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npsimons commented on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer   gill.net.in/posts/my-ques... · Posted by u/mygnu
lqet · 8 months ago
I live in a mountainous area that attracts huge amount of motorcyclists on weekends. Most of the fatal accidents I recall in the last years (usually around a dozen per year) were caused by right of way violations by cars, by excessive speeding of the cyclists, or by risky overtakes. I am not sure how a brake light would help there.

Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

npsimons · 8 months ago
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.

npsimons commented on Microui+fenster=Small GUI   bernsteinbear.com/blog/fe... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
mark_l_watson · a year ago
Thank you!

BTW, all of the eBooks I have written in the last ten years can be read for free (click on book, then ‘Free to Read Online). I try to keep them updated.

https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

npsimons · a year ago
Holy crap! It's the "Loving Common Lisp" author! Haven't had a chance to finish it yet, but it's awesome and I really appreciate the updates!
npsimons commented on Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money   newatlas.com/marine/how-t... · Posted by u/peutetre
dmd · a year ago
It's also possible to do this on "cruise ships" that aren't "cruise ships". My wife and I toured the Dalmation coast (Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece) on the https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-48957... ten years ago - a cruise, but a cruise with ~30 other people, not ~6000. It's a big difference! The ship itself was, as you say, really just the way to get there; everything happened on-shore.
npsimons · a year ago
> a cruise, but a cruise with ~30 other people, not ~6000.

This is the sort of thing that tempts me - an enchanting vision, like something out of "Death on the Nile", only minus the death. Just a small floating hotel that takes you to interesting places, not a floating amusement park combined with buffet.

npsimons commented on Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money   newatlas.com/marine/how-t... · Posted by u/peutetre
scarab92 · a year ago
There’s times I want to explore, and there’s times I just want to do nothing.

Cruises are good for when I want to do nothing for a while.

npsimons · a year ago
Sounds like a very expensive way to do nothing. I can do nothing at home virtually for free.
npsimons commented on Microui+fenster=Small GUI   bernsteinbear.com/blog/fe... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
HexDecOctBin · a year ago
Does s7 allows for REPL-driven programming? That's the only thing missing from the Lua VM that can't be implemented as a library. An embedded Lisp that supports a true REPL would be a god-send.
npsimons · a year ago
> An embedded Lisp that supports a true REPL would be a god-send.

I might be misunderstanding your requirements; "embedded" can mean so many things these days. But what do you think of ECL (https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/main.html)?

npsimons commented on Jujutsu: A Next Generation Replacement for Git   vincentschmalbach.com/juj... · Posted by u/vincent_s
donatj · a year ago
One of the bigger things I try to hammer in to a junior developers mind is to be conscious and thoughtful about their individual commits. To basically never just "git add ." whatever might just happen to be different in their work area, but to ALWAYS review the diff and make the commit a logical collection of changes.

With the lack of staging area it really seems like this encourages the exact opposite. Seems like a good way to get secrets as well as just general junk and clutter committed to your repo history.

If I am working on a big project, I will start to commit change sets as parts of the code solidify without committing other less solid changes. That seems pretty basic. I don't want half finished changes forever committed to history.

npsimons · a year ago
> I don't want half finished changes forever committed to history.

This is exactly why I hew to squash+rebase. As I like to put it "I don't care about every little sneeze a developer had." Git has spoiled me with this, where I have the power to commit to my private repo anything I damn well please, but in the end I can clean things up and keep the central repo clean and bisectable[0].

Any VCS that doesn't offer these (squash, rebase, bisect) is a complete non-starter for me.

[0] - https://blog.carbonfive.com/always-squash-and-rebase-your-gi...

npsimons commented on Do Skis Get Blunt?   brooker.co.za/misc-blog/2... · Posted by u/luu
oldandboring · a year ago
Former junior and Masters racer here. Glad to see there's some very qualified voices in these comments, including a few who are currently involved (as racing parents). I very much appreciate the level of technical detail and accuracy in those comments. I'll talk base bevels all day.

Pretty much agree with everything those folks have written. Most definitely sharp edges, and your bevels, matter when you are really pushing it, especially if you are racing, and most especially if you are on extremely hard or even water-injected snow.

Outside of that type of skiing, the ski tech on the lift was, I think, making a point that is true enough for most "normie" skiers, and inadvertently the blog author validated it with the microscope experiment. The short version is that once your edge angles are set, "polishing" them with a diamond stone should, generally, mostly, be all that is necessary to restore the edge shape after use. No filing should be necessary. If the edge get damaged with rocks or rust, this is no longer true. All caveats apply. The ski tech is just trying to say "don't pay a shop to run your skis through the machine when all you need is to rub your edges with a diamond stone for a minute."

Now, just how practical this is, again depends on who you are. You'd have to be:

- A regular enough skier to own your own equipment

- Good enough to benefit from a tuned edge

- Technical and handy enough to buy a diamond stone and learn to use it

- It has to not be impractical to go through this ritual after skiing (try doing this with two or three young, tired kids in tow)

Anyway I just enjoyed having this be on the front page of HN today. I'm good at like 2 things and this is one of them.

npsimons · a year ago
> Most definitely sharp edges, and your bevels, matter when you are really pushing it, especially if you are racing, and most especially if you are on extremely hard or even water-injected snow.

I have to ask, as someone into alpine touring and ski mountaineering (but not racing), what difference would backcountry skiing make to this advice? I imagine you'd need sharpening more often, due to twin factors of A) more rock and hard ice and B) really wanting that control on ungroomed (ie, icy) slopes at high angles.

I don't consider myself "really pushing it", but would like to have every ounce of control I can get when heading downhill. I'm enough of a beginner that I will often side-slip or even just hike completely down a slope I don't like the looks of.

npsimons commented on Do Skis Get Blunt?   brooker.co.za/misc-blog/2... · Posted by u/luu
Zironic · a year ago
Carving is extremely popular in Alpine skiing. The thing to keep in mind though is that a perfect carve on a perfectly sharp ski means you are literally ice-skating downhill. That means you will go very very fast, much faster then most people are comfortable with on the harder slopes.

So what people do is instead of carving perfectly, they deliberately slip to create some friction and slow themselves down.

npsimons · a year ago
> So what people do is instead of carving perfectly, they deliberately slip to create some friction and slow themselves down.

As an amateur alpine tourist who is deathly afraid of that feeling of "loss of control" from incredible downhill speeds, this is exactly what I do.

That said, I'm here reading because I want to know if the heuristic for sharpening changes when A) one is mostly off-piste (rock, hard ice, etc) and B) really want those edges sharp for ungroomed (ie, icy) slopes.

npsimons commented on Managing Oneself (2005)   hbr.org/2005/01/managing-... · Posted by u/bx376
ozim · a year ago
I think interesting take on the same idea I saw lately was "Every Dead Body on Mt. Everest Was Once a Highly Motivated Person". It seems not that new but still.
npsimons · a year ago
> I think interesting take on the same idea I saw lately was "Every Dead Body on Mt. Everest Was Once a Highly Motivated Person". It seems not that new but still.

I mean, everyone dies. Not that I'm elevating Mt. Everest climbers, but at least they're aspiring for something.

Now, if the message you're trying to get across is it takes more than motivation, and life is rife with failure, that I can get behind. But "don't try, there's no point" is the laziest, most self-serving twaddle ever to be uttered (and no, it's not Nihilism either).

npsimons commented on Things you didn't know about GNU readline (2019)   twobithistory.org/2019/08... · Posted by u/meribold
kstrauser · 2 years ago
It's a relief seeing readline pulled in as a dependency for some command line tool: ahhh, there's going to be at least a reasonable amount of command history and editing features available.

To remind yourself how much we take for granted, play with `psql --no-readline` some time and see how awful it is to lose the ability to up-arrow get the last query back, edit it, and send it again.

npsimons · 2 years ago
Forget the up-arrow, C-r is a life-saver for us Emacsers who have to go to CLI for whatever reason.

u/npsimons

KarmaCake day4272March 8, 2012
About
Previously a programmer in the DoD world, now a solo software developer. Before that, I used to hack on RTLinux until FSMLabs couldn't afford to pay me any more. My personal interests include search and rescue and musical groups. Also tried my hand at consulting around 2000-2001, failed; tried another startup based on a GPS logger concept that never got off the ground. Would like to contribute to open source, but the aforementioned extra-curricular activities get in the way. Run my own email/web for personal stuff at hardcorehackers.com; can be reached at the usual (RFC) addresses there.

I despise Apple fanboys and Microsoft shills, but I'm getting better (mostly by laughing at the former and ignoring the latter).

I used to be what I considered a master of C++; nowadays I'm an unabashed Lisp elitist, but mainly I putter along working on personal projects. Not currently looking for work, but if your project is interesting enough . . .

Still of the opinion that Emacs is the last editor on the last OS (Debian GNU/Linux).

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