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Agathoson Hover.css – A collection of CSS3 powered hover effects

I always hit m.xkcd.com now, never the main site, even when I have a mouse. That hover text was always a pain.

Agathoson Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

Please do not taunt the Rust fans.

It works! (n=1)

"I used to go to the gym and pretend in my head I had already died, and it was 100 years into the future, and I was dreaming of some guy who wrote a database. I didn't know how the story ended yet, I hadn't gotten that far."

-- Damien Katz, http://damienkatz.net/2014/10/tank_man.html

Agathoson Pax Mongolica

Somebody's been browsing Wikipedia while watching Marco Polo.

Agathoson Two eras of the internet: pull and push

I remember just about every PC Magazine columnist suddenly started writing about "push" around the same time.

Agathoson Haskell Poll Results

The exact wording was, "What <features> do you feel are under represented or often misunderstood?"

I agree that Functor and Monad are hardly candidates to dominate that survey, the burrito notwithstanding.

Agathoson Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?

"Draw me a house," with the gotcha if you don't ask questions, is described by Fred Moody in I Sing the Body Electronic. That's early 90s Microsoft.

Agathoson Why switching jobs is almost always a good idea

We used to call this a Socratic dialogue, but I'll update my vocabulary. Thanks for the notice.

Agathoson Fat 'breathed out' of body via lungs, say scientists

Conversely, even reasonably well educated people are sometimes surprised to learn where plant biomass comes from. Most of it is not sucked out of the ground; it's made from the same CO2 that we're exhaling.

Agathoson Before Detroit Can Move On, It Needs to Upgrade from Windows XP

Most coders just happen to like coding. Selling IT services to a government might involve a little coding, but it's mostly about mastering the procurement process. Where do you even start with that?

I seem to recall we had a similar discussion in the wake of the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7855295

Agathoson What’s the Matter with Boston Tech?

Boston Tech? Didn't it move to Cambridge and change its name?

Agathoson America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane

I bet the deck crews will love that.

Agathoson Mean People Fail

Edison lost the War of the Currents, which is what he killed the elephant for. The whole episode was bizarre, and I'd file it under "unhinged" instead of "mean." Was he born like that, or did his early successes turn him into a stubborn, crazy old man?

Agathoson The First Rule of DevOps Club

The first rule of devops club is welcome to devops club.

The second rule of devops club is welcome to devops club!

The third rule of devops club: someone yells stop, goes limp, tests don't pass: the deployment is over. Roll back to your last known good Docker environment.

Fourth rule: only two gu^H^H devops professionals to a deployment.

Fifth rule: one deployment at a time.

Sixth rule: no bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production.

Seventh rule: deployments will go on as long as they have to.

And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at devops club, you have to push something into production.

(Some of these are more practical than others, I'll admit. Please don't practice rule 8, and I'm not sure what rule 7 even means.)

Agathoson The LaTeX cargo cult

My school publishes a LaTeX template for theses. After I downloaded that, I spent very little time thinking about formatting.

Unfortunately my advisor doesn't do LaTeX so it kind of sucked for collaboration.

Agathoson How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

Of course some radars did physically move their dishes to stay locked on to a target. I'm in the middle of The Invention That Changed the World (spoiler alert: it was radar) and I was stunned to learn how well this worked with analog circuits. An SCR-584, paired with an M9 analog computer, could detect that a plane was moving out of the center of its conical scan, and then convert that into a signal to the motors that drive the dish (and its associated antiaircraft guns).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conical_scanning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-584_radar

Agathoson For Cinephiles, Netflix Is Less and Less an Option

"...and Netflix sells off its vast supply of DVDs for drink coasters..."

Can we get off this, at long last? CDs and DVDs are terrible coasters. They're too thin and not at all spongy or porous, so the condensation will creep all the way around to the table side. I once ruined a desk by leaving a cold drink on a CD overnight. Admittedly it was a cheap, second-hand desk, but still.

Agathoson How to buy a tank: a BRDM-2 story

I was annoyed to see the same mistake in this article (and its headline) when it first went up. They've since corrected it, but you can see the note at the end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/us/police-armored-vehicle-...

Agathoson Ask HN: Are you a drinker or a teetotaler?

Since turning 30, I've noticed my hangovers have started lasting all day. Who has time for that? I still drink fairly often, but rarely more than a drink or two a night.

Agathoson Show HN: Exploring the US Budget, 1962-2019

My impulsive response would be that no insurance company would be stupid enough to sign up for such a certain loss. But then again, AIG.

Agathoson [dead]

"People say techies are invading science fiction. They said the same about my immigrant girlfriend."

Acronyms in headlines are so annoying.

Agathoson MedXT (YC W13) Announces FDA-Cleared Medical Image Platform

Any suggestion about medical technology startups on HN inevitably brings a rain of comments (often including one from me) about how the regulatory burden is too high, getting approval is a job for lawyers not coders, etc. Kudos to MedXT for doing it anyway.

Agathoson Who smeared Richard Feynman?

Without looking, I would have guessed Edward Teller, but the gender thing shoots that down.

Agathoson Amazon snubs French free delivery ban with one-cent charge

Bank lending to small businesses is way down since the start of the recession, and if they were inclined to start again they could borrow at nearly zero percent anyway. Bank leadership has been saying they don't see good opportunities. In that climate, Amazon's account makes no difference.

See for example

http://www.inc.com/jeremy-quittner/wells-fargo-earnings-and-...

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/07/12/eu-banks-dijsselblo...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2014/07/11/str...

Agathoson MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

“Inbox is an email company. Google is an advertising company. This product is our focus, and will not be ‘discontinued’ unexpectedly.” Burn!

Very amusing. But for all we know they will be acqui-hired, maybe even by Google, and then shifted to a different project.

Agathoson Things I learned as an engineer that I wish I had known in grad school

I definitely learned 1, 3, and 5 while in grad school and I'm a little surprised he didn't. On 1 especially, I will tell people about grad school, "Being smart can only get you IN. Persistence and hard work get you out."

4 is interesting. I was THE stakeholder in my thesis project, being literally the world's leading expert on that very narrow field and being the one who would benefit or suffer the most after its success or failure. Now I'm working in the software industry and I have a lot less autonomy and responsibility.

Agathoson My startup failed, and this is what it feels like

My TL;DR: a founder ran into some painful but survivable bumps along the road, plus one killer.

The latter being there are people in the US government who would rather burn down the whole economy than share any of it with a dirty immigrant. Even a white, English-speaking one!

Agathoson Who Gets to Graduate?

Can't be bothered to read the article, indeed.

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.

Agathoson Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time

There are plenty more government IT projects for them to save next. The scale of these failures is mind-boggling, and Healthcare.gov wasn't nearly the worst. Here's one I just read about yesterday, might be good for their next project:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/26/Another-Fa...

That's $1.1 billion lost, another $4 billion planned. I can't even imagine what I'd demand of a $4 billion piece of software.

Agathoson A Type House Divided

The only reason I clicked was that I was wondering, "no, that couldn't be it."