dmckeon (u/dmckeon) - Readit News

dmckeon commented on The Rise of the Japanese Toilet nytimes.com/2025/05/29/bu... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

dmckeon · 7 months ago

If anyone wants to explore the bidet space without replacing an entire toilet, I can recommend the Neo line of products from https://luxebidet.com/ They sell kits for under $70 USD that attach to existing toilets, using the space between the seat and bowl, and attach to the toilet's water supply with a tee fitting and one-way valve, either at the wall valve, or at the bottom of the tank. Installation should take less than 30 minutes for anyone handy with a screwdriver and a crescent wrench.

Their bidets are surprising effective, and do not require any electricity or hot water, as the water volume needed to be effective is small, and the water has usually been sitting in the pipes in a home's walls at ambient temperature. 10/10, would spritz again.

dmckeon commented on They used Xenon to climb Everest in days – is it the future of mountaineering? nytimes.com/2025/05/27/wo... · Posted by u/nikcub

comrade1234 · 7 months ago

So they slept in hypoxia tents which activates the hypoxia-inducible factor molecule, but they also took xenon which also activates the molecule. So, it's not clear if the xenon actually did anything?

Back during the 2000 dot-com boom crash I met a guy who got into a top business school in part by writing about the challenges of climbing Everest. He confessed drunkenly at a party to me that he'd never even left the USA...

dmckeon · 7 months ago

> hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air

I wonder if the shorter time at altitude also reduced the chances of slower-to-develop high-altitude cerebral edema and pulmonary edema (HACE, HAPE). Some climbers have been sleeping in camp in small tubular pressurized tents to reduce daily apparent density altitude.

dmckeon commented on Modification of acetaminophen to reduce liver toxicity and enhance drug efficacy societyforscience.org/reg... · Posted by u/felineflock

hgomersall · 7 months ago

It's for this reason in the UK paracetamol (as we call acetaminophen) is only ever manufactured to 500mg tablets. I don't know if that is global.

dmckeon · 7 months ago

Tylenol markets a 650mg Extended Release for Arthritis and Joint Pain: https://www.tylenol.com/products/arthritis/tylenol-8hr-arthr... It is effective for me for general analgesia.

Trigger warning for self harm.

The real tragedies with acetaminophen are "cry-for-help" situations where someone thinks it is the same as aspirin, and swallows a handful, perhaps washing it down with alcohol. What might have been a suicide hesitation mark becomes an entry on a liver transplant list - if they are lucky. If you have children, make sure they know which one can be deadly, especially before going off to college.

dmckeon commented on GPS Needs to Toughen Up, or Get Trampled Down aviationweek.com/business... · Posted by u/throw0101b

dmckeon · 7 months ago

The MagNav tech, using maps of magnetic anomalies as a global reference, and getting accuracy down to 3 meters sounds interesting.

dmckeon commented on British naval dominance during the age of sail lesswrong.com/posts/YE4Xs... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

dmckeon · 7 months ago

While the "weather gage" and heeling does have an effect on cannon range, the more important issue is that the upwind ships (that have the weather gage) thus have more maneuverability, and can more easily pursue a ship trying to flee downwind. Of course, one could always: "Never mind manoeuvres, go straight at 'em”

dmckeon commented on High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers wsj.com/lifestyle/careers... · Posted by u/lxm

taurath · 7 months ago

A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time.

Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.

dmckeon · 7 months ago

> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.

Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.

Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.

dmckeon commented on Bloat is still software's biggest vulnerability (2024) spectrum.ieee.org/lean-so... · Posted by u/kristianp

hilbert42 · 7 months ago

"…there's too many distros, there's too many languages, there's too much software. But there's no central authority telling people to make them."

You are right, there is no central authority telling people what to do and what software to write. And you are correct "you can't force people to not reinvent the wheel…".

What can be done however is to mandate specified software that's gone through rigorous testing in certain buisnesses, government, utilities, the military, critical engineering—aircraft, nuclear, and so on. There's already been a bit of this with Ada and the military but it's miniscule compared with what I am advocating.

Think of it this way: no matter what country one is in all electrical outlets are the same and comply with strict electrical standards for that country. That's not to say there is only one standard worldwide but there are far fewer than if it were a free-for-all as it is in the software industry.

You don't stop people from doing anything, reinventing the wheel or whatever—instead you make it unlawful to supply sofware to those vital entities that does not comply with those specified standards (as set by the ISO, etc.). Outside that realm programmers can do what they want but if they want to play with the big end of town then they'll have to play strictly by the rules.

We'll get to this stage eventually, but it's taking undue time.

As you've said, "Sooner or later things stabilize, when the new solution is not better enough to outweigh the old one…"* but the software industry as a whole is nowhere near that stage of development. Individual program may have reached that stage of development, but in a global sense the software industry is still decades behind the professional standards of other well-established professions (don't take my word for it, just consult the literature).

Right, that sounds authoritarian and something a dictatorship would do. But not so fast: those electrical standards to which I referred were only mandated by govermnents after the free-for-all chaos of the early electrical era where industry could not or would not adopt common standards. . The same applies for other disciplines, electrical engineering has any number of rigorous standards in addition to the example I've already given, same with civil, chemical engineering, transport, shipping etc., weights and measures, and almost all of them are tied to national and international standards. Moreover, a large subset is mandated by law for reasons of compatibility/interoperability (shipping containers, etc.) and or health and safety reasons, or for economic reasons, to minimize costs, to stop people being cheated etc.

These standards and concomitant laws and regulations are a fact of life worldwide and in many instances penalties apply for violating them. About the only exception is the software industry, it's no longer young and should have matured by now but it still operates like the Wild West were anything goes.

I say that as someone who has sat on standards committees and been involved in writing standards. Moreover, in my profession if I were to act in the undisciplined manner of much of the software industry, I'd be struck off.

Right, those are harsh words indeed—but they are only harsh for an industry that has never had to comply with rigorous rules and regulations that have been set by law. Whilst other disciplines have learned to accept them long ago the software industry still does what it damn-well wants, and it's done so with impunity from its outset. That has to change.

So you think I'm a self-opinionated crank. OK, let me bring you back to this HN story and think again. Software programmers and developers like to call their work software engineering and themselves software engineers but I'd suggest many in other engineering professions just laugh at the notion. If you don't hear them shouting it out loud it's because they're being polite.

What we in other engineering professions laugh about isn't the skill sets of programmers and developers, we accept there are many very skilled people who work in the industry. The real issue is the laissez faire free-for-all attitude of the industry—an undisciplined industry not bound by strict procedures and lawful regulations. Without regulations and clearly defined rules and procedures we end up with inconsistent results, bugs and lots of mess.

I'd suggested you read this story again then read the document in the link below, it was written nearly 31 years ago and covers the issues I've addressed, it's a SciAm article titled Software's Chronic Crisis. One of its key postulates is that software development doesn't have the disciplined lineage of say chemical engineering and that programmers are more akin to artists than engineers because they operate without industry standard strictures and procedures (such as those set by law).

What's so poignant about that article nowadays is that precious little has changed in the software industry in respect to those matters it refers to. Now ask yourself why is that so given that there has been much development in other areas of software development.

Little doubt the above commet is correct. Look at the way Niklaus Wirth's Pascal lacks widespread support amongst programmers whereas languages such as C are very popular because programmers don't feel constrained to the extent that Pascal constrains them, they feel hemmed in by it. Pascal essentially works like other professions—you must define what you want first up, (the concept, say a bridge) and then draw up the plans and revise them before anyone starts building it. After it's built few if any changes can be made. That's the cultural difference between software development and other engineering professions. It's a fundamental one.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247573088_Software'... (best copy—PDF)

https://www.cse.psu.edu/~gxt29/bug/localCopies/SoftwareCrisi...

dmckeon · 7 months ago

I agree. Here's a different perspective:

Bloated and crafted software - a rant:

The state of software is the state of the structures of primitive societies: some in cave shelters, some under roofs of sticks and leaves, some in mud huts.

We talk of Cathedral and Bazaar, but there are very few carefully designed Cathedrals of software, and those probably have plenty of barely hidden flaws.

The Bazaars are all around us, jammed together, spreading for miles and miles, tent walls and roofs billowing in the breeze, all awaiting a strong zephyr to carry many of them away, and leave most of the rest in ruins.

What software needs is building blocks. Bricks of uniform size, easily joined together. Concrete masonry units. Tilt-up walls. Trans-oceanic shipping containers (connex, seabox).

Solid, composable, engineered, units. We should be able to pull a well-known and heavily tested package or function to use, just like a contractor would call for a delivery of 200 8x8x16" CMU blocks, and be able to expect they will get just that, with no gaps, weak spots, or broken webs.

But, no , all of us software crafts-folk want to carefully create our very own artisanal version of whatever library functions, that are needed for the project at hand. In a world that could be made of solid concrete blocks, we are crafting our very own adobes, with our own special blend of straw and mud, and we think we have advanced far beyond the folks living in mud huts.

Some of us will say they are master masons, crafting cathedrals out of hand cut stones, each carefully measured and chiseled, and each stone unique. We're still duplicating effort when we could be using commercial off-shelf libraries. And all the while the project deadlines go zipping past as we try to craft our way to local perfection.

All I can suggest as a solution is a multi-government and multi-corporate effort to design and build fairly universal functions, libraries, and packages that are robust, exhaustively reviewed by humans, and tested thoroughly. I won't ask for provable correctness, yet. :-)

Would the result be an Ada on steroids? Depends on who is involved.

Choice of language should not matter. The APIs would matter, a lot. A few competing teams would be a possibility. Passing several existing functions to an AI, with a "do like these, only perfectly" might be useful, or useless.

And yes, then we would have 15 competing standards. https://xkcd.com/927/ (Well, we probably already have at last 1,500, so, go figure.)

dmckeon commented on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/nkurz

drivingmenuts · 8 months ago

That competent and well-staffed bureaucracy is important also because they patiently work through these problems with their counterparts on the other side of the the Rio Grande.

Except they got fired, so now there's no one to do that work. We got what we wanted. God help us all 'cause no one else is.

dmckeon · 8 months ago

And now those positions are listed as open. Disruption, but to what end. Sigh. https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961

dmckeon commented on How a single line of code could brick your iPhone rambo.codes/posts/2025-04... · Posted by u/sashk

Kerbonut · 8 months ago

Almost like a "soft"-brick, if you would.

dmckeon · 8 months ago

Thus, perhaps "loafed" as in something brick-like, but which may also be soft. And a "loafed" device, being idle, would be loafing.

dmckeon commented on Potatoes in the Mail facts.usps.com/mailing-po... · Posted by u/mooreds

htrp · 8 months ago

Wait until you find out you can send chickens by mail

https://facts.usps.com/shipping-chicks/

dmckeon · 8 months ago

Various live animals, queen bees and up to 8 attendant bees by air, but bee hives by ground only. Fair warning: the recipient of mailed bee hives may get a phone call at any time of day or night to "please come get them ASAP".

https://about.usps.com/posters/pos138/pos138__v04_revision_0...https://pe.usps.com/PUB52_Archive/NHTML/PUB52_Archive_202204...