Hacker News: throwaway173738

New comment by throwaway173738 in "US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:55:52 +0000

Just call 811 and let the utility figure it out.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:21:20 +0000

It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The senior engineer death spiral"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:08:36 +0000

The real prescription to stopping this is to only commit to looking at the problem for a few days regardless of how much progress you’re making. And never take on open-ended tasks with no sunset date. A CTO had me take an open-ended dev project once and I learned that the lack of a time box made it really miserable.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Prompts aren’t Real"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 23:49:32 +0000

We could have a sort of “Representational State Transfer” using HTTP to represent the state of resources in both a human readable and machine readable format.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:39:26 +0000

This is too mechanistic. You also choose which emotions to pay attention to.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:19:44 +0000

That doesn’t excuse us doing it when we’re trying to cop the moral high ground. Otherwise we’re just in a race to see who can do the worst things.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:18:32 +0000

Yeah that’s true of Azure and of GCP but not AWS. Azure clearly states this in their documentation. Nobody was trying to hide it from you.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:15:56 +0000

I live in the real world where we follow the law because otherwise some of us might end up in jail and all of us will be out of a job. We pick and choose through our elected officials here.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit"

throwaway173738 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:35:43 +0000

Not really. They’re a day or more late most of the time in the major metro where I live. Usually only when I’m relying on them.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:38:22 +0000

Nobody invented writing. Various people probably independently started making marks on things to signify amounts of stuff. Some people drew likenesses of things. This continued for millenia and became more and more elaborate. It wasn’t born from someone’s head on a single fateful day. All human endeavor is like that, from the most minute thing like carpentry nails to the most elaborate. All of it is the result of collaboration between us and our ancestors.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:53:48 +0000

An HOA has a lot more leeway to do whatever it wants than other local governments. They get to act as government sometimes, then as a corporation sometimes, and then as a group of amateur lawyers sometimes. They can both pass laws and try you for violating them without recourse. And IME only the most toxic people stay on the board for very long.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:29:14 +0000

Well they tend to optimize heavily by discouraging things like bathroom breaks, and I’ve seen evidence of this thinking in how they treat their drivers. I’m not sure why this would be extraordinary? On its face those incentives don’t sound bad except that they will incentivize unsafe behavior in edge cases like this.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:41:23 +0000

I wonder if Amazon does.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:10:06 +0000

Or it could just be a series of images. I’m looking for a way of not taking 10 pounds of books on a trip not perfect fidelity.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "'Old Person Smell'"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:06:09 +0000

6% or better white vinegar in the rinse cycle removes exercise smell from synthetic clothes too. IME it’s cheaper and better than the sanitizer. I just put a cup of it in the bleach cup in the washer. It vaporizes in the dryer. I wash everything in cold water with mild detergent and vinegar.

You can also soak clothes in it to remove concrete/cement.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The Lost Art of Carrying Loads"

throwaway173738 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:23:45 +0000

Yeah the writing tastes like processed food. There’s no substance just “here’s some stuff people do” but nothing about why it works or where you could learn more.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters"

throwaway173738 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:12:22 +0000

Frequently you have to mention specific laws and describe how your situation matches the law or your complaints get ignored. At least this is how it works when you call your insurance company and make similar complaints.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Doubling of Kobo's U.S. sales in both 2025 and 2026, 70% US female customer base"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:16:41 +0000

Is there a way to get kids books on Kobo? Every time we fly we carry like 10 pounds of board books to keep my son entertained. It would be awesome to have an ebook reader with his board books and other stuff on it.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:52:32 +0000

Which might be easier since the surface is larger

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:51:38 +0000

Might as well just go whole hog and change the entire computer architecture, then. A lot of the arguments against this change boil down to computers and software code don’t work well with this today.