HN user

bigpicture

422 karma
Posts1
Comments61
View on HN

Prevailing winds bring relatively clean air to most any city east of the Mississippi River especially in the winter time. Without nearby mountains, temperature inversions are pretty rare.

In late summer, air quality drops quite a bit as the wind drops off.

A few years ago I had to update some FORTRAN code written in the 1980s that did bond valuations and some other financial stuff. It hadn't been touched since it was written and was now running out of space because the number of bonds keeps increasing year after year.

I'd never done anything with FORTRAN before, so I spent a couple days reading about it and looking into how it works, fearful that I'd muck everything up trying to fix it.

I open the code and find that it was the most elegantly written software you could wish for, with fantastic comments and structure. I changed two numbers and was done, buying us another 30 years or so of rock-solid service.

The longer I work in this industry, the more I am coming to believe that waterfall is nothing more than a strawman set up to make development process X look like the Holy Grail.

Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?

I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.

It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions

When the yachts are idle, which is the majority of the time, they are typically plugged into shore power and are thus just consuming electricity from the grid. The electrical systems of these things are typically far more efficient than your home because they must generate their own electricity when at sea.

As for the wasting of money, you'll note that most of the cost of building a yacht is labor because they are mostly one-off builds and can't take advantage of automation. The article mentions that they cost 10% of the purchase price per month in upkeep. The vast majority of those costs are labor.

These things are among the most efficient devices for transferring wealth from the rich to the middle class. I wouldn't discourage their use at all.

This was a nice little review so I went to my local library website to reserve and found that they have two copies of this book published in 1967 from the Harvard University Press. The review's affiliate link to Amazon shows that this particular book is new and perhaps significant:

“The Greek text of Characters is rather messy, with lots of sentences in dispute (or simply unintelligible) due to copyists’ errors in the transmission process. Only a few years ago, a new edition of the Greek text by James Diggle sorted out many of these problems. This new English version by Pamela Mensch takes advantage of that cleaned-up Greek text.”

The crazy thing about this article is that it presents Chicago's solution (make the combined sewer bigger)

Except that Chicago's publicly stated position is that the Deep Tunnel system is not the solution. This is not a new thing, either. It's been that way for more than 2 decades.

For more than 10 years, they've had a stormwater management building ordinance and (with few exceptions) any project (new construction or renovation) that changes the amount of stormwater exiting a piece of property is subject to it. It limits the flow rate of stormwater leaving, the volume of stormwater leaving, and the amount of sediment that can leave a piece of property. It is entirely math-based, with published formulas and coefficients and makes determining compliance straightforward, objective and fast.

They've received international recognition for their incremental approach to stormwater management, which recognizes that the vast majority of property in the city is private property built long ago. As for public property, whenever the city rebuilds an alleyway, it is done with permeable pavement and is disconnected from the sewer. Whenever the city rebuilds a road, it is disconnected from the sewer to the extent that surrounding private property allows. Last year an entire block of a road near me was rebuilt and the side that was adjacent to a railroad embankment was built with swales every 50 feet or so to manage stormwater. It was actually visually attractive as well.

The S&P 500 publishes changes to the index in advance of the changes taking place, so all of the affected stocks have prices that reflect the change at the time of the change.

Most tracking indexes, especially the ones Vanguard uses, do not do that and thus do not allow the markets to front-run them. If you adopt the strategy of "do what Vanguard does" and you do it immediately after Vanguard says they did something, you are already too late to get the prices that Vanguard got and can kiss at least .05% goodbye just based on that. I would expect to under-perform by at least .25%, if not more.

Not being familiar with the term XNU, I did a little clicking around and hopefully I understand a bit better:

This file is evidence that Apple has been running iOS/MacOS on the Raspberry Pi 3?

The next thing I want Apple to do: If an app will request location services, it must: 1. Have a specific publicly available URL that contains all "location data" terms, conditions, and privacy information. 2. Monitor that URL and reset the permission dialog if the URL ever changes. 3. Immediately disable location services for that app if the URL disappears.

Yes and parking in the loop is blissfully expensive, encouraging suburbanites to take the train in.

At least they have the option of using a functioning train system!

You can see the locations in which street parking is meter-based and how much it costs [1]. It is very much a demand-based scheme and I think that many people see it as ideal.

The map doesn't show how parking is handled in residential areas though [2]. If demand exceeds supply, a numbered residential parking zone is implemented and only those who prove that the live inside the zone can buy the number sticker that goes in the window of your car and allows you to park on the street in that zone ($25 per year). Those residents are also the only people that can buy 24-hour visitor parking passes for guests ($0.53 per pass).

[1] http://map.chicagometers.com/

[2] http://smartchicago.github.io/zone-parking/

I understand that Apple does everything in its power to make the life of developers miserable

All XCode projects are automatically code signed on every build. If you have a developer membership with Apple, it uses a certificate issued by Apple. If not, it's just a locally-generated certificate.

If you use make or call Clang directly, obviously there is no signing process, but there is a command-line tool that you can use and integrate into your non-Xcode build process just fine.

In my area, it is very common for parents of boys that will be "young" when starting kindergarten to hold them back a year. They call it redshirting (a reference to US college athletics).

Our local school district prohibits the practice, but really can only enforce it at the kindergarten level. So many parents continue to enroll their boys in private preschool for two additional years and then enroll them in first grade when the school district can't say no. It is very rare for girls because of the assumption that emotional and behavioral development is far ahead of boys at that age.

So, why do it? Should a razor thin majority in a public vote 2 years ago decide the UK's policy forever?

Why do it? That question ceased being relevant a long time ago, when the process was irreversibly started. The linked article is suggesting a least-bad path forward. People may or may not agree with their assessment.

Wooden bikes 8 years ago

Steel is the best frame material for 95% of people due to its durability. Quality steel frames (not Schwinn travellers) are quite light.

I have a bike made with True Temper OX Platinum steel and it is my favorite bike by far. It is a very light frame, but that is not what I like about it. Steel (and titanium) frames can be made with tubing of a much smaller diameter than that of aluminum or carbon. I believe that the tube diameter (and associated stiffness) is what people are feeling when they talk about the difference between bikes.

If you make a steel bike with tubing that is indistinguishable from aluminum or carbon, I am not surprised that nobody can tell the difference!

Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built

As a teenager in rural Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright worked for a graduate of MIT school of architecture and then went to Madison to work for a civil engineering professor at UW Madison. His big break was to run away from home and go to Chicago, which was in the midst of the largest building boom in the history of the world up to then, where he was hired within a day of arriving by the firm owned by the MIT grad he worked for years before.

The guy started very early and then never stopped working.

Wow, this is the 2nd time in two weeks that something has appeared on my probability homework and then made the front page of HN almost immediately.

Coincidence?

Who else is taking Stat 110?

Sure, big old U.S. Steel is behind the times, but that's true for any industry.

U.S. Steel operates integrated mills, which make steel from raw materials. "Mini-mills" make steel using electric arc blast furnaces to recycle existing steel.

If you need very high quality steel, you have to get it from an integrated mill. Everyone else can use the recycled stuff. The real benefit that you are talking about is the fact that recycled steel quality is improving enough to be useful in more applications.

PS - U.S. Steel is converting their Alabama mill to an electric arc blast furnace (they may have finished by now).

Don’t underestimate AMD’s ability to shoot itself in the foot.

Every single consumer-targeted Intel chip has integrated graphics capable of displaying a 4k movie on the screen/tv without so much as breaking a sweat. AMD has exactly 3 Ryzen chips with that capability, none of which fit into their "Lot's of cores!" strategy. I'm not sure that AMD understands what drives the majority of consumer purchases.

highest-earning first year teachers only earned $39,259

Appendix A [1] contains the salary schedule for Chicago Public Schools, which shows that in the current school year a first-year teacher ("step 1") with a bachelor's degree ("lane 1") earns between $57,000 and $69,000 per year, depending on the length of the school year in the particular school they are appointed to. A master's degree ("lane 2") bumps the pay by somewhere in the range of $4,000-5,000.

Being a coach on the sports team earns an additional $26.21 per hour of coaching, participating in after-school non-coaching, non-instructional activities earns $40.90 per hour, and after-school instructional activities earn $47.62 per hour.

It appears as though a teacher could add $5,000 or more per year with only an hour of extra time per school day.

If a teacher wanted to be frugal and save money, it surely appears possible.

[1] https://www.ctunet.com/for-members/2015-19-contract

I vote in Chicago, and our electronic voting machines print a paper receipt. The process is as follows: 1) Write your name and address on a piece of paper. 2) Hand it to the worker, who looks you up on the computer. 3) The worker writes your ward/precinct on the piece of paper and asks you to confirm and sign. 4) The ballot is loaded onto a smart card and given to you. 5) You choose any open voting machine and insert the smart card. 6) The voting machine presents your ballot and you press a button to confirm it is the correct one. 7) You do your voting. 8) The voting machine shows you all of your votes, screen by screen and you confirm them. 9) The voting machine prints your votes, page by page on a roll of paper (behind clear plastic) and you confirm them. 10) The voting machine asks if you are really, really sure and you confirm. 11) The smart card pops out of the machine and you drop it in a box on the way out.

If you do early voting, you can only vote electronically. If you vote on election day, you can choose a paper ballot if you wish. Early voting is electronic only because you can vote anywhere in the city (if you work downtown you can do so on your lunch break no matter where in the city you live) and there are dozens of different ballots because we vote on things at the neighborhood level in addition to state and national candidates. Having paper ballots would be quite challenging.

This means that they can "financially engineer" quarters

Sure, look at their balance sheet from the 8-k filing. How many quarters in a row showing a $1.2 billion increase in accounts payable will their suppliers tolerate?