brianaker (u/brianaker)

brianaker commented on In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home smithsonianmag.com/scienc... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

mikestew · 2 months ago

I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog.

I live near a trail which also serves as a wildlife corridor, including coyotes that we regularly see on our dog walks. Years ago, we had a feral cat that we would feed and care for (including neutering). He remained outside because he refused to even be brought inside, let alone live with us. This guy was huge, and looked like he had won his share of fights with the scars to prove it. If a cat would survive in the wild, it would be this guy. But even he wasn’t tough enough to hold off (what I assume were) coyotes forever, and one day he just quit coming around.

After that I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood.

(And for context, we aren't out in the boonies; this is within the city limits of Redmond, WA, where the local elementary gets locked down about once a year because mama bear and her cubs showed up off that same trail.)

brianaker · 2 months ago

"I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood"

Stop neutering cats, encourage alley cats.

brianaker commented on The $25k car is going extinct? media.hubspot.com/why-the... · Posted by u/pseudolus

BLKNSLVR · 2 months ago

Subaru's have an increasingly good reputation for long-term reliability. Stick with and love the beater.

I find a certain liberation in not caring too much about risks of car park dents and "curb rash" and other surface-only non-mechanical auto-maladies.

brianaker · 2 months ago

You obviously have not been following Subaru, while what you are saying was once true, it has not been true for several years now.

Google "Subaru battery", read about all of the additional electrical problems that are the result of Subaru being unwilling to fix a problem that is the end result of them selling your data.

Subaru stopped making reliable cars somewhere around 2014.

brianaker commented on Turn any bicycle electric dhruvvidyut.co.in/... · Posted by u/samdung

alistairSH · 7 months ago

Often, in the US, your normal home-owners/renters policy has some level of umbrella liability coverage. Check with your plan to be sure.

The problem is (IMO) e-bikes that are more "motorcycle" than "bicycle". Which includes a massive number of the kits.

There currently is no national framework for classifying e-bikes. There's the 3 tier system that some industry groups use, but it directly conflicts with most state's moped/motorcycle regulations.

Safe bet for an e-bike is a "class 1" bike from a major brand. 20mph cap, no throttle, the most "bicycle" of the 3.

Class 2 bikes keep the 20mph cap, but add a throttle (don't need to pedal). This probably makes it a moped or small (50cc) scooter in some states.

Class 3 removes the throttle, but bumps the top speed to 28mph. Again, this speed probably makes it a moped or scooter (or possibly even a full motorcycle).

And then there's the e-bikes that are more motorcycle than bike. 30+mph, powerful engines, and the pedals are truly vestigial. Supe73 and Surron bikes fall in this category.

brianaker · 7 months ago

US Law, i.e. Federal Law, for e-bikes is 15 U.S.C. 2085(b) and additionally Title 28 Chapter I Part 36 Subpart A § 36.105.

Pedaled vs throttle is an ablest issues; not everyone has picked up on this.

brianaker commented on Do you need Redis? PostgreSQL does queuing, locking, and pub/sub (2021) spin.atomicobject.com/red... · Posted by u/fanf2

throwaway313373 · 10 months ago

Why is it "shocking"?

It's just an architectural decision to spawn a process per connection that Postgres made long time ago.

It's a tradeoff like most decisions.

Back in the days MySQL had huge issues with scaling to multi-core systems (maybe they fixed it now, I haven't used MySQL for a long time) while Postgres never had this problem.

When designing an application around Postgres you just have to take into account that:

1. opening a new connection is rather expensive, so you should have a connection pool

2. opening too many connections is problematic, so you should keep the size of your pool rather small and return connections back into the pool ASAP

That's it.

It's not that hard in practice.

brianaker · 10 months ago

MySQL never had a problem with scaling to multi-core systems; Linux on the other hand did have a problem and its problems became everyone's problems. In the early 2000's the answer to multi-core Linux issues was to buy a system running one of the commercial UNIX. By 2006 or so this became a non-issue for Linux ( for the most part ).

Postgres uses an old design model which predates threads; I have no idea if they have made any progress in updating their design. In the past I have heard the core devs talk about how difficult it would be to do this.

Oracle Database moved to a hybrid process/thread model at some point, this is the superior solution ( I have no idea if it was done well or not, but from standpoint of how to achieve better leverage of CPU vs IO, this is the way ).

If the PG devs had enough time/money, I am sure they would move towards a hybrid model where the focus would be on processor affinity with IO being all tied to events.

brianaker commented on Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more greenwichtime.com/news/ed... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

troyvit · a year ago

I totally agree. Many assignments are on the ipad, and they come via shitty sass products that regularly crash, taking their homework with them. Additionally for stuff like math you need to show your work, which is impossible for higher level math so the kids have to turn in a paper version along with the ipad assignment.

brianaker · a year ago

A number of years ago when my daughter was in the second grade the school expected them to turn in homework via this crappy power point knock-off app that would constantly crash.

I had her eventually just take screen shots and send them to the printer. From there? She would fill in her answers, take a picture of the work, and then drop the image into the power point knockoff.

We got a note from the Principal about how "printing" was not supported.

Whatever.

brianaker commented on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts apnews.com/article/suprem... · Posted by u/_rend

comex · a year ago

You're mixing together a few different things.

- Trump's lawyers argued in this case that an ex-president can only be charged with a crime if he was impeached and convicted for that same act. But all of the justices rejected this view today. The newly granted immunity is orthogonal to whether or not the president is impeached.

- Though, the president does have to leave office somehow before he can be prosecuted. He can't be prosecuted while still sitting. This wasn't technically decided in this case, but the parties mostly agreed as much beforehand, and the majority opinion has a footnote approvingly citing an Office of Legal Counsel memo to that effect.

- Separately, Trump's lawyers argued that the special counsel that prosecuted him was not properly appointed by an act of Congress. But the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari on that issue and the majority opinion today did not address it. Justice Thomas's solo concurring opinion, however, did address it and agreed with Trump (but a concurring opinion has no legal effect). In any case, this is a different question from whether prosecutions of ex-presidents must go through a special counsel. As far as I know, there is no formal rule that would require it, but it's highly desirable as a way to avoid political bias. That question didn't come up in this case, though.

brianaker · a year ago

Trump's attorneys did not say "the special counsel that prosecuted him was not properly appointed by an act of Congress", Justice Thomas brought this up in oral arguments. Trump's attorneys admitted in oral arguments that they had not brought this up during the appeal, so as an argument it was not saved.

Further more, historically there is no basis for the argument. Special prosecutors, which are different from the "independent counsel" that came about after Nixon; the laws around "independent counsel" expired a while ago.

"Special counsel", and all of the other similarly named, have been around since Marbury. By happenstance, some have been X-members of Congress, Cabinet members, etc... but far from all.

There is a reason why none of the other Justices brought this up, it is absurdist.

brianaker commented on Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf] storage.courtlistener.com... · Posted by u/brianaker

sp332 · a year ago

The VPN app installed a root CA on the device and did the snooping locally. It collected statistics about how people used competitors' services and sent that info back to Facebook.

brianaker · a year ago

How would Meta/Facebook accomplished this without reading Amazon's communication with its customers?

You have at least two parties in any conversation, I don't see where Youtube or Amazon consented, nevertheless, the recording was being done by Meta/Facebook, which was a third-party to the communication.

There are both Federal and State laws against the sort of wire-tapping that Facebook/Meta performed.

brianaker commented on Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf] storage.courtlistener.com... · Posted by u/brianaker

sp332 · a year ago

The headlines around this have definitely blown things up. Running a VPN service so you can snoop on how customers use other services is plenty scummy, no need for the catastrophising.

brianaker · a year ago

Running a VPN service would not be wiretapping, but that is not what they were doing, and understand they had multiple avenues that they explored.

If you want to focus on just the VPN bit though; running a VPN would not break Amazon's secure communication. For Facebook/Meta to accomplish what they did they had to place fake endpoints in-between Amazon and its customers where they could pretend to be the party Amazon thought it was communicating with.

brianaker commented on Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf] storage.courtlistener.com... · Posted by u/brianaker

ChrisArchitect · a year ago

[dupe]

Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39832952

brianaker · a year ago

That story links to a different document filed with the courts.

Additionally, the scope is wider than just what Onavo did for Facebook.

There are comments being made in that post as well where people are assuming all of the communication on one side, which was not the case at all.