Hacker News: spectra72

New comment by spectra72 in "My two-part desk setup"

spectra72 — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:22:27 +0000

Walking into my office, you definitely see the backside of my dual monitor + audio interfaces + studio monitor speakers (I dabble in music production as well as tech) from the doorway.

I just live with it. I'm on the good side. The few times a day my wife needs to talk to me she just comes around to my side of the desk anyways.

New comment by spectra72 in "A Life Hack for the Ultra-Wealthy Is Going Mainstream"

spectra72 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:03:58 +0000

I've been working from home for almost a decade.

My wife has long referred to me as her house manager.

I handle coordinating the various outside contractors needed for things like plumbing, electrical. I coordinate the house cleaning service. I handle the trips to the vet for the dogs. I'm here to sign for packages and deliveries. I handle taking things to the UPS/FedEx/USPS drop off.

Can we get an article on our pioneering life hacks as well?

New comment by spectra72 in "U.S. pauses all military aid to Ukraine"

spectra72 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 21:28:16 +0000

As has the US with all of their aid.

Yet, the US is the one that is forever chided for being negligent to the terms of the agreement.

New comment by spectra72 in "U.S. pauses all military aid to Ukraine"

spectra72 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:39:15 +0000

The UK, France and China also signed that same agreement.

New comment by spectra72 in "The quest to find and save the Vasa (2019)"

spectra72 — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 23:20:43 +0000

And another good thing about the Vasa museum?

The ABBA museum is only a 5 minute walk away.

And easy two-fer.

New comment by spectra72 in "Wyoming Braces for Dangerous Windchills Up to -45 Can Cause Frostbite in Minutes"

spectra72 — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:19:21 +0000

-45F is pretty cold. Last weekend in southwestern North Dakota windchill temps were down in the -70F range. It's -51F in my hometown in northern ND right now.

An interesting tidbit was that with the -70F in ND and it being 92F in Miami at the same time there was a 162 degree temp difference in lower 48 states.

New comment by spectra72 in "Nobody cares"

spectra72 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 04:27:18 +0000

Because we aren't bombarded with "Why don't we do things like they do in Italy" messages on every online forum like we are with Japan.

New comment by spectra72 in "1/3 of women < 44 have no children and the trend is rising. What is causing it?"

spectra72 — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 03:04:14 +0000

Even in highly liberal/socialistic countries with low levels of religion women are opting out.

It all boils down to choice. And women are choosing "No thanks" in high numbers even in countries where you'd think most of the barriers are quite low.

New comment by spectra72 in "1/3 of women < 44 have no children and the trend is rising. What is causing it?"

spectra72 — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 02:44:54 +0000

Turns out, actually having to give birth is kind of a drag, even in the best of conditions, and women who realize they have a choice in the matter are more and more likely to nope right out of it.

Or at least nope out at levels less than the current 2.1 children needed for replacement levels.

New comment by spectra72 in "Funeral Food"

spectra72 — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 21:08:43 +0000

In my family, the difference would have been that the good food was from my German relations, who were Lutheran. (as were my Norwegian relations, but they didn't cook as good for funerals).

My wife's family is also German, but they are Catholic, from another part of the state and their funeral food is pretty good too.

New comment by spectra72 in "Is it safe to use __secret_internals_do_not_use_or_you_will_be_fired?"

spectra72 — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 06:10:22 +0000

I had to read that multiple times to prove to myself that the text didn't literall call out "Unix Wizards".

After 10+ years of doing qa on the ZFS appliance I completely ignored the warning and you could have slipped anything past me in the text.

New comment by spectra72 in "Listen to the moment the guns fell silent ending World War I"

spectra72 — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 03:07:11 +0000

Desire to kill may be a bit strong but I distinctly remember sitting with my WWII veteran grandfather in November 1989 (US Thankgiving to be exact) and watching the stories of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the obvious prospect of a united Germany in the near future.

My grandfather and I watched CNN silently and after a while he got up, and as he left the room he remarked "We'll be fighting the bastards within 50 years."

He's got 20 years.

New comment by spectra72 in "UPS Has 260,000 Union Workers and They've Just Authorized a Strike"

spectra72 — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 20:09:09 +0000

I was working for UPS during that strike. We didn't lose a lot of drivers from what I recall because they had relatively nice hourly wages to come back to and could weather the storm a bit.

We lost almost the entire load/unload staff though. The grunts in the truck at 12am unloading semi-truck after semi-truck worth of boxes. They were only getting ~$8/hr and couldn't afford to be out for 2 weeks. Out of 12 guys on the team I supervised I think 2 came back.

New comment by spectra72 in "NFL Releases Finite Element Helmet Models"

spectra72 — Tue, 15 May 2018 22:23:22 +0000

They tried something like that. The Kazoo Helmet. It had the unfortunate propensity to briefly stick to an opposing helmet during a collision rather than slide off the other helmet's hard surface causing a wrenching of the neck.

New comment by spectra72 in "Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders"

spectra72 — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 21:18:59 +0000

If the recent book is to be believed at all, we now know that the person that Trump outsmarted most of all was himself. He never intended to actually win.

New comment by spectra72 in "In Final Holiday Push, UPS Grabs Its Accountants to Deliver Packages"

spectra72 — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 04:08:59 +0000

Interesting. I used to work in a UPS hub in Colorado as a unload manager. As I was in "management" I was explicitly not in the union. Actually, having been a manager, even though 20 years has passed I can still never rejoin the union at UPS.

One time in my area a yard driver had backed up to the unload bay with one trailer door open. Trucks were usually loaded so full that opening both doors to a trailer would allow the packages to start spilling out. So they'd carefully open a single door to the trailer and back it to the bay and then an unloader would remove a few rows of boxes, giving sufficient clearance to open both doors without spilling. After those few rows were removed, we'd call the yard drivers and they'd come back and and pull the trailer out a few feet, open the other door, and then back the trailer back to the unload bay. We'd then unload the entire trailer.

During one of these movements, a few packages fell out of the trailer onto the ground. The driver simply unhooked the trailer and left it about 15ft off of the unload door with the packages just sitting on the ground. They weren't supposed to pick up packages. That was an unloaders job. I, as the manager, was supposed to get one of my guys out there to move the packages, and then call the yard drivers to come back, re-hook to the trailer and back it in.

Well, this time, I simply went out there and threw the packages back in the trailer myself. All of my guys were deep into unloading other trailers and there is constant pressure to get those trailers emptied and moved, so pulling a guy out of one trailer to come outside and pick up a couple of packages no small disruption.

Not 5 minutes later there was a driver and a union steward yelling at me with a grievance in hand. I was taking work from union employees by picking up these packages and thus had to allow the union employee his grievance worth 2 hours of his pay.

I'm actually shocked that management is out there delivering packages.