andrewem

I knew someone who was on prednisone for 3 days. They got 6 days worth of things done in those 3 days, then spent the next 3 days of withdrawal in bed unable to do anything.

Also: this is wildly off topic, but did your 8 hours of sanding off cracked anti-reflective coating work? What equipment did you need? I had a similar issue and it never occurred to me that it might be fixable at home.

I used to work with an engineer who would have a loud negative emotional reaction the first time they were told about some new thing that would be happening at our company, and after a little bit would be totally fine with it. After one or two instances of this pattern, the manager learned to talk to the engineer ahead of time, so the upset reaction wouldn’t happen in a big meeting. I suspect that more of us are like this than would like to admit to it.

The manager’s new tactic seems to me both more effective and kinder, because it takes into account the engineer’s need to process a change outside of a public setting.

I read a bunch of John Muir’s writings last year. In his book “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf”, about his journey south in the late 1860s, it was pretty hard to ignore how he never missed an opportunity to demean the people he met who had recently been enslaved. And he was born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, so it’s not like he came from the South.

There’s a lot of great stuff in his writing, but there’s this too.

FYI, the first listed author of this post has the job title Principal Software Developer, which I assume makes that person is one of the people who write the code.

Edit: added missing “is”

It’s wideband Delphi, which predates planning poker by several decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi

Edit: as I recall from doing estimating using wideband Delphi circa 2004, the main differences with planning poker as I see it practiced today are that estimates were in real time like days or weeks, and votes were collected and displayed anonymously, though as you would expect there was temptation for people to de-anonymize their own votes.

The United States Navy had serious problems with work demands causing sleep deprivation. Here’s a news story about a policy update they made:

“The “Comprehensive Crew Endurance Management Policy,” signed off Dec. 11 by Naval Surface Force Pacific and Naval Surface Force Atlantic, is the first update to the joint instruction issued just months after two 2017 fatal at-sea collisions rocked the Navy.”

Basically the crews were too tired to think clearly and crashed into things, causing damage and deaths on their ships.

https://news.usni.org/2021/01/28/latest-surface-navy-sleep-p...

“Solve your child’s sleep problems” by Richard Ferber, M.D. is the book which includes this. It also includes a lot more, including an overview of sleep physiology including phases, as well as lots more like details about night terrors and other “partial arousals”.

The big thing he says for going to sleep is to set up the desired sleep associations (eg, alone in the crib in a dark quiet room if that’s what you choose) and then ensure the child falls asleep in that situation and it doesn’t change while they sleep. So for instance, don’t let them fall asleep on your lap then move them to the crib, because when the next normal sleep cycle ends and they partially wake up, they will discover something is different and get upset.

Wikipedia has a lot more detail about him. Basically a Fry’s VP arranged for $65 million in kickbacks from companies that wanted to see at Fry’s, and then gambled away even more than that, and ended up $137 million in debt:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausaf_Umar_Siddiqui

I’ve read that essay before and I re-read it just now and I still don’t understand what is meant by “avatars walking around on top of our company home page”. So I guess the essay proved its point.

I found the Wikipedia article for that airport, which says it has one runway of 2,623 meters and serves as a diversion airport on polar routes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqaluit_Airport

And here’s a list of diversion airports: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversion_airport

Here’s a link to a description of ULID, for those like me who had never heard of it: https://github.com/ulid/spec

I had to look up why not to put diodes in parallel, and here’s an answer: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6151/is-para...

Aside from the ethical questions, if I could help it I wouldn’t want my job to be spending all day getting into enclosed spaces only recently vacated by a series of probably unmasked people, as a valet job likely consists of. (Sure you can open the windows so it’s better than say cleaning a capsule hotel.)

On revival efforts of the Hawaiian language:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/22/452551172...

(There is both a textual and an audio version on that page.)

Addendum: my favorite part was Berkeley Breathed showing a letter he received from Watterson, which has a drawing of Breathed fueling his motorboat by pouring dollar bills into the gas tank. Breathed notes that it’s meant to be commentary on Breathed’s willingness to pursue merchandising to make more money.

Fans of Calvin and Hobbes might like the documentary “Dear Mr. Watterson”, which includes a lot of his art work and interviews with several cartoonists, (though not Watterson).

I hesitate to ask, but what’s the copyright status of the material written by people other than you which you’re publishing and charging money for? Did your web site forum terms say the user assigned their copyright to you?

Having not written Python in a long time until recently, I discovered fstrings. Are they the best choice for (nearly all) string formatting at least in new code? They seem to work pretty similarly to eg Ruby’s string interpolation.

There was an arcade game many years ago where that was part of the game play, and this “test” could probably be manipulated in the same way: “ Because the game responded to repeatedly pressing the "run" buttons at high frequency, players of the arcade version resorted to various tricks such as rapidly swiping a coin or ping-pong ball over the buttons, or using a metal ruler which was repeated struck such that it would vibrate and press the buttons.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_&_Field_(video_game)

I’m glad it’s working well for your use case, especially with the final expert evaluation.

What it makes me think of is genealogy, part of which can be thought of as the process of assigning records (birth, marriage, death, census, etc) to entities (natural persons). These are complex determinations requiring understanding and correlating multiple records, and analyzing them in terms of information which is not explicit in the records (eg, knowing about relevant place names, name changes, etc). In the case of businesses, imagine trying to figure out the connection or lack of connection between the many Ray’s Pizza shops in New York City, as they open, close, and change names, locations, and owners over time.

Have you (or anyone else here) done that and succeeded at it? I can see why one would assume it could somehow be useful, but in the absence of someone accomplishing it I’m skeptical.

andrewem

having learned of them

submitted this article so you

could read a clerihew (or two)

Re-reading this, I again liked this part I recalled from when it came out: “By entering the storefront two hours earlier, by taking an avalanche-safety course, we had statistically increased our chances of being killed in an avalanche. We were more likely to die now than we were at 8 a.m.”

“Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that.” Great, so let’s not avoid that - with your insider perspective:

In what ways do you see McKinsey’s actions with Purdue Pharma as being bad? In what ways were they typical of McKinsey’s behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors been addressed? How do the events with Purdue show what has and hasn’t changed since McKinsey’s deep involvement with Enron?

I’ve seen people (entirely in computing contexts) say “used in anger” but never knew the derivation.

See eg https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fire_in_anger#Verb

An interesting normalization of amounts for baking bread and similar foods is called “baker’s percentage”.

The total weight (or mass) of flour in the recipe is 100%, and all ingredients are measured in terms of that. You do end up with very small percentages for ingredients like yeast, but in general it’s nice because you can easily see for instance how sweet a recipe is based on how much sugar is added as a percentage of the total flour.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage

Thanks for mentioning that! I took your example and was able to find myself - there was only one record which matched the combination of birth day and state, parents’ ages, and mother’s birth state (which is different than mine). Add in birth weight if you know it, and I speculate you’re almost certain to be able to find yourself.

An interesting aggregation query would be how much information is needed to uniquely identify some large percentage of all births in the data set.

Your comment made me think of this essay “How to Survive as a Woman at a Chinese Banquet” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/women-chin...

They say “NAMER-based employees will be eligible for up to six months of COBRA”. Note that by law, a former employee is eligible to pay for up to 18 months of continuation health coverage under COBRA. So perhaps they mean that Dropbox will pay the premiums for up to 6 months, but it’s awfully unclear as written.

(Also I assume “NAMER” means North America. It’s a funny way to say “The United States” in this context, given that presumably Canada and Mexico, which are in North America, don’t have a law called COBRA which is about this.)

There’s this example of your point, which claims that “Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years”

http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html