carlospwk's comments

carlospwk | 3 years ago | on: Schools should be using open source software

I'd love to agree with this but almost every experience I've had with an open source project that has a complex GUI has been painful. Tried to switch from Sheets to Libre Office Calc and it's like going back to an incredibly buggy Excel, with a downgrade in UX/UI.

PS. Why is this post a .txt file? I can't even click the links.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses

I don't know why you've come to that conclusion? I do the exact opposite. I got to malls to buy something specific, but there's no reason to spend anymore time there than necessary. City centres are the opposite.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses

A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don't they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores?

I've never even gotten an answer, just silence.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?

What has worked for me:

1. Find out why you are overweight. For me it was comfort eating junk food and large meals.

2. Start working on what’s causing the first step. I very gradually changed my approach to eating, shifting from unhealthy foods to healthier ones. Now I have an pretty easy time to either not eat or just pick something healthy.

3. I cut out breakfast and just drink coffee or tea, then light lunch followed by healthy snacks and a large dinner. I use whatever amount of fat I need to cook dinner and make sure my food is tasty. I don’t avoid carbs.

4. It all mostly just boils down to cutting out sugary snacks, huge lunches, breakfast and eating “normal food”.

5. Oh, I also try to get 20 min of walking or cycling or something a day in. Then some push-ups , maybe a chin-up. Excercise is important but only like 20% of the whole thing.

What hasn’t worked for me:

Diets. Calorie counting, KETO, whatever. Weight always comes back after a while because it doesn’t address on why I eat.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Yerka bike uses frame as lock

>This makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about what the police can and would do.

In a lot of places they do absolutely nothing. A lot of bikes show up on sale on places like FB Marketplace shortly after they're stolen, cops could easily go set up meetings with these thieves if they wanted to. You can have god knows how much evidence or pictures or whatever of the thief but they do nothing. If I was selling stolen cars online, they'd be allover me, but bikes don't matter apparently.

>There's not a lot the police can do after a bike is stolen within proportion to the value of the stolen bike and bikes are both easy to steal and easy to scrap for parts (that are practically untraceable in most cases).

Sure, if you look at the value of a single bike this is true. But generally professional bike thieves steal multiple bikes and it ads up. Here in Finland, in 2020 insurance companies paid 11 million euros worth of compensation for stolen bikes. And that's just the ones which were reported & still worth something.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Yerka bike uses frame as lock

So what do you do when the lock breaks and you can't cut it open?

Look, I could list a dozen reasons why this is a bad design but I won't. Besides the U-lock, there has never been a widely adopted tech solution to combat bike theft. Locks which release OC gas when sawed, GPS tracking, bike registers, camera surveillance etc., none of it works as well as a solid U-lock through the frame and rear wheel attached to a solid object. Only frame-based solution I'd like to see is some universal mount standard for U-locks.

The problem with reducing bike theft is that you can't do it just by inventing new locks. You need to do all of the following: reduce the need to steal bikes (eg. sane substance & welfare policy), actively police and punish bike theft, teach proper locking techniques and make online marketplaces responsible for selling stolen goods.

Out of those, teaching proper locking techniques would be the easiest to implement. People seem to have no issue leaving a 1000$ bike locked with a 20$ cable lock unattended while they go shopping but would probably never do the same with a 4k flat screen TV. Put a $40 U-lock on it properly and you just increased the difficulty of stealing by a lot: instead of using pocket fitting cable cutters, the thief now needs to make two cuts with a noisy angle grinder. Chuck in another lock and the thief will probably just find something easier to steal.

carlospwk | 4 years ago | on: Austin cyclists split on sharing bike lanes with pizza delivery robots

“A statement from Austin’s Transportation Department says it had provided a list of groups Refraction AI should reach out to ahead of launching service here. The list of groups included the Bicycle Advisory Council. The company provided no briefing to the BAC ahead of the launch, although it was planning to speak to some members Wednesday.”

great. let’s dump a bunch of experimental AI tech on already scare bike lanes without consultation, which, if successful, will decimate both the only easy to enter low skill job pool AND clog up bike lanes. just look at the massive PITA rent scooters have caused in city centers around the world, this has the potential to cause even more disruption.

carlospwk | 5 years ago | on: The Guy I Almost Was (1998)

After I clicked a few panels I got this weird feeling and then I realized it... I actually remember reading this when it came out! 1998 was 22 years ago :$

carlospwk | 6 years ago | on: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

Our Teams has Planner to do lists. Great, I thought, now our to dos are integrated into our chat platform. Then I tried to edit a comment I made on a card. Couldn't figure out, contacted our vendor only to find out it's NOT POSSIBLE! Googled it, tons of requests from years ago asking MS to implement edit and delete options for comments. Unbelievable.

carlospwk | 7 years ago | on: How the Apple Store Lost Its Luster

Finn here. We don't have an Apple store, but I've been to a few in NYC. Just wondering around and looking all the staff run around and people waiting gives me anxiety.

If I buy an Apple product, I either order it with express delivery from the Apple website (not very often) or go buy it from whatever electronics store has it in stock for the cheapest price. I have no idea why I'd want to purchase it from an actual Apple store.

When the keyboard on my MBP broke a few years ago, I just took it to whatever authorized repair shop and gave it to the guy after being second in line. First he did some temp fix, but when I told him I wanted it properly fixed under AppleCare, it was done in a few days.

carlospwk | 7 years ago | on: The sad state of font rendering on Linux

Really interesting read on how fonts render on different systems. However a huge reason why I went from Win to macOS are the incredibly frustrating scaling issues. At work I gave up and just set my laptop display to 100% since I’d rather deal with the occasional tiny text than always having incredibly blurry fonts in certain crucial apps like Outlook.

I do agree that macOS fonts are nearly unreadable without a Retina/4K display. However I’ve never noticed any scaling issues on macOS.

carlospwk | 7 years ago | on: Leukemia Has Won

It's 2:40 AM, I open Hacker News because I couldn't sleep and notice this is on top of the page. I have no words.

I didn't really know Alex from his work at Automattic, I knew him as the guy who ran the fan website for "Top Gear". I don't have any numbers how many people he helped to get access to the episodes, but I'm absolutely certain the show would have never gotten as popular without his contribution.

Thanks and sorry.

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