Hacker News: sio8ohPi

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently"

sio8ohPi — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 04:56:29 +0000

Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit...

> The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "The Strategic Oil Bombing Campaign"

sio8ohPi — Sun, 04 May 2025 20:04:43 +0000

Or for that matter the author's own book, The Secret Horsepower Race.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)"

sio8ohPi — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:04:21 +0000

Having been on the other side of the table... there's a tactic students will sometimes use, where they don't understand the question but will simply attempt to regurgitate everything written on their notecard that is related in hopes that they'll accidentally say the right words. Sounds like you did understand it, but the volume perhaps made it look like you were just dumping. It is indeed annoying to grade.

Grading is boring, tedious, and quickly wears down one's enthusiasm. The words of M Bison come to mind: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)"

sio8ohPi — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:52:45 +0000

There's a certain irony in your outrage at his failure to control his emotions, even as your own rage leads you to dream of hurting his family.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction"

sio8ohPi — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 03:18:32 +0000

I feel like the featured articles are good if that's what you want. The archives go back like 20 years.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "The case for letting Malibu burn (1995)"

sio8ohPi — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:06:10 +0000

Townhouses with no intervening space would likely be an improvement. Browse Altadena in streetview and you'll see loads of houses with vegetation -- tinder -- stacked between them. Getting rid of those intervening spaces entirely would reduce the surface area exposed to embers while simultaneously depriving homeowners the temptation to store fuel in unwise places.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?"

sio8ohPi — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:37:10 +0000

Normally they land with flaps down, which reduces landing speed.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?"

sio8ohPi — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:36:10 +0000

Because the system is bureaucratic and stupid. Notices warning pilots about irrelevant obstacles are, literally, a meme. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/wzsvru/the_notam_sy...

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?"

sio8ohPi — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:12:09 +0000

No. The ILS localizer was 260 meters from the threshold, not 2.1 NM (3800m).

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?"

sio8ohPi — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 23:00:25 +0000

I don't see that note. There's one "extreme caution" note but it's about some other obstacle 2.1NM from the threshold of runway 1.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Jeju Air Jet Crashes in South Korea With Over 170 Dead or Missing"

sio8ohPi — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 03:05:06 +0000

It has happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_International_Airline...

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Efficient German Language Learning: Is Anki the Answer?"

sio8ohPi — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 21:49:19 +0000

This is very personal. I credit "fun" classroom conversations with scaring me off French for a decade. Anki on the other hand is great, it's a big dopamine hit when it lets me pick out a word in the wild for the first time, especially when it's something niche that I was dubious about learning.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Efficient German Language Learning: Is Anki the Answer?"

sio8ohPi — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 20:39:50 +0000

I've been satisfied with Anki for French over the last year or so.

The big schisms I see among other users tend to be sentence cards vs vocab cards, pre-existing decks vs build-your-own, and whether or not to include NL -> TL cards. Some people also favor cards with only TL and images. Personally I felt sentence cards did little for me, and I feel building my own deck is an important part of it.

From retrospectives from people abandoning anki, I get the impression that the most common problems are becoming too rigid (making it an exercise in memorizing the dictionary), and using Anki to the detriment of other forms of engagement with the language. I think that's one of the virtues of the build-your-own deck approach: it forces you to balance Anki with other forms of study.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Ask HN: What are your most regretted tech purchases?"

sio8ohPi — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 19:52:53 +0000

I'm not the parent commenter, but I use a Dygma Raise (60% split kb). It has some issues but navigation hasn't been a problem. I use two of the thumb buttons as momentary (push-and-hold) layer shifts, with hjkl (and asdf) becoming arrow keys as long as that navigation layer is active, and qerf/yuio becoming home/end/pgup/pgdown in that navigation layer.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Ask HN: What are your most regretted tech purchases?"

sio8ohPi — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 03:42:24 +0000

HTC Vive Pro 2.

Unlike some of the other people listing VR headsets, I actually use VR regularly. But the Vive in particular was an expensive piece of junk: it lasted not even a year before one of the displays started to die, then experienced the same failure again 6-7 months after warranty repairs. Apparently this failure mode is common.

In general I think it's best to stay away from the high-end headsets: HTC, Varjo, Pimax, Bigscreen, everyone I know with them has experienced problems of some sort or other. Many of the midrange headsets are worse on paper, but seem to have fewer issues in practice.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "High housing costs may be California's biggest problem"

sio8ohPi — Tue, 14 May 2024 00:48:27 +0000

Subsidizing a heavily regulated industry sounds like a good way to waste a lot of money.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Gigantic new aircraft design aims to create the largest plane ever to fly"

sio8ohPi — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 07:32:28 +0000

External transport of wings has been done:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/wreq34/antonov_an...

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Kids Today Can't Read – Even College Kids: The Bite-Sizing of Books"

sio8ohPi — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:02:44 +0000

> A generation who spends nine hours a day on their phones has no time for books.

Incorrect. The linked source only claims Gen Z averages "around 9 hours of screen time per day", not phones specifically.

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The article presents a graph of "books finished per year" by generation as evidence that reading is declining. It doesn't address whether or not books read increases with age within a cohort. An obvious possibility is that GenZ and Millennials are busy with school and work, while GenX and especially retired boomers have more time to read. Note this also excludes audiobooks, which anecdotally seem popular with Millennials because you can listen to them while commuting to work.

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I'm unconvinced by the argument the blog makes.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Movement of pilot's seat a focus of probe into Latam Boeing flight, report says"

sio8ohPi — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 17:50:24 +0000

Typically this happens during take-off when rotating. This particular failure mode doesn't make much sense for an airliner in cruise.

New comment by sio8ohPi in "Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure"

sio8ohPi — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:08:36 +0000

Number of groundings depends on the subjective judgement of FAA employees. It's not useful as an objective measure.

Christ, Boeing planes used to just spontaneously explode back in the 90s, and the only reason more people weren't killed was that two of the three had the good fortune to happen on the ground.