ctstover's comments

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Would You Ride a Bus from SF to LA If You Had Your Own Bed?

I would love to see this catch on all over the country. There always have been, and always will be trade offs that often do make rail travel (in the abstract) superior to commercial air. 75 year long story short, the implementation in the US is broken, and will never be fixed. This should be marketed, and envisioned as a competitor to rail and existing bus lines.

I also think they should research route combinations that have terrible or no commercial air options. There are hundreds of these. Think about flying between two tier 3-4 cites. Or places where people take road trips to popular destinations from tier 1 cites. For that matter you might do well with families.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Flippaper: Draw your own pinball in real time

You honestly don't think people in the 2030s are not going to think smart phones and tablets are "shitty useless junk"? There are plenty of people now feel that way.

Also I think your impression of 80s consumer tech is woefully laking.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Aligning Text Smartly in CSS

Good riddance! Back in my day we had character cells, and we had pixels. Is it not self evident that the entire browser ecosystem is wholly dysfunctional and psychotic? Personally, I'm holding out for left-align text as a service that uses a client with a 2GB dependency tree and infinite polling.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

While I would love a contemporary performance computer that can be trusted, no such device is even remotely possible in the manufacturing and fabrication ecosystems of today. Consider for just a moment ALL the chips inside the box. All the microcode, all the ROM, all the places something could be intentionally hidden. The idea that you could buy some parts on the internet at retail price that could satisfy the truly paranoid (ie defense & espionage communities) is ridiculous.

On the other hand, it still is probably possible to prevent a computers unrestricted access to the internet. For now at least.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Ubuntu on Windows

I've seen plenty of windows centric IT departments that would try to ban this from being installed. This act of admission will just be to iconoclastic for all those really enterprisey entrenched forces. You know the type.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: A Saner Windows Command Line

let me guess (the keyboard is the give away) when you say unix, you mean osx. Yeah, that terminal induces rage, and the bash is like 40 years stale.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Lee Sedol Beats AlphaGo in Game 4

As a human, I'm pulling for the human. As a computer programmer, I'm pulling for the human. As a romantic, I'm pulling for the human. As a fan of science fiction, I'm pulling for the human. To me it will matter even he can pull off a 3-2 loss over a 4-1 loss.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: The VAX platform is no more for OpenBSD

I installed it on simh a few weeks ago. It took a few tries, but compared to the netbsd which I never did get 100%, it was a smooth ride. Now where did I save that...

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Expect a $300,000 tab if you’re a woman in the tech industry

Life Tip: Most of the time, things at work are not going to go your way. Most of the time, you will not be rewarded, recognized, or even treated fairly. You will also always see others with seemingly the opposite experience. This is baseline normal.

Now, when this happens to you, you might be tempted to ask if things are stacked against you for one reason or another. When you get to this line of thinking, you should revisit the reasons why life is good, instead of fanning the flames of political cancers.

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Raising money for the first time, any tips?

> 1 intermediate engineer = $65,000 CAD / year = $48,888 USD / year

The gross annual amount of an employee's base salary is very different than the cost of hiring an employee with said base salary. I know CA != US, but payroll taxes, benefits, retirement contributions, unemployment and disability insurance, etc can't be that alien of a concept. Or is it? In the US estimate 130%-160% of the salary for base employment. Or is circa 30k for an intermediate engineer normal in Vancouver? In which case what would the entry level position make?

ctstover | 10 years ago | on: Cygwin and MinGW utilities may lose files

In any case where one has to mitigate the problems of bringing windows into the mix. At my last job I had several bridges to windows only systems and silliness that exposed out to a nix universe with ssh invokable cli tools.

Currently my only use case is that it does count in my book as a different variety of nix. If you are attempting to have a portable software it is another platform you can use to for testing that can be brought into a CI pipeline.

A more common use case (though still strange) is people using windows natively, who want to use C, C++, Fortran, Ada, etc to make windows programs (instead of cross compiling from Linux). Generally this category is students, and this is still far more educationally beneficial than attempting to learn skills with long term value from say visual studio's IDE.

edit note: asterisks make things italics on hn

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