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jacksonkmarley

Re:Ask HN: What is the most memorable game you played? on Friday July 21, 2023 @08:50PM (#36822042)
The Tarkovsky one apparently.
Re:Ask HN: What is the most memorable game you played? on Friday July 21, 2023 @08:33PM (#36821931)
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

Surprised no one mentioned this actually. For those not familiar it's a shooter located on the site of the accident where the disaster produced various mutant monsters and an unstable environment. Really immersive with the difficulty, story and ambience. Haven't seen the movie it was based on.

Re:Python GUIs on Thursday June 15, 2023 @12:09AM (#36336285)
Also had this problem, tried to create exe packages on windows and had endless trouble (although windows apps aren't my expertise). The real killer in the end for me was some windows security feature that would start killing the process, not immediately, but after a couple of startups. It was an internal tool so in the end I used an executable batch script to start the program, that seemed to bypass the problem, but when it came time to add features and make things available for a wider audience I just abandoned the windows gui and moved to a web app.
I would also add that even the odd writer with a great early book or books commonly slumps down to meh and then churns it out from there on, which is sad.

It's like the fiction publishing industry had this technology for 10-20 years already.

Re:Ask HN: How did you learn to stretch effectively? on Thursday April 13, 2023 @07:49PM (#35563749)
DeFranco mobility routines (e.g. agile 8, limber 11) have good exercises.
Re:SpaceX based 4G/5G coverage coming to New Zealand on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @06:00AM (#35437316)
>This will make PLB (personal location beacons) redundant

Wouldn't this make the subscription satellite communications devices like inreach redundant, rather than PLBs? A safety conscious person in the wilds would probably still want a dedicated emergency device (?), only now it has another possible communication method to make it even more reliable.

PLBs as I understand it are designed specifically to be one-shot foolproof devices with no secondary comms, with guaranteed battery lives (15 years I think), robust cases etc. that just sit there until you press the 'Save me' button. A phone (or inreach which is closer but still has messaging etc.) is not a real replacement for that functionality as I see it. Mainly because the other things you use it for mean it can run out of batteries or whatever.

I'm certainly sick of reading about ChatGPT.
Re: on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @01:53PM (#34808731)
> dual-wield and use a Linux or de-googled android phone for daily use and keep a second device around for the apps that won't run there

I was thinking about this but what happens with on-the-spot payments? This seems like a functionality that's really convenient (not having to carry a bank card) but that would be on the official device, not the daily use device due to security issues. But paying for stuff in person is a daily use activity.

The good thing about Edge for me was being able to open largish pdf docs without the crappy loading times of adobe bloatware.
Re:Jupyterlab Desktop on Sunday February 12, 2023 @10:38AM (#34763600)
So here is a piece of anecdata for those interested in comparisons to vscode, I saw this hn post and installed the jupyter desktop app, and set up my current play project on it (sicp exercises in jupyter, I'd previously been using the browser). I also set up the same thing in vscode.

For this example I couldn't get vscode to perform correctly (maybe possible but not obvious), while the desktop app worked as advertised.

Vscode mistakenly labelled the cells of my scheme notebook as python, while correctly running the scheme kernel. The result was that I could run my cells and get the right output, but entering code was annoying as the auto indenting and error markers were based on python instead of scheme.

Anyway, unless I can fix the vscode weirdness, score one for the desktop app, I will keep using it.

Re:Show HN: AI Cover Letter Writer on Thursday February 02, 2023 @05:33AM (#34624744)
The reason I said "mostly" a waste of time, is I didn't want to rule out the possibility of swaying an employer with some special reasons or explanation of how you could be a good fit that wasn't covered by the usual bare facts in the resume.

But to me that always seemed like a rare exception, they would have to pay attention and I would have to have something special to say. The great majority of cover letters I have written were because it was required by the process. Honestly this tool would probably be useful for that sort of fluff, so good on them for making it, but better to just have cover letters as a special case than the rule I think.

Re:Show HN: AI Cover Letter Writer on Thursday February 02, 2023 @01:56AM (#34623104)
If you needed any more reason to think that cover letters are mostly a waste of everyone's time, now they are worth even less.

Not knocking the work put into this website.

Re:MuscleWiki: Find exercises that work specific muscles on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @11:39PM (#34335058)
Reddit fitness subs have a surprising amount of information in their wiki(s)

https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...

Re:I am done. I give up on Friday December 23, 2022 @08:22AM (#34105481)
You mentioned "digital nomad influencers" a few times, were you trying to start businesses as a digital nomad, or was that just something you saw as a common feature of the "influencers" you paid attention to?
Re:The Twitter Files, Part Six on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:44PM (#34024363)
So far this whole Twitter Files thing seems underwhelming, but not exactly a "nothing burger". I feel like it's a good thing that they got published, but the details aren't big news, more like a whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations that probably should be addressed by people directly involved.

For example FBI trawling through social media and flagging accounts for review doesn't seem like a strict constitutional violation unless you can prove some coercion; but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.

Maybe this sort of stuff (i.e. government/law enforcement communications with social media companies) should be automatically in the public domain if it isn't part of a criminal investigation.

Re:California pulls the plug on rooftop solar on Friday December 16, 2022 @10:27PM (#34024220)
Or to express the headline in a less clickbaity (or metaphorical) way:

California slashes rates paid for household solar contributions back to the grid.

Re:Where did software go wrong? (2020) on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @03:05AM (#33981128)
What is the point of this? To me this reads like contentless wordplay, some random software-insider negativity with a bit of anti-capitalism thrown in. I didn't really find any interesting points worth engaging with either positively or negatively.

TBH I would have just downvoted this if I could. If you're scanning comments before reading, don't bother with it.

Re:Ask HN: Best books read in 2022 on Saturday December 03, 2022 @11:06PM (#33850487)
Listened to a lot of audiobooks this year, and can recommend:

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan (Biography and background to the development of the ICBM)

The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian

One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs (about the Cuban missile crisis)

Chip War by Chris Miller (about the semiconductor industry and it's place in geopolitical competition)

Re:Ask HN: Best books read in 2022 on Saturday December 03, 2022 @10:04PM (#33850146)
> By JFK Jr.

He's been dead for like 20 years. I think you mean RFK Jr.

Re:A Jorge Luis Borges Reading List on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @07:57PM (#33795529)
Paul Theroux describes here visiting Borges and reading to him, I always think of this when I think of Borges.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/r...

Re:Habits of Highly Overrated People (2014) on Saturday November 26, 2022 @10:33PM (#33760001)
Personally I don't have much experience with people behaving like this, motivated by straight-up laziness or covering up incompetence so blatantly. These seem like they would be very obvious problem behaviours, and not as damaging as other more common but perhaps less overtly dishonest habits of overrated people.

I have encountered many people who behave in harmful ways according to personal or organisational incentives that they or others could argue were legitimate. Technical people promoted above their managerial competence level for example, can end up being rated highly by upper management as they are seen to be experts, but can then go on to make terrible strategic decisions.

Also non-technical project management professionals, using techniques that could be interpreted as legitimate, can be rated highly despite contributing next to nothing. Asking tech contributors for deadline estimates, recording the answers, and then chasing the overruns can seem like constructive action.

Then you realise that there are no high level plans coming back that integrate the timelines in a constructive way, it's just a way to apply psychological pressure by getting investment in a target that can be held over people's heads.

The micro-management goes away somehow as the game goes on? I should cancel the refund claim LOL?
I got this on steam, started with the tutorial, and after a few minutes couldn't imagine getting any enjoyment out of playing this. What am I missing? The level of micro-management seems so high, and simple actions seem to require clicking through like 4 sub menus.
Re:Termux on Android 5 or 6 on Monday November 21, 2022 @11:48AM (#33694686)
Working through sicp in my spare moments.
Re:Memento Mori on Thursday November 17, 2022 @06:26PM (#33647460)
Jonathon Nolan short story which I haven't read, and the related Christopher Nolan film Memento.

edit: I read it and it's actually pretty good, but with annoying advertisements.

Re:Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’ on Saturday November 05, 2022 @12:43AM (#33478044)
What exactly does this mean? Doesn't the baseband processor exclusively handle the mobile communications? I thought the parent comment was more to do with OS running on the main processor.

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