News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

irowe

Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @08:26AM (#49181870)
If it's anything like my municipality, all that stuff is balanced in the budget by issuing bonds. My accounting knowledge is weak, but as I understand it, even though a city's credit rating and the prospective interest on its bonds are a feedback mechanism to help moderate the spending, it's still tempting for a city to overbuild without a plan to fund the bonds plus the incurred cost ongoing maintenance without ending up with too much debt.
Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @08:16AM (#49181768)
Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection
The exact same comment could be made of Atlanta's roads.

How did we get here from the post about uv?

A huge value in having authors upload the original source, is it divorces the content from the presentation (mostly). That the original sources were available was sufficient for a large majority of the corpus to be automatically rendered into HTML for easier reading on many devices: https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html. I don't think it would have been as simple if they had to convert PDFs.
Re:Windows ML is generally available on Saturday September 27, 2025 @10:51PM (#45401374)
Vitis AI is just riddled with bugs and undocumented incompatibilities. I also failed to get it to work for anything beyond the demo models.
Not a talk show, but the pilot season of Mythbusters tackled this. They registered some false positives and the test manufacturer refused to admit it was possible.
Re:Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019) on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @06:03PM (#40216980)
I'd agree that the second book has the highest cringe per page. The Luo Ji character was laughably bad.
Re:Universities Lost the Internet on Saturday March 23, 2024 @02:15PM (#39801945)
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for"

The author's experience aligns with my own, both at university and working with government-funded scientific and engineering organizations. I suspect that many well-intentioned cybersecurity, outsourcing, and streamlining measures have, on the whole, significantly harmed the ability of these organizations to fulfill their missions.

I spent way too long trying to find a way to read this without making an account on X, so here's the recap:

An illustrator accidentally mislabelled a quasi-satellite named 2002-VE68 as a moon of Venus called “ZOOZVE" on a children's map (Venus doesn't have any proper moons).

Having also found the hyperventilating approach effective, I just want to note for other readers that hyperventilating before breath-holding is extremely dangerous when swimming or diving. This is heavily emphasized in safety trainings for swim coaches. It greatly increases your chances of hypoxic blackout: https://www.socom.mil/POTFF/Pages/Hypoxic%20blackout.aspx
Re:C++23: The Next C++ Standard on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @06:27AM (#36692544)
Something I've learned recently is that the convention of when to use angle brackets and when to use quotes is not prescribed by the standard but instead is implementation-defined.
I don't think they are referring to the Reddit news, I think they are referring to the ongoing disagreement between the SO Inc staff and volunteer moderators and resulting strike over the new policy on generated content: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-s...
Re:Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone on Saturday February 25, 2023 @07:59PM (#34942039)
You're definitely right that some of the slowdown is due to physical wear. I have had the battery replaced once, about 2 years ago back when Apple was offering it at a reduced price, but it's back to "significantly degraded" status. I have a hard time thinking that the system software load increasing over time doesn't also have a significant impact, though.
Re:Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone on Saturday February 25, 2023 @01:20PM (#34939022)
I’m now to the point where I frequently have first party apps crash on my iPhone 7, plus the screen has phantom touch issues. I really don’t want to replace it though.
Re:Google Stopping Coding Competitions on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @03:53PM (#34902558)
Clicking the auto-link of my address on an iOS device will open a route in Apple Maps to an address with a different street name on the wrong U.S. state. Apple Maps has come a long way, but it still doesn’t cut it.
Re:Lessons learnt while trying to modernize some C code on Sunday February 19, 2023 @04:47PM (#34862194)
The GNU Make documentation is excellent, and you can get t a long way with handwritten Make files, but when you move beyond a few translation units that have different needs, it be becomes much easier to maintain things with CMake.
Re:Spotify's podcast bet went wrong on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @08:26AM (#34803476)
Hmm. You can search episode names and show notes on Pocket Casts on a per-show but not a global basis. I guess that is a shortcoming.
Re:Spotify's podcast bet went wrong on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @02:21PM (#34794535)
Pocket Casts has a whole “Discover” tab with both algorithmic and human-curated recommendations, as well as browsing by category. I’m not sure what more you could ask for except for maybe user-generated shareable playlists.

Pocket Casts even has this excellent feature where you can share a link to the current time stamp in an episode and share it. The recipient of the link doesn’t even need to download the app; the shared snippet is playable right in the browser.

Re:Introducing ChatGPT Plus on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @05:40PM (#34619048)
As they should be. No sense in fragmenting questions just because the best answer may have changed.
Re:IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free on Saturday January 21, 2023 @11:05AM (#34467333)
I’m so glad someone else pointed this particular case out! When I was a first year university student but still claimed as a dependent on my parents taxes, the accountant who prepared the returns wasn’t even aware that it needed to be reported, so they had to redo it. Later when I was doing taxes for myself via TaxAct, there was no way (that I could see) to accurately report that income. It also stumbled on HSA contribution limits. Both issues were easily resolved with the free fillable forms (which come with detailed, if overwhelming, instructions)
Re:IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free on Saturday January 21, 2023 @10:50AM (#34467200)
Well IRS Free File isn’t one single service. It’s a coalition of private tax prep services that have agreed with the IRS to provide their software for free to taxpayers meeting certain constraints. The insight into how your liabilities stack up certainly varies by product (I found TaxAct did this quite well, but I’ve stopped using them and started filing out the forms directly since I no longer qualify for the free file program).
Re:Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future on Friday January 13, 2023 @08:58AM (#34367770)
Not to pile on too much, but I feel very similarly. It seems like about 80% of the way through the first book (beginning with the Panama Canal attack), Liu gave up on trying to write characters and started trying to compensate with bigger (and admittedly very cool) sci-fi set pieces. Overall, the first book had a good set of strong characters (Ye Wenjie, Wang Miao, Da Shi) and was still good enough to be one of my favorites.

The second book still had some good character writing (mostly in Zhang Beihai, although Luo Ji had a okay arc), but I felt like the plot really meandered to the point where I almost put the book down before the reveal of the Dark Forest concept, which was interesting and novel enough to compel me to finish.

The final book has the whole kitchen sink of cool sci-fi conceits thrown at it, but there are even fewer memorable characters, and the plot time-jumps so many times that it feels like the antithesis of “show, don’t tell”.

What’s sad is that the core storytelling skill of Liu is clearly there (for example, with the fairy-tale allegories), but it’s so buried under the drive to introduce a new technology every chapter that it’s hard to appreciate the final book as a good novel.

Apparently publishers have seriously been turning the screws on libraries wrt to license fees for ebooks and audiobooks, so the current golden age of getting them from the library may be ending.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...

Yeah that does seem a little low. US News and World report has average in-state tuition at $10,423/yr [1]

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/object/image/00000183-138c-db49-a3a3-...

Sounds like you need to go to a sporting event in Chicago to find out…
ClassPass is one example I recently ran into. I’ve already bought credits for the month and am planning to cancel my current plan, but if I do I immediately forfeit my (prepaid!) credits.
Re:Thrifting Is the New Normal on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @01:05PM (#31413559)
I suddenly feel very old.
The space-station themed Fry’s store near Houston, TX recently closed. I only ever visited it in the twilight years where there was so little inventory in such a large footprint that it seemed like a front for something. The architecture and decor was definitely imaginative.
Re:BGP Implemented in Go on Saturday March 19, 2022 @10:14PM (#30739414)
I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m shocked that you have a 4 year CS degree and never heard of BGP. Does your degree predate widespread use of the internet? I went to a fairly average state school and both networking courses I took (one required, one elective) covered BGP (at least at a high level).

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