slipperyp

Kinda wish there were more details on this page to understand or interpret what the author is talking about or compared it to.

I have a Canon 9000F (consumer grade) that is getting very old now and often difficult to get running when I pull it out, but it scans film at 2400dpi which has been adequate for my home archival purposes. I don't know if this is in the ballpark of what the author used as the comparison for the consumer scanner (nor is the DPI cited). About 8 years ago I was going to start a new film scanning project and thought "Hey, maybe now's the time to buy an updated film scanner" but I learned there is very little on the consumer market and it's gotten very expensive.

I think the 9000f hasn't been made in a while but I still find it to be a great scanner when I need this.

As I'm WFH next to my Synology and look down at my ESD bag-wrapped spare WD Red, I can't help but be reminded of Peter Graves glancing down at his tray with a perfectly cleaned fishbone in "Airplane!"

There is more information on the method from this documentary Doing Time, Doing Vipassana:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg

It documents the use of Vipassana as a reform measure at a harsh prison in India and traces the impacts it had on some of the inmates there.

It's not a horrible place to work. I've worked at Microsoft and work for Amazon now. It's unavoidable that with a company the size of Amazon there will be some (maybe a lot) of bad areas to work and it's obvious that despite even the best hiring practices in the world, you'll find people winding up in a position for which they are not a good fit.

There's a lot of interesting work, though, and a lot of people happy working on it. I wouldn't tell anyone it's the best place to work or that it's "better" to work than another place, but I love what I do and work with hundreds of people who (more or less) feel the same. I also know people who don't feel this way and I encourage them to move on or move out because nobody should be in a job they really dislike (and I'm aware of the incredible privilege that's reflected by my ability to say that).

KIRO TV in Seattle did a small test of impairment on a closed course with participants using varying amounts of marijuana a few years ago around the time Washington voters were choosing to legalize pot and found similar results:

http://www.kiro7.com/news/stoned-drivers-hit-test-course/139...

This post by Bunnie Huang, on the manufacturing process observed at a plant in China, is relevant enough to mention here: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364

I don't know if it's statistically valid, but I've used methods similarly based on this to do calculations like you're talking for a role similar to what you described.

There are more subtleties that it might be important for you to take into account - primarily:

1) need to sample fairly extensively before/after outage to calibrate more accurately against Holt-Winters (the Holt-Winters seasonal projection should accurately project the trend, but actual numbers are probably running at some slight or significant rate above/below projections)

2) When running those samples, it's important to sample data where you believe the data points are definitely not impacted by the outage. This is often quite challenging since outages sometimes might span low / peak traffic periods or ramp-up/down periods.

3) Finally, it can be hard to pinpoint the actual start / end of the event (the identify the time samples you want to consider in your measurement for the outage cost). Particularly the end, since there's often some pressure for queued operations (by software or by your users who are itching to complete what they were trying to do) that may make your samples fluctuate. That backfill pressure can be substantial and is important to not ignore in your measurement of the actual cost of the issue. Say you're a retail site - if you have a 15 minute period of 50% order drop but the first 5 minutes where service is restored, the total order rate was 50% above projections. Do you count that as 15 minutes of 50% order drop, or 10 minutes of 50% order drop? Both are legitimate but it's important to know what metric you're measuring yourself against so you're as correct / honest as you can be.

You shouldn't let that scare you away. There's a good article from Joel on Software about how software is priced. It might be this (it's long enough and old enough it might be right): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

but essentially you're likely to find many models of software (from large software vendors) with a lot of different models for how you can try / use / own it. My sense is that most commercial software vendors want you to use their software and want you to get it legitimately and want to find a way where you can pay what vaguely seems like it should be mutually agreeable (if you're using it educationally, there are often ways to get it for free, if you're a developer for a large organization, they want that organization to actually pay for it and support the value they're getting out of you using it).

I worked on MS Office and I once remember Sinofsky (then in charge of Office) once talking about the pricing structure of Office and saying nobody paid the ~$400 MSRP. People get it bundled with new computers, pay substantially lower upgrade fees, or something else. I don't remember if he went so far as to say "at some level, people pirate it" but that's a reality that only the really oblivious would ignore. The point is - try stuff out, see what you like, and try to figure out what makes you the most productive without worrying about "some day I won't be able to afford this" (but by all means you should also rabble-rouse if you find the prices for the software you use are unreasonable and inflexible).

Call me a nitpicker and you'd be right, but the screenshots in this[1] and other ads[2] where they showcase this watch for GPS navigation while on a bike (or motorcycle) where the watch is not doing a 90 degree rotation on the content area so you can read it while your hands are on some handlebars really bugs me. I guess it bugs me more than some model getting on a motorcycle wearing what looks like a blazer with no helmet or gloves, too.

But to make this comment, say, 20% hn worthy, can someone explain whether it's unrealistic that I think the accelerometer should be able to figure out the "holding handlebars with forward velocity" scenario and orient the display properly?

[1] http://www.lg.com/global/gwatch/index.html#urbanstyle5 [2] https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=motorola_mo...

Yeah, but this isn't to produce a drinkable brew. It's not even a super different projection from the brew time when I've homebrewed (which has been a while but was probably closer to 6 hours for me to get it into the primary fermentation tub). This thing looks pretty cool, but I'm interested in seeing more on the whole setup / maintenance and, especially, cleaning.

He wasn't laid off - he was fired. This is the first point the CEO makes and it's an important distinction that the poster seemed to not own up to at all. Not knowing the difference between being fired and being laid off is bad - there's a pretty remote possibility that the poster's direct manager didn't own the message well and told the guy "we're letting you go" and he didn't understand he was being fired, but even if that's the case, most organizations of any reasonable size should have someone in HR handling the exit interview who makes things like this super clear.

I have no insight into what happened here, but I definitely have had experience working with and processing the termination of underperformers who don't recognize or accept that they are not meeting the bar and this sounds a bit like one of those cases.

There are probably some aspects of this separation that were imperfectly handled on both sides, but given the context of "guy is fired from company chooses to be interviewed on company site and say the company didn't give him any reason why he was fired" and the company says "you weren't doing your job" - I tend to trust the company.

Right. It's a bit disappointing in the context of a page with the lead-in "What if every soldier could run a four-minute mile?" but I trust this research is still a work in progress and adding an 11lb weight + helmet and taking those times off is a significant achievement.

Many thanks - that's exactly the discussion I was looking for :)

Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added):

"...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code governs..."

Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something, where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" - that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just curious...

Paul Ford is a magician and offers terrific perspective on subtle aspects of what is typically our American culture. If you're looking for him to beat you over the head with THE POINT about what he insists you're suppose to think, you're reading the wrong author.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize this doesn't really directly respond to "IDE replacement" - honestly I don't write much code any more so some of the below doesn't apply to that. When I wrote code, the main benefit of emacs was that it abstracted me a bit from the nuances of different IDEs for different languages / platforms and was good at generalizing interactions with the compiler / errors / objects. A really good IDE would be better at many certain things than emacs, but emacs was marginally better all around. I used it for C, perl, and a little C++.

1) "the kitchen sink" thing, which is commonly cited as a drawback, is (to me) emacs most compelling feature. If this isn't compelling to someone, then a lot of the rest of emacs probably won't be, either.

There's a learning curve to doing everything in emacs. I've written some guides on it before to ease the transition to starting to use it (basically introducing a few very important basic concepts that introduce major and minor modes, keybindings, and how to investigate those and customize them), but when you have that core understanding down, when you realize that you can apply those same concepts to everything you do - it's incredibly, incredibly powerful and you understand why people want to live in emacs.

eshell or shell-mode for your shell interactions is amazing. searching through a shell buffer with emacs' regexes or incremental search is fantastic. Running your whole shell in that buffer and being able to run simple but useful commands like "occur" (essentially letting you grep through multiple preceding lines of output) is something I use all the time. The commands to jump up / down through the buffer to prior prompts in the shell history - all of that stuff is great.

Similarly, using dired (directory editor) as my shell browser is great. If I need to do a batch file rename, I could jump through some hoops to do this with shell script one-liners or something, but putting dired into editable mode and then treating the file names simply like text and using search & replace operations the same way I would on regular content in a file is a natural, fast, and powerful operation.

And of course all of these are the same commands and same environment as I have for editing text.

I don't do everything in emacs but I do as much as I can in it. And I didn't mention org-mode but I use it for 100% of my note taking and publishing to HTML - it's incredibly awesome.

I'm not thrilled about this company or my order - fair warning below for others who ordered a lens from them.

tl;dr - the site may have autogenerated an account for you with a weak password if you told it to check out as guest.

First - they didn't have an exact lens match, so I tried ordering two sets of close-to-recommended lenses. My lenses arrived today (10 days after my order, which is probably pretty decent) but I only got one of each, not two sets. OK, this was probably my screw-up, but I definitely knew what I needed and remember trying to tweak quantities on my order to get this right. This is probably my screwup but part of me wishes that it wasn't so easy to screwup online retail (yes, by the customer) like this.

But my bigger worry is this! Now that I've got two individual, unpaired lenses, tonight I'm going back to place a new order. I didn't create an account with my original order so I'm checking out again and choosing the "don't create an account" option again when the site tells me I have an account. That's weird because I definitely know I didn't choose to create an account. But I can't check out in without signing in, so I try using the password generation routine I've been using for years. That doesn't work, so I ask it to email me my password and the email I receive tells me my password is "optics".

1) For obvious reasons, it's really, really, really bad to send a username and password together in an email (my username happened to be my email, but the body of the message makes this explicit, too) 2) I definitely did not create that account or with that password - this seems to have generated one "for" me 3) In doing so, it used a really insecure password and I suspect that same default password is in place for other accounts that have been generated automatically and without consent on the site.

I don't really mean to come slam these guys and their site - it seems like a bit of a mom & pop shop for some specialized equipment - but others who've placed an order here should beware.

Right. His first example puts a scale factor on a 2400x700px image to make it "not too big" for smaller screens. That's responsive design the same way that the NES emulator on my old WinCE phone in 2003 (which had a touch display that only supported a single input touch at a time) was NES on WinCE.

"biased" how? That simply means that for the more recent data set, the owners bothered to decypher a small set of user agents (those represented in the graph - latest verions of dominant browsers), everything else is marked "other" and it shows that in Jan 2014, ~20% or fewer of clients were connecting from anything but some latest-version browser (and of whatever resources this covers, Chrome is by far the leader). That doesn't strike me as bias - just data simplification.

I dislike that statement, too, but for different reasons.

The 30,000x larger sample in the aggregate means the calculated fire rate for non-Tesla cars is probably a more reliable number. Maybe those 100M Tesla miles were "lucky"? Possibly not, though - I don't know enough about cars to guess.

The 3 trillion aggregate miles includes a lot broader sample size of car age than those from a single company that's 10 years old. This, to me, seems important to control for.

Finally - I bet the usage profile of a Tesla is different from the median usage profile of every random car on the street and throughout the country.

Hunch: it's got to do with the fact that anyone can upvote, not anyone can downvote, and there's a large enough audience that thinks every topic posted is fodder for the surveillance discussion (which isn't a stretch) and thinks that's the most important thing to upvote (IMO it's probably not, but welcome to democracy).

A few months ago a friend told me he felt hn had jumped the shark. This frontpage discussion about a blog post about a reddit thread pretty much settles any debate there was to be had on that topic!

Many, many people are and do it all the time right now, every day. There was a video where Scott Jurek talked candidly about Dean a while ago - it was great. The site took it down (or the site is down?) but in a nutshell, Jurek was very super critical of Dean because Dean for goes around like the ambassador and greatest ever athlete in ultrarunning when he's never been one of the top 10. Dean's a pretty great athlete - there's no question about that. But he's only a fraction of the god that he thinks he is or that the media empire he's built around himself makes him out to be.

(for background: Scott Jurek is definitely one of the top ultrarunners of the current generation)

I doubt this is the internal audit of the outage event. At least I hope it isn't, but I could be wrong. The template from Google isn't super uncommon and I bet most organizations that really want to drill in and understand root causes and prevent recurrence use something very similar to it (if the organization is serious about uptime and if they're successful at reducing recurrence).

It doesn't seem crazy to me that Facebook's publicly facing summary of this is as casual as this seems to be. They owned up to breaking their platform and indicate they're taking measures to not do it again. But if the person who's internally accountable for analyzing this and preventing recurrence told me "we're building better tools" without any specifics about those tools, who's got accountability, or the timeline they anticipate putting those in place, I'd say they should pack their bags, so I bet there's a more detailed plan internally. I'm also not a facebook app developer, though, and if I had any revenue depending on not being shut down like this, I might be more frustrated with this either a) poor level of transparency (giving them the benefit of the doubt) or b) poor depth of analysis.

Tangent from the pet thing, but ... personally and admittedly, I get quite hoity toity about this and don't think I'm spouting any gospel. My $0.02 and observations around this though are: - No one (ok, one exception) I know who trains heavily relies on a GPS, fitbit, etc. Most of them know what kinds of splits they'd turn out for some workout (mile repeats, 800s or some trail they run a lot). - Conversely, I know a lot of people who use a GPS or fitbit who are not in shape and seem to want to get in shape but aren't making noticeable progress over months (based on their satisfaction or what I'd call visible results) - But yeah, I also know a lot of people who exercise casually and incorporate these into their days.

I just see a lot more people who these don't do anything for than those that they do, and I think the device has little-to-nothing to do with the outcome. A MUCH better investment would be to join a group (many are free, many cost less than the devices).

Back to the pet thing, I think you have to want to care for the pet and pay attention to its behavior and needs. This looks like a neat / fine device, but I'd probably sooner make one of the DIY "Cooper the Photographer Cat" cameras (which incidentally run half the cost of the whistle: http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_cc_o1_en.htm)

I'm not thrilled about that at all, either. My dog is from a shelter (it was a no-kill shelter but I looked at kill shelters, too). Basically, I think more people need to take care of their pets and more people need to help sterilize pets that there don't appear to be anyone to take care of. My parents got a few ferral cats in Texas "fixed" and I know a guy in rural Peru who was supporting this mostly out of his own pocket. I think those types of things are probably the best approach (and I donate money to a local shelter and know one of the services they perform is sterilization of stray animals). Mostly, though, I think that's just another sad situation in addition to people not taking care of their pets (a mild form of animal abuse) and think they are mostly separate issues.

I look at this and think "finally, someone's found a way to capitalize on the disposable income of people whose homes are already full of exercise bikes being used as coat hangers and whose wrists are nearly ready to collapse under the weight of their fitbits, pedometers, and GPSes."

Here's the secret to health and exercise: you have to want to do it. Another $100 device to tell you "you're still not doing the thing you said you want to do but that you're not making time for" if it's not something you want to do. I run and love to do it. Here's how I know I'm different from other people this way: when I started running a lot (about 6 years ago) I would ask friends if they wanted to go for a run and they would say "no." I wanted to get fit, but I also wanted to run. I know people who ask "how can I run more?" and I ask "well, do you enjoy running?" and usually they say they don't. I don't tell them they need to buy different shoes or gadgets to try to coerce them into doing it, I suggest they look at other kinds of activities that will fulfill them and try to incorporate that into their life.

I believe too many people confuse fitness with the goal of exercise. Happiness should be the goal. It's fair (and probably right) to say fitness will bring happiness, but it's important to keep those in perspective and realize that if exercise (a means to fitness) isn't bringing happiness, then maybe the exercise should change.

Lastly - I have a small ax to grind over people getting pets who aren't prepared to give the pets the attention they need to be happy. Pets need a lot of attention and activity - they express very clearly when they aren't getting enough if you pay attention. And you can calibrate the type of dog that might suit your lifestyle before you get one.

Sorry to rant over problems with fitness and pet ownership that I feel that a product like this brings up - the product itself may be totally fine and I'll probably get downvoted for saying some of this. Clearly there's somewhat of a need for a product like this.

I'm guessing you don't want to sell cycling gear to people who live in Seattle, either.

I think they put the 18 point font in their all on their own.

Yeah - also take some comfort in the fact that though this sounds amazing (and probably is), it's clearly illustrating the fact that it's easier to have an idea, get it kind of working, and make a big announcement about it than it is to oversee a successful launch.

I don't know what's causing the failures (whether it's a problem at wolfram's end or facebook) but I've seen multiple errors every time I've tried this and judging from the comments here in hn, many others are, too. Maybe you'll be first to announce a reliably working implementation?