Hacker News: usrn

New comment by usrn in "Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:03:43 +0000

I have a blog I generate from org mode files. I think it's better for my mental health than comments like these.

New comment by usrn in "Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:02:52 +0000

I did everything under my real name up until last year, this is why I stopped. I remember being told over and over again never to use my real name on the internet. I wonder why we stopped telling people that, it was a good idea.

New comment by usrn in "Is JPEG 2000 a preservation risk? (2013)"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 12:56:20 +0000

I know someone who got hired recently to get PDP11 software running in an emulator to control an industrial process.

New comment by usrn in "Taking the Sting Out of Wasps"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 12:55:24 +0000

People keep telling me "wasps are great because they eat the spiders" and I really don't get it. I'll take spiders over wasps any day of the week.

New comment by usrn in "Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 12:21:46 +0000

I really love the greenfield situations where you're building stuff up from scratch and have minimal APIs to deal with so you can just keep everything in your head and plow through writing tons of code. No one pays you to do that though.

New comment by usrn in "Understanding the make-buy question in a growing Mars city"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 07:44:01 +0000

There's a ton of carbon in the Martian atmosphere. It sounds like a great place for an algae farm (which is where terrestrial oil came from.)

New comment by usrn in "Trends in menstrual bleeding changes after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 06:01:17 +0000

"Trust the science" when there isn't any public study or experiment really means "trust the conjecture" but that's not so great for PR.

New comment by usrn in "George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 03:19:20 +0000

You will never destroy ethnic identity in humans because once you manage it for one or two races, one of the many remaining will just over run them. It's not just a waste of energy to try, it's actively harmful and often causes reactionary movements like this when people realize what the end of it is.

New comment by usrn in "Is JPEG 2000 a preservation risk? (2013)"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 02:48:20 +0000

Software rots man. It can be really hard to run some open source software from the 80s and 90s. This is actually one of the big arguments for Open Source: Access to the software is way less interesting than the support/community/ecosystem around it; there's no reason not to open source your software and not doing it actually harms the users.

New comment by usrn in "The case for bad coffee (2015)"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 02:16:51 +0000

I can taste the different kinds but I honestly don't mind the Folgers bagged coffee. It's nice because I can just use my normal electric kettle and there's hardly any mess.

New comment by usrn in "‘Things are going to break’: Texas power plants are running nonstop"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 02:15:18 +0000

Solar panels are pretty hard on the environment and (in places with poor regulation) the people manufacturing them but once you've got them set up they're pretty fantastic (provided you don't accidentally smash them like I did my first system.) You have truly independent energy this way. Also there are consumer products like the jackery that make moving power easy for normal people so It's not hard to share with your neighbors when they need some extra too.

New comment by usrn in "Prose.sh – A blog platform for hackers"

usrn — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 02:09:02 +0000

A lot if you're posting from your Apple ][. Users should really be signing their posts themselves anyway, not relying on authentication and vouching from a third party. Session authentication is kind of silly for blog posting IMO. The problem is that message authentication still isn't common so people just use session authentication since it's easy and it's what we have.

New comment by usrn in "Looming natural gas shortages has the EU scrambling for solutions"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:51:10 +0000

I'm blaming blindly siding with environmentalists (especially corporate funded ones) without reasoning through the consequences. If you want to call those hippies than yeah I'm blaming the hippies, this is a direct consequence of their actions no matter what you call them. The exact same thing is going to keep happening if they don't change their behavior.

New comment by usrn in "Looming natural gas shortages has the EU scrambling for solutions"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:47:57 +0000

China is

1) Not self sufficient, they have to import food from the US

2) Burning nearly a million more cubic feet of coal per capita than the US does (and they have way more people, so that means they're really burning far far more coal)

Honestly I'm not sure how you thought that made any sense.

EDIT: (out of comment quota)

>China also installs more renewables than anyone else

I'm sure that's great for the companies producing those, I'm not convinced that will lead to them burning less coal (although their coming demographic collapse almost certainly will.) Germany was in a pretty similar situation too and the current situation is the consequence.

New comment by usrn in "Looming natural gas shortages has the EU scrambling for solutions"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:39:23 +0000

Part of the reason Germany is still stuck on fossil fuels was the ultimatums of the environmentalists that killed their nuclear power. IMO if they really care about the environment they need to chill out so people can work out how to transition. Hard rules like this will first result in desperation which causes people to make sub-optimal choices like you're seeing now and eventually economic collapse which will absolutely destroy the environment (think of all the messes the USSR made when it fell apart.) Whatever regime replaces the one that causes this probably will care a lot less about the environment too.

New comment by usrn in "Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:51:36 +0000

I own a Pinephone, I go back and forth with it. Once you take away the psychological manipulation and crappy mobile GUI from popular smartphone OSes you start to realize the form factor isn't that great over a very small (like 7-9 inch) laptop.

New comment by usrn in "Rety – Live coding without the stress"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:47:52 +0000

You probably could have just stepped through an ex script. Also it's not really live coding if it's pre recorded.

New comment by usrn in "Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 12:21:10 +0000

I don't bother with spam filters. Yeah I get some spam but it's not worth missing emails. Gmail has gotten really bad about throwing away legitimate email btw so I wouldn't say even theirs is good. Much better IMO is address tagging (x+y@z.com) so you can block a tag when people sell your address.

New comment by usrn in "U.S. public health agencies aren't ‘following the science,’ officials say"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 12:08:01 +0000

America is effectively two nations forced into one at this point.

New comment by usrn in "Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time"

usrn — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:57:48 +0000

I was paying $2k for a very nice apartment in a very nice DC suburb within walking distance to my office. I moved to an even cheaper house (in a very walkable neighborhood) just outside Richmond. No people are not paying anywhere near NYC rent for urban living elsewhere.