00 +0000

EM’s vector fields formulation is fairly straightforward: it’s all curls and divergence. Any 3rd (-ish) semester undergrad multivariate calculus course is likely to cover it in sufficient depth. “Mathematical Methods for Physicists” covers it in sufficient depth, for example, provided you already have a thorough understanding of the prerequisite material. Most undergrad physics degree curriculums should have E&M courses whose texts (e.g. Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism, Griffiths) cover enough of the details. If you want to pursue it further than an undergraduate level study, you’ll also want a good text on differential equations that has or is supplemented by material covering, e.g., spherical harmonics and Bessel functions (among other things). I wish I could remember what I used, but it was…more years ago than I care to say when I was an grad student.

New comment by sidlls in "Five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer"

sidlls — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 12:07:02 +0000

I'm American. I've been in two economic classes: dirt poor (as in, more or less homeless, when I was a child, for a bit) and now on the low end of rich (net worth in the mid 7 figure range). I've seen both sides of this inequality, in America, personally. And new social circles that have opened up have given me something of a first-hand view of the "truly" rich as well.

I can list numerous ways that it's a problem, if you like. Here's one to start: "as long as people can move geographically" isn't applicable to those on the lower end of the economic scale. Your comment represents something generalizable about the rich, too: they are completely oblivious to just how hard and draining (physically, mentally, and emotionally) it is to be impoverished. I shudder to think what it's like for the poor in poorer countries.

New comment by sidlls in "NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes"

sidlls — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 03:46:40 +0000

This is ridiculous. Set aside the (incredibly optimistic, to be charitable) thinking that is going into the acceleration of these probes. The astronavigation itself is hugely questionable, especially with probes that aren't big enough to hold the kinds of equipment necessary to detect bodies that would perturb the trajectory, let alone make adjustments after encountering these.

I don't think people realize how mind-bogglingly, incomprehensibly HUGE space is. It's BIG. Like think of the biggest thing you can comprehend, and it's not even the size of an atom in comparison to even "short" distances in space.

New comment by sidlls in "NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes"

sidlls — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 03:41:39 +0000

At 0.25c the probes would blast through the centauri system in minutes. Hardly enough time to collect data more useful than what we already can sitting here practically stationary, even if absurdly far away.

New comment by sidlls in "Error handling in Go web apps shouldn't be so awkward"

sidlls — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 14:19:06 +0000

It does not have 0 performance impact, it's not rare, and in applications that are in the hot path, error handling is also in the hot path.

New comment by sidlls in "Error handling in Go web apps shouldn't be so awkward"

sidlls — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 02:35:33 +0000

That "detail of implementation" is what is used by user code, e.g., `myError.As(...)` uses reflection, implicitly.

New comment by sidlls in "Error handling in Go web apps shouldn't be so awkward"

sidlls — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 02:27:26 +0000

https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.21.6:src/...

New comment by sidlls in "Error handling in Go web apps shouldn't be so awkward"

sidlls — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 02:23:38 +0000

I really appreciate the lack of magic in go's error handling. I do not appreciate the specific implementation of errors in go. It's inefficient (`reflect` is all over the place) and prone to obscuring the actual "error path". In applications of non-trivial size, it also becomes an obstacle to implementing structured logging and other components of observability. This makes debugging/triage of, say, a production incident harder than it needs to be.

New comment by sidlls in "IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023"

sidlls — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:20:12 +0000

Some tech is. Meanwhile large tech companies that are actually innovating (FAANG, near-FAANG, and FAANG-adjacent companies) are not. My comp has never been higher, and we're hiring. In the bay area.

New comment by sidlls in "Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content"

sidlls — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 23:17:41 +0000

It does take a long time, and also "real life" immersion, to learn a language deeply. It's the immersion part that Duolingo doesn't do well if at all. So it has to artificially slow down those things it does do in order to keep subscribers.

New comment by sidlls in "Things engineers believe about Web development"

sidlls — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:02:34 +0000

I think the argument is generally that most applications' "complex interactions" are artificial contrivances and are unnecessary. I certainly think so.

New comment by sidlls in "Things engineers believe about Web development"

sidlls — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:54:43 +0000

How is SPA a simpler starting point? It requires more code and more abstractions in the client from the onset. One might argue that that complexity would just exist in the backend in an MPA, but that's not true: there is some additional backend complexity, but not nearly as much as required to support the multitude of clients that exist for the baseline in an MPA.

New comment by sidlls in "FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s"

sidlls — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 19:49:17 +0000

It will come out in the NTSB report, if it's true. Though that will take quite a bit of time.

New comment by sidlls in "BYD's YangWang U8 launched, can float on water for 30 minutes and sail 3km/h"

sidlls — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 19:43:47 +0000

Please stop moving the goalposts. Iterating on the past is different from thieving entire designs, and you know it.

New comment by sidlls in "BYD's YangWang U8 launched, can float on water for 30 minutes and sail 3km/h"

sidlls — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 19:37:52 +0000

Because it demonstrates a theft of tech and design, which puts their credibility and integrity in question. Is the derivative safe (actually safe, not government-of-China wanting a feather in its cap rubber-stamp safe)? Is the derivative actually comparable (i.e. is the marketing a lie)? Aside from that, do we want to reward companies that steal other companies' ideas?