HN user

netaustin

683 karma

Co-Founder Alley Interactive: Full service digital product development for publishers

Posts16
Comments91
View on HN

As a cyclist and avid fan of pro cycling, I don’t see this being so useful for transportation from a dropped position back to the peloton or breakaway. As others have noted, team cars help, and often the distance to close can be handled by one teammate. I forget which stage, but this year when Vingegaard had a mechanical and needed to swap bikes, Visma didn’t have any domestique wait for him! The protected rider is usually the best rider.

I was thinking about how this might be useful on the attack. Visma had several super domestiques remaining at the end of the tour (Jorgensen, Kuss, Simon Yates) and UAE had lost its top lieutenant. Could they have made a 2x2 train for Vingegaard? Well, maybe, but Pogacar would’ve just hopped on board. So not sure we would see this either.

Amateur rides with no cars and a wider divergence in cyclist abilities, maybe this is more useful.

Love this idea! I wonder how this could one day come to incorporate the true value of a coach on deck, which is to see the stroke and offer guidance. Some self-coached or remotely-coached swimmers film themselves underwater, which your system might reasonably consume at some point. I have worked with swim coaches in several formats, and the coach on deck providing instant feedback has been by far the most useful to me. Perhaps this is why one of the most common formats for swimming is the team practice, since one coach working in real time can watch a dozen swimmers and give feedback.

I had the pleasure of learning from Terry Laughlin at a Total Immersion camp in 2014. (I learned to swim as an adult for triathlon.) Terry loved the water so much that we could earn ourselves an extra minute of rest between sets just by asking him to show us a skill again. Far and away my most helpful and memorable swim instruction.

Having not thought about it at this level, the feedback loop explains why my Bullet Journal works well for me. I can write down any task and break it down to any level of detail without worrying about software, which is nice, and I get a nice little reward when I cross off a bullet. I have used post-its in this way in the past and found that it's more effective than the bullet journal if I need a real kick in the pants. Also I move around a lot between home, office, and work trips. While post-its don't travel well, the phone apps just don't work for me.

When I need to coax my kids (7 and 10) into completing a tedious list of chores, like cleaning their room and playroom, practicing their instruments, and doing their homework, I also reach for the post-its. They each get their own color and we talk through the best way to break things down, arrange them in a backlog on the wall, set a timer, and agree to meet when the timer goes off to review our progress.

Not a tangent! I certainly appreciate the semantics, and there seems to be some academic interest in the semantics alone! Some Lyme researchers would like to call it “Lyme Disease Facial Palsy” or LDFP to encourage practitioners to differentiate early. Not sure that would’ve helped me, I had no bullseye rash and no fever, just horrible fatigue and facial paralysis. The idea would be to encourage practitioners in Lyme-prone locations to see Bell’s, test for Lyme, which I think your point about overlooking the link between condition and the cause supports. Lyme showed up on a blood test my PCP ordered only after I completed a course of prednisone with no improvement and much misery. He didn’t even tell me he added a Lyme test, but I’m glad he did!

Here’s one paper on the topic I remember reading at the time: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8791801/

I contracted Lyme disease while on vacation in Cape Cod last year. The first symptom was left-side facial paralysis, which my physician diagnosed as Bell's Palsy, so I spent two weeks on steroids before we figured out the real issue. Three weeks of doxycycline cured the Lyme but left feeling pretty wrecked for more than a month afterwards! I seem to have avoided the chronic symptoms some people experience, but a low-dose antibiotic would have been great.

Very interesting and well-explained. Given that the research has been out for two years, any interested data collectors have considered this! Forget hackers, this an exploit for enterprises and governments!

Could websites concerned with privacy deploy a package that triggers interrupts randomly? Could a browser extension do it for every site?

We spent a whole gray day at Bletchley and TNMOC and I appreciated the connection between Bletchley and TNMOC given the context of WWII. To me Bletchley is more about process, a metaphorical "Scrum room" of one of the most important math and science programs in history. And taken together, they encapsulate sort of a catalyzing moment that computing prehistory transitioned to computing history.

My history-teacher wife liked Bletchley a lot more than TNMOC, where I lingered too long, but I did like both. Even though the Bombe replica was down for repairs that day.

The purpose of the article is persuasive but the HN title is ambiguous and reads much more expository. I’m a New Yorker who walks, bikes, and drives, in roughly that order and it was clear to me that the author is pro-bollard.

I work in news technology, including with many local news organizations, both corporate and independent, including in California. Google does not support all news organizations equally, and this seems designed to gain some leverage over organizations that do get a lot from Google. Their Google News Initiative is on its surface just a training platform for publishers to learn how to use Google’s tools but they’ve done quite a bit more for some publishers. This feels like an attempt to gain the vocal support of publishers who have been blessed by Google’s beneficence, many of which are earnest non-profit organizations who might take the bait about big bad hedge funds. I don’t know how they select who to help and who to ignore and our attempts to engage with them on behalf of publishers have had mixed results.

But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.

As far as I'm aware, the state of play in tech is far more welcoming to formerly incarcerated people than this thread would imply. Justice Through Code at Columbia University is designed to place formerly incarcerated and criminal legal system-involved individuals in tech roles, and has had a lot of success placing its alumni at big tech companies [1]. And this is largely for entry-level tech workers.

Checkr is a commonly used background-check tool, especially in tech, that allows for those with criminal histories to provide context for what's on their record [2], I'm curious if you've encountered it specifically.

To your post about being ghosted, that seems unfortunately to be a common theme in this period of staff contraction that may not be limited to those with criminal records [3], but reneged offers is a bummer, I'm sorry that's happened to you. There's a theme of "owning the narrative" among some formerly incarcerated people that may be worth considering.

Last, a useful resource on humanizing language for those of us without criminal justice histories [5].

[1] https://centerforjustice.columbia.edu/justicethroughcode

[2] https://checkr.com/

[3] https://medium.com/@k0ryk/everyones-getting-ghosted-dbf0fbaf...

[4] https://fortunesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/final-...

Totally. During the early months of the pandemic when NYC was hit super hard, Samaritan's Purse set up a tent hospital in Central Park directly opposite the main campus of Mt. Sinai which was a marvel to see, I would run and cycle past it nearly every day. Another of my common running routes took me past the USNS Comfort, docked at Pier 90, and the Javits Center, which hosted yet another modular hospital. Then a little later, a modular morgue on Randall's Island, which is now the site of a modular migrant encampment.

I later read that because of strict policies relating to a notion that only the "simple" cases, of which there were few, could be transferred, the temporary hospital facilities ended up underutilized. But the ability to surge capacity in a specific area is hardly constrained to parts of the world with fewer hospital beds. Public health crises and natural disasters in the USA are perfect candidates for this technology.

I hope we can test this quickly, and if it works, buy a bulk pack.

I feel like in the parent comment coup is sort of shorthand for the painful but necessary work of building consensus that it is time for new leadership. Necessary is in the eye of the beholder. These certainly can be petty when they are bald-faced power grabs, but they equally can be noble if the leader is a despot or a criminal. I would also not call Sam Altman's ouster a coup even if the board were manipulated into ousting him, he was removed by exactly the people who are allowed to remove him. Coups are necessarily extrajudicial.

I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.

I want to endorse the process and maybe not worry so much about the result. I started on a similar journey in the pandemic of making pizza for my wife and kids every Friday night. They all receive their own (small) personal pizzas, which I knead, roll, and transfer from a pizza peel to a pizza stone. Starting from a NYTimes recipe for Roberta's pizza dough — a pre-children favorite of ours — and iterating from there, I became confident over dozens of repetitions. My pizzas now are very crisp on the bottom without being burned on top, and I can "sense" when the pizza is done, no timers needed. I can feel when the dough is hydrated, I can see when it's rolled flat.

All this isn't about knowledge that can be imparted in a book; it's frankly about kaizen. The art of doing it a little better this time than you did it before. If you do it 2% better each time, after ~35 times, you're twice as good. Don't get me wrong, I love (love!) the open knowledge here. But OP cannot put in the reps for you. Only you can put in the reps.

Lots of the comments here get at the reason, which is import taxes, but there's confusion about the impact of it on the high-end camera market. Most professional setups that use "still" cameras are running them into a video mixer (like Blackmagic ATEM) which connects to a computer. You can record directly onto disk and stream live at the same time using free software like OBS. The camera just sits with its shutter open but doesn't record anything, thus there's no time limit. The Sony A7 series is quite popular for this application. What I'm describing is kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of video capture complexity.

I participated in the clinical trial at Duke that's linked to from that story, which honestly was a blast. That the medics let this guy keep training is astonishing to me. If they measured his pulse ox and sent him back in anyways, that's criminal. Also, as I understand it, Sildenafil during dives is a bad idea (something about seizures) which might be why it's "banned" in SEAL training.

But who funded the Duke study that surfaced Sildenafil as a candidate drug? The Navy SEALs, of course.

Yes. The first time it happened was in the Hudson River in the NYC triathlon. I thought for sure that I'd just ingested some sludge, and I went on to complete the race, after which I was sent to the hospital (I walked). My pulse ox was 86. Most triathlon deaths occur during the swim portion of the race and are attributed to cardiac events, often SCD, but pulmonary edema may actually be the primary cause. A teeny bit of education (chest congestion? get out of the damn water!) could save lives, but nobody in the business of triathlon wants to scare off new participants, since the amateur fee-paying end of the sport is really the whole game.

Ha, fair. I love open water swimming and triathlon, and I can do it in not-cold water or a pool indefinitely, plus the Sildenafil entirely prevents it in cold water. Even without Sildenafil all I have to do is stop swimming and I'm fully better after an hour or so.

Off-label uses that appear to actually be effective include altitude sickness and prevention of SIPE (Swimming Induced Pulmonary Edema). I take it for the latter, and it's remarkable. No Sildenafil = I cough up blood after just a few minutes swimming in cold water (as in a triathlon). Sildeanfil = no ill effects whatsoever. I'm unclear how a vasodilator would impact a neurological disease.

The boundary between useful advertising and word of mouth is exceedingly thin and contextual. When Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth, had it already won? Clearly not then and not now; it's barely posted an operating profit and it still a couple billion away from positive net income. Rather, it's in a duopoly in the US and an oligopoly in some other markets and facing a pretty gnarly advertise (defect) or not (cooperate) prisoner's dilemma. Word-of-mouth can be a form of promotion. Most products have obvious entry pathways which smart and experienced marketers will readily identify; few of these are display ads, fewer still are billboards.

The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.

This works well for me, too. My wife is a teacher. I appreciate her schedule and her outside perspective on my chunk of the tech industry, and the diversity of our perspectives makes us a better parenting team. I also appreciate the income diversification; I know lots of couples who have highly correlated salaries. Not a reason to choose a partner but something to try and de-risk if you’re in that position. Lastly, it’s nice to bounce product ideas off someone who is unimpressed by flashy features.

This isn’t to say that I think developers dating developers is a bad idea, choosing a partner is the most personal possible choice and I’m glad to see an interesting new angle on it.

As far as I know, CPA in most states requires 150 hours of college credit, of which many must be in accounting. My CPA friends largely joined the big four firm on the strength of their CPA, spent a little time in audit, then promptly switched to consulting. What you get from that certification is the ability to sign corporate audits, own an accounting firm, and the right to prepare and defend tax returns. Unless you are preparing for a second career in accounting, CPA seems like a lot to bite off, but good on you! I don’t envy you all the cost accounting headaches and audit rules.

CFA requires that you have work experience making investment decisions and can get references to that effect, but in all it would be easier than CPA.

I'm restarting my own math education from the point of Calculus 1 so I can learn more about AI/ML, and want the college credits so that if I decide to do more graduate school, I will have solid prerequisites. I searched pretty exhaustively and settled on NetMath (https://netmath.illinois.edu/) which is a UIUC program. Most classes are self-paced and use Mathematica extensively, but you can go amazingly far in the program. I hope to get through their Calculus-based probability by about a year from now.

Beware the potential for death spirals, and the bigger you get the harder they are to see. Early on, this is easy; last long enough to get to a profit. Later, if you have several products and you're allocating overhead among them, you could be tempted to cut the one with the worst margin. Then the overhead gets reallocated to the other products and pushes a second line underwater.

If your output requires direct labor, it IS possible to sell your way into a death spiral because labor is short-run inelastic.

Know your experience curve and know where you and your competitors are on it. If the curve has flattened and you're not the winner, find a new curve.

I played a version of this on Zoom as part of a Columbia University program [1] designed to simulate the conditions of re-entry from prison, which have considerable structural similarities to poverty and homelessness. The Zoom game is based on one played in person with "stations" representing different institutions and "tokens" representing stuff like money, birth certificates, ID cards, etc. Your hypothetical scenario is quite a lot like the mechanics of this game. I'm working on building a single-player software version of it because the live simulation is rather difficult to stage!

[1] https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/r...

A little oral airline history — I was a student at Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and 2003, studying EE and CS. I struggled, not with the material, but with my own personal issues and the fact that my girlfriend was 600 miles away in Minnesota. I dropped out of school and took a job at US Airways as a baggage handler so that I could fly for free. I learned SABRE fast, and wrote a little web app in PHP to help me memorize airport codes. (AVP = Scranton Wilkes Barre. Fifty years from now, this might be my dying thought.)

A year and two promotions later, I had dropped out and transferred "upstairs" to a generalist customer service job. I moved to Minneapolis, just an hour from my girlfriend, and worked as a ticket agent, gate agent, and baggage service agent. At that point I knew five distinct SABRE subsystems very well. Ticketing, gate, baggage, ramp (DECS), and flight operations (also DECS) are all handled differently in SABRE. I learned intuitively how VCRs work and could "pull" them out of defunct reservations and "push" them onto new ones, which made me the fastest re-booker at the station. I could sell a Zed fare in 30 seconds, and almost never needed to hand over a paper ticket to a customer, which meant that my end of day report was usually clean. In retrospect, SABREs green screen commands formed kind of a functional language in a real-time Vim-like environment.

I was laid off from US Airways in the wake of its America West reverse merger. I took a job with Carlson Wagonlit as a corporate travel agent. Carlson used a complicated mid-2000s web app instead of SABRE or Amadeus, and ultimately I was able to automate a large part of my job with an HTA application (JavaScript with system privileges on Windows NT). After I showed my work to our IT department at the insistence of my supervisor, who thought I was breaking the rules, a mid-career developer took me aside and gave me stern advice to leave Carlson immediately and seek employment as a programmer. I had no idea that software skills were worth anything, and quintupled my income overnight.

Fifteen years later, I remember the feeling of throwing bags onto conveyor belts like it was yesterday. I loved that job, and I loved SABRE.

I think that's a point that the authors of the paper are eager to test. If you believed you could escape a personally forecasted career trajectory by accepting an education instrument that was available as equity but not as debt, would you?

I'm also not sure that a world that honors personal bankruptcy can be so simply associated with indenture.