BuckyBeaver's comments

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)

Leaded gas is on the (long overdue) way out, now that there's finally an unleaded option approved for the entire piston fleet.

A modern piston plane can get the equivalent of 30 MPG, and fly directly to its destination. So there's no need to rag on it.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)

Really? Electronic ignition and fuel injection alone are advantageous enough, not to mention the ability of at least one Rotax engine to use true automotive gas (gasohol).

As the article points out, the writing was on the wall for leaded fuel decades ago. The GA industry killed itself by dragging ass on eliminating the need for it, abetted by the burdensome FAA certification process for any aviation advancements.

It may be too late to save GA. BasicMed was a big help, and the increased pace of STC approval has been a boon. But with the FAA derelict in its duty to protect airports (see the sellout of Santa Monica as an example) and corrupt local governments eager to destroy our public airports and sell their land to developers... the future looks grim indeed. Just as electric training aircraft, unleaded fuel, and less-polluting and more-efficient engines render the anti-aviation cabal's excuses moot.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Transmission v4.0

Every time I try a new Transmission release, I remember why I deleted it last time:

NO PROXY SUPPORT.

Ridiculous.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: StreetPass: Find Your People on Mastodon

Maybe I'm missing something about this one, then. How is detecting "me" Mastodon links on Web pages similar to discovering people who are online near you?

Or as that not what Nintendo's did? Anyway, thanks for any insight.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Has Windows Become Spyware?

Spyware or malware or adware. The beyond-obnoxious badgering to log in, log in, LOG IN!!! with your "Microsoft account" to do ANYTHING renders the OS totally unacceptable in my house... and I regret replacing my parents' computers with new Windows machines plagued with that offensive behavior, along with crippling UI defects (some MS apps ignore the system-wide font-size setting, for example) and missing fundamental applications (like a competent E-mail program).

I was a software developer of large Windows-based systems for over a decade, before going to work for Apple. I regarded Windows as a sharp knife, and Mac OS as a child's safety scissors. Today, Windows is a depressing, hopeless mess and Mac OS is what I rely on daily to get stuff done. I hope rumors of Apple introducing touchscreen Macs are wrong. Doing so would require degrading the OS UI for a stupid, failed idea... leaving no good mainstream desktop OS.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M

The original pressing is a great example of how good pop music used to sound and how shitty it sounds today because of dynamic compression.

“3 a.m. Eternal” sounds huge, and doesn’t inflict pain when turned up LOUD.

I haven’t listened to it on streaming services, but most of their catalogs have been ruined by “remastering;” AKA crushing them into a wall of noise with dynamic compression to make them “louder.” It’s despicable.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you use JSON Schema? Help us shape its future stability guarantees

This is exactly what I expected: a well-traveled path. I assumed I was doing something wrong or just not "getting it," and spent weeks digging through the scattered doc and poring over Java code and templates... and the generated code, which wouldn't even compile. In our case, we needed C++ for client and server... a hugely under-served scenario.

Using OpenAPI and Stoplight was very useful for thinking the API through and how the whole thing could work, but the code-generation aspect was a total bust. And talking to some new colleagues later who had some knowledge of it, I found that I wasn't alone in my opinion that the tooling is trash.

Even worse, the prevailing opinion on the ecosystem is so poor that it might even be a professional liability to propose (or admit to) using it. The implication was that it (or at least the code-generation facilities for it) is by and for people who don't know what they're doing. Oof.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you use JSON Schema? Help us shape its future stability guarantees

It's hard to say. It may be that the Java ecosystem for it is in good shape. The generator tools are almost all Java, so you might have the best-case scenario.

The OpenAPI Generator uses Mustache templates and a plug-in-style design to handle all the different languages and outputs targeting different packages. I was never able to find a succinct document explaining exactly how the processing steps worked or even a catalog of data elements that the generator extracted from your OpenAPI spec document (YAML or JSON). So while there's a lot of talk about creating a custom template, or, if that's not enough, a custom generator... the documentation to do so is very incomplete. The only example I found all discussed making a generator for documentation and not code. Again, not to sound unappreciative, but... that's lame.

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you use JSON Schema? Help us shape its future stability guarantees

What are you trying to do in regard to your API? I just developed an extensive API definition using OpenAPI, which (as of version 3.1) is compliant with JSON Schema. I used Stoplight Studio on Mac OS, although it still doesn't fully support OAS 3.1 two years after it became the current OpenAPI standard. The support from tools and generators is terrible; there's still no apparent toolchain that supports version 3.1 from definition through code generation.

Ass-dragging on 3.1 support aside, the code-generation tools out there are, in my experience, trash anyway. It's a massive hodgepodge of Java-based tools with incomplete and redundant documentation repositories all over the place, and widely varying output quality... when the tools work at all. I appreciate people giving their time to open source, but on the other hand I wasted so much time trying to make the broken tools work that I could have written my own code generator from scratch (which is what I ended up deciding to do after weeks of dicking around with OpenAPI Generator).

Anyway, I was just wondering how you're using JSON Schema for API work (since you didn't mention OpenAPI).

BuckyBeaver | 3 years ago | on: Toroidal propeller allows a drone to operate more quietly [pdf]

"The flying cars that are in development currently are largely mega-sized drones."

Mmmm, I'm not aware of any that are. The Terrafugia wasn't, but it has been abandoned apparently. The Samson Switchblade is a three-wheeled car with a pusher-prop design: https://www.samsonsky.com/models/

The three-wheel strategy is pretty smart, because the vehicle can be licensed as a motorcycle and doesn't have to have all the heavy safety equipment of a car.

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