aaaronic

I worked at a place that was trying to do this for thousands of restaurants, only they wanted to configure the POS system (all the items, variations, modifications, combos, etc.) using just the PDF menu. We never got very far with automating it, but part-time high school employees were usually pretty decent at it.

Menu layouts are all over the place, so using OCR was trivial, but trying to figure out what went together and what modifications were valid on which items was a complete mess. Shrimp cocktail w/ cheese, anyone?

I share this with my students when I talk about paletted display modes on the Gameboy Advance. A couple of students actually made use of it this semester on their projects.

Thanks for the link!

This reminds me that I keep meaning to see how much Rust toolchain support there is for legacy consoles like the GameBoy Advance.

It seems like the people who want to disprove Dunning-Kruger are falling victim to it.

I honestly think people take it way too seriously and apply it too generally. Quantifying "good" is hard if you don't know much about the field you're quantifying. Getting deep into a particular field is humbling -- Tetris seems relatively simple, but there are people who could fill a book with things _I_ don't know about it, despite playing at least a few hundred hours of it.

Is there an answer to that humility gained by being an expert in one field being translated to better self-assessment in other fields? I feel myself further appreciating the depth and complexity of fields I "wrote off" as trivial and uninteresting when I was younger as I get deeper into my own field (and see just how much deeper it is too).

rclone is another useful cli tool I use frequently.

There's no sense in getting madder at him each time you think about it. You might want to try to find a way to forgive him or at least let go of some of your own anger at his choices. It really can eat you from the inside.

Kudos to you for looking out for your mother. I'm the sole person who can look after my own and I only hope I have the strength to support her when the time comes.

It sounds like both of you could benefit from grief counseling, even this long after the fact.

Junk DNA is, AFAIK, not actively expressed (used to create proteins). It's important, though, in the sense that spacing between gene expression sites is a control on which genes get expressed under which conditions (so the junk adds necessary spacing between important genes).

I did _some_ research on epigenetics during my MS degree. Spacing between sites was an important factor in our modeling of gene expression.

Rubbing alcohol where I am is isopropyl alcohol (which is highly toxic -- your body metabolizes it into acetone), not ethanol. A kid in my high school class ended up getting his stomach pumped when drinking it to try to get drunk.

When the difference between iterations is less than whatever threshold of accuracy you're looking for, I'd assume.

"Relaxation" algorithms for calculating fields work that way.

Yep, it's all over Physics, really. Many non-mechanical concepts are often mapped to a mechanical analog model (so many tiny oscillators out there!).

Mandatory Physics "troll" comment:

For small angles, sin(x) ~= x and cos(x) ~= 1 -- the ["small angle approximation"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-angle_approximation)

It's actually kind of ridiculous how many times it comes up and works well enough in undergraduate Mechanics.

I teach lookup tables specifically for sine/cosine (we just use one with a phase shift and modulus) on the Gameboy Advance. The hardware has no floating point unit support, so we do it in 8.8 fixed point with 1-degree resolution.

It turns out the BIOS on the hardware can do sine/cosine, but you have to do that via inline assembly (swi calls) and it's no faster than the simple lookup table.

This is all just to get terms for the affine matrix when rotating sprites/backgrounds.

There are treatments for that? I've never had anyone suggest anything other than therapy for it.

I don't know why all the official cloud clients are so limited, but rclone shows how easily they could enable a lot of the missing features.

I was excited when I found this utility a few months back. I've used it to migrate all the files of two old machines to multiple cloud backups pretty easily.

I plan to set up cron jobs to use it for simple cross-cloud syncing.

Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary. (Either that, or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D)

I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.

I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.

As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.

Couldn't get past "which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view," in the third paragraph. Truly cringe-worthy to read in today's context (at least the cultural context I live in).

This article spends a ton of time explaining very rudimentary things and then completely glosses over what it intends to convey.

C-style casts aren't evil, but they are powerful. They can also be used in places where more than one C++ cast would be required. C developers are very likely to use the C style because it mostly gets the job done the first try.

C developers working on C++ code are not likely to be swayed much by anything that doesn't make a strong case for having 4 different cast operators and this article doesn't manage to do that.

I think you mean 140 million, right?

I thought the title here read: "In praise of the 5-day Workweek and other 'radical' ideas" and I just assumed it was from the 1890s...

The Atlanta one is a LinkedIn URL?! Party foul!

Pretty weak arguments all around, IMO. Docker has its issues, but most of them aren't really even mentioned here.

Splendor is a great game that meets your description: https://www.amazon.com/Asmodee-SCSPL01-Splendor-Board-Game/d...

Takes about 5 minutes to explain and plays in 30 min or so (After the first game). It has a nice mix of random/strategy, etc.

Edit: The box is way bigger than the contents, so a custom foam solution seems to be popular with some people.