News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dmckeon

Re:The Rise of the Japanese Toilet on Saturday May 31, 2025 @06:14PM (#44147309)
If anyone wants to explore the bidet space without replacing an entire toilet, I can recommend the Neo line of products from https://luxebidet.com/ They sell kits for under $70 USD that attach to existing toilets, using the space between the seat and bowl, and attach to the toilet's water supply with a tee fitting and one-way valve, either at the wall valve, or at the bottom of the tank. Installation should take less than 30 minutes for anyone handy with a screwdriver and a crescent wrench.

Their bidets are surprising effective, and do not require any electricity or hot water, as the water volume needed to be effective is small, and the water has usually been sitting in the pipes in a home's walls at ambient temperature. 10/10, would spritz again.

> hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air

I wonder if the shorter time at altitude also reduced the chances of slower-to-develop high-altitude cerebral edema and pulmonary edema (HACE, HAPE). Some climbers have been sleeping in camp in small tubular pressurized tents to reduce daily apparent density altitude.

Tylenol markets a 650mg Extended Release for Arthritis and Joint Pain: https://www.tylenol.com/products/arthritis/tylenol-8hr-arthr... It is effective for me for general analgesia.

Trigger warning for self harm.

The real tragedies with acetaminophen are "cry-for-help" situations where someone thinks it is the same as aspirin, and swallows a handful, perhaps washing it down with alcohol. What might have been a suicide hesitation mark becomes an entry on a liver transplant list - if they are lucky. If you have children, make sure they know which one can be deadly, especially before going off to college.

Re:GPS Needs to Toughen Up, or Get Trampled Down on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @01:00PM (#44053497)
The MagNav tech, using maps of magnetic anomalies as a global reference, and getting accuracy down to 3 meters sounds interesting.
While the "weather gage" and heeling does have an effect on cannon range, the more important issue is that the upwind ships (that have the weather gage) thus have more maneuverability, and can more easily pursue a ship trying to flee downwind. Of course, one could always: "Never mind manoeuvres, go straight at 'em”
> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.

Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.

Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.

I agree. Here's a different perspective:

Bloated and crafted software - a rant:

The state of software is the state of the structures of primitive societies: some in cave shelters, some under roofs of sticks and leaves, some in mud huts.

We talk of Cathedral and Bazaar, but there are very few carefully designed Cathedrals of software, and those probably have plenty of barely hidden flaws.

The Bazaars are all around us, jammed together, spreading for miles and miles, tent walls and roofs billowing in the breeze, all awaiting a strong zephyr to carry many of them away, and leave most of the rest in ruins.

What software needs is building blocks. Bricks of uniform size, easily joined together. Concrete masonry units. Tilt-up walls. Trans-oceanic shipping containers (connex, seabox).

Solid, composable, engineered, units. We should be able to pull a well-known and heavily tested package or function to use, just like a contractor would call for a delivery of 200 8x8x16" CMU blocks, and be able to expect they will get just that, with no gaps, weak spots, or broken webs.

But, no , all of us software crafts-folk want to carefully create our very own artisanal version of whatever library functions, that are needed for the project at hand. In a world that could be made of solid concrete blocks, we are crafting our very own adobes, with our own special blend of straw and mud, and we think we have advanced far beyond the folks living in mud huts.

Some of us will say they are master masons, crafting cathedrals out of hand cut stones, each carefully measured and chiseled, and each stone unique. We're still duplicating effort when we could be using commercial off-shelf libraries. And all the while the project deadlines go zipping past as we try to craft our way to local perfection.

All I can suggest as a solution is a multi-government and multi-corporate effort to design and build fairly universal functions, libraries, and packages that are robust, exhaustively reviewed by humans, and tested thoroughly. I won't ask for provable correctness, yet. :-)

Would the result be an Ada on steroids? Depends on who is involved.

Choice of language should not matter. The APIs would matter, a lot. A few competing teams would be a possibility. Passing several existing functions to an AI, with a "do like these, only perfectly" might be useful, or useless.

And yes, then we would have 15 competing standards. https://xkcd.com/927/ (Well, we probably already have at last 1,500, so, go figure.)

And now those positions are listed as open. Disruption, but to what end. Sigh. https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961
Re:How a Single Line Of Code Could Brick Your iPhone on Sunday April 27, 2025 @11:16PM (#43817170)
Thus, perhaps "loafed" as in something brick-like, but which may also be soft. And a "loafed" device, being idle, would be loafing.
Re:Potatoes in the Mail on Thursday April 17, 2025 @07:31PM (#43723367)
Various live animals, queen bees and up to 8 attendant bees by air, but bee hives by ground only. Fair warning: the recipient of mailed bee hives may get a phone call at any time of day or night to "please come get them ASAP".

https://about.usps.com/posters/pos138/pos138__v04_revision_0... https://pe.usps.com/PUB52_Archive/NHTML/PUB52_Archive_202204...

People trying to ignore politics are like fish trying to ignore water.
Re:YAML: The Norway Problem (2022) on Sunday April 13, 2025 @12:57AM (#43670201)
Narrow escape for people from Yemen (YE).
Regenerative braking would tend to reduce particulates from friction braking.
Re:Take this on-call rotation and shove it on Thursday March 27, 2025 @07:25PM (#43499429)
Have a minimum of say, 60 minutes, and if that is exceeded, the issue gets escalated or deferred. If deferred, presumably to the next day shift, the cost is limited. If escalated, the second person must also defend the time spent. If management still doesn't trust their workers to be honest, then the company has other issues that tweaking on-call will not solve.
It is worth noting that Midgely was also awarded multiple prizes for helping invent Freon, which reduced our earth's ozone layer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Freon
People in the US who work with large volumes of fresh water use acre-feet and cfs (cubic feet per second) almost exclusively. If an article refers to gallons or comparisons like swimming pools instead, consider it popular journalism rather than engineering. Science can use metric, if preferred.
We could ease into more driver testing by requiring retesting after certain types of incidents - vehicle goes off roadway for no apparent reason, collision in a manner suggesting impairment - but that might rely too much on the discretion of a responding law enforcement officer. Perhaps better to let insurance companies do a carrot/stick approach: discounts for periodic driver retraining/testings, required retesting after an older driver is at-fault in a claim. Disclaimer: am older driver by TFA standards.
Many states[0] have explored this. IIRC, the New Mexico legislature once, back in the 1980s, helpfully defined alpine skiing as a "hyper-dangerous" activity, trying to place all liability on the skier, but a reference eludes my google-fu. [0] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/pa-supreme-court/1528129.h...
> Delta: "The Delta crew on flight 480 continues to follow ATC instruction along its journey from Los Angeles (LAX) to Honolulu (HNL). The flight is en route to HNL with no issue.”

Apparently ATC (Air Traffic Control) was unaware of the TRF (Temporary Flight Restriction) around Vandenburg for launches. Perhaps this will prompt an improvement in communication and cooperation in future.

Re:LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @06:03PM (#42639485)
Note that Getty Villa != Getty Museum. The Villa is near Malibu, the Museum is miles away near the 405.
> at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of them in the United States

Unless that percentage is an artifact of more accurate reporting in the US, I am now even more disappointed in the state of US health care and public health.

Tragedy from a Swiss cheese failure - several small holes/failures all line up. The issue of halon extinguishers versus oxygen-powered combustion producing many toxins while failing to extinguish is interesting - good that:

> Halon fire extinguishers are scheduled to be phased out of most commercial aircraft by the end of 2025.

Re:Tiny Black Holes Could Have Left Tunnels Inside Earth's Rocks on Thursday December 19, 2024 @02:12AM (#42459180)
So, PBH eats the liquid core, leaving tennis ball(TB), then TB (with PBH still inside) has close approach to another more massive object (bowling ball?) which sends PBH and TB off in separate trajectories?
Re:Civil war buffs drill for the 'hardest test in history' on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @05:30PM (#42446117)
Not so much at this Gettysburg level, but one of the challenges for volunteer docents is that visitors often volunteer what I call "lore" that is based in myth, folklore, fiction, or folk etymology, and the docent, not having enough time to accurately correct the misinformation, is faced with saying nothing, or "I've heard that too." and moving the tour along. Lore at the level of: "spices can conceal the taste of spoiled meat" and "window glass moves over time, making panes thicker at the bottom." Later, other visitors will defend their misinformation with "Well, someone at <site> said it, so it must be true." Glad to see that NPS has serious standards.
Or to keep hives alive when nectar is scarce but colonies have not started to hibernate. Adulteration of produced honey with syrup would be 10x easier than feeding bee with syrup and then doing extraction from comb.
Luxe Neo bidet attachment - easy to tee into supply, fits under toilet seat, options for rear/male only, or both rear/front male/female separate spray nozzles.
Re:The Shell Hater's Handbook on Friday November 01, 2024 @06:18PM (#42022118)
Might have been Oil shell, which is worth looking at: https://www.oilshell.org/
Re:The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border on Thursday October 17, 2024 @10:57PM (#41875982)
It may be worth noting that a significant proportion - 42% - of "other-foreign-nationals" or "undocumented immigrants" arrived here at airports or other ports with a legal visa, and then overstayed their visa, thus never crossing the "border" (implicitly with Mexico) that looms large in all discussions of this topic.

[1]https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/R47848.pdf#:~:text=An%20esti....

Re:The first proposal for a solar system domain name system on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @02:03AM (#41705046)
With around 1300 TLDs, I'm not sure that more TLDs are a good solution. <planet>.sol seems adequate for now. Also, after doing interplanetary DNS, let's think about light-speed delays for NTP, and time zone abbreviations.

Older »