aparks517

Happy Friday! I built Doc Search with the generous help and advice of my wife. During a long car ride, we got to talking about the increasing difficulty of finding in-depth information on many topics using consumer-focused search engines. She lamented the disappearance of the option to show only PDFs in the search results as well as the shift toward "helpfully" ignoring some of the terms or directives she would try to add to a query to refine it.

I think I understand (at least some of) the constraints and incentives that push consumer search engines to work the way they do and I suspect the current state of the art strikes a good balance in accommodating them. After all, there are a lot of really smart people working on the problem.

By scoping the problem differently, I suspect that smaller operators can build tools shaped by different constraints and incentives and provide better service to their respective niches. Doc Search is my contribution to this effort. We've been using it for the past eighteen months or so as I've worked to grow the index. It's getting to the point where it usually gets us useful results, so I thought it would be a good time to share it and solicit broader feedback.

I hope you find it useful! Please let me know what you think. I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have.

Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.

In the United States, engineering drawings or reports submitted to local, state, or federal government agencies typically have to be stamped by a licensed professional engineer. You'll sometimes see similar requirements in private industry as well.

Around here (and maybe in all of the United States?) you don't have to be a PE to call yourself an engineer, but I think in some countries you do. I personally reserve the expression "real engineer" for PE's who can stamp drawings and have the license and insurance to back it up.

But, hey. What do I know? I'm probably overpaying by going to a "real" dentist.

For sure. I stood in line for the original iPhone, owned every model (except the 5C) up through the 6, then an SE, X, and now an 11 Pro since it came out. I played around with Siri when it debuted, but didn't use it much. I turned it off at some point (I think it was when Apple was catching grief for keeping recordings or something like that) and haven't missed it. I'm not against it especially -- it just never really became part of my life.

"Get lucky" is solid advice, but you've also got to give luck something to work with. I think your overnight success started a long time ago, at least as far back as when you showed your manager you weren't a bozo.

Thank you for your kind words! For lofi.limo I support back to Chrome 49 and Firefox 52 (the last versions available for Windows XP), which I /think/ both have Fetch, so I could have probably used it here.

Fetch has about the same capabilities as XHR, so it should be a drop-in replacement in this project. Let's call it an exercise for the reader! ;)

Thank you for your suggestions! I'll see if I can write a few intelligent sentences on these (somewhat more advanced) subjects.

I don’t expect it to as long as the mark-up is valid. Perhaps someone with more SEO knowledge will stop by to correct me.

Oh, wow... I hadn't even thought of the diff angle, but it makes all the sense in the world. I've heard some authors even start each clause on its own line. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.

Aw... you didn't read to the end ;)

> The right way to tie your shoes is with a square knot. It's easy to confuse this with the granny knot, which is the wrong way. The square knot is a simple and sound knot with many uses. The granny knot is an unsound knot whose only known uses are to make your shoelaces look crooked and to trip you.

Thank you for the kind words! I've been working on adapting this style for web apps, but I haven't got it figured out well enough to write an article about. Yet...

I wouldn't mind if we had a bunch more basic content documents on the web.

Less-than or greater-than signs (code points 0x3C and 0x3E in ASCII). A friend put me on to calling them that because they (sort of?) look like alligators with their mouths open.

I've been using this style - with some tweaks - for web apps too. I don't think I have it completely figured out yet, but it's promising so far. You can view the source of http://lofi.limo/ to see how it's working out.

Power is the product of current and voltage. To transfer much power at a low voltage requires a large current. Supporting a large current without getting hot and melting requires large-diameter wire. Other components may also be bulky or expensive if they have high current-handling requirements.

I seem to recall that somewhere around 50 volts is a magic number from a safety/regulatory perspective. It might also have something to do with semiconductor breakdown voltage, but maybe I'm out of date on that.

Thank you for the shout-out! I see a bunch of folks came by to check it out :)

There are some good tutorials on YouTube. If you use iOS, GarageBand is free and up to the task.

Only required for finished ammunition, not for bullets alone.

Thinking about how an extrusion die is made, I imagine it's tricky to make very thin fins and to put them very close together. Copper work-hardens significantly too, which may be a factor.

I maintain (what I think is) a classic personal site: picture of the author, articles, and bookmarks. https://aftermath.net/

Thank you so much! I enjoyed hanging out with you in the chat ;)

> The only problem is there is no legal way of obtaining DRM free digital copies of movies or tv shows.

I think that depends on where you are. Maybe someone will correct me, but I was under the impression that here in the US you can "format-shift" a DVD or BD you legally own by ripping it to an unencrypted format so you can watch it on your tablet or what-have-you. Isn't that the legal leg iTunes stood on (before ITMS) for ripping CDs to listen to on your computer or iPod?

Working on this project, I've already had the pleasure of getting to know many artists and listeners and the opportunity to learn from them. Things are really coming together, so I thought it would be a good time to share with more folks and keep learning!

I'm happy to answer any questions I can, whether they're technical, philosophical, or business related. I hope in return you'll let me know what you think. Please tell a friend too, because the more the merrier!

For some applications, it's valuable to have globally-unique addresses even if they're not (all) broadly accessible from the open Internet. For example, if you're building private links between networks which don't share an authority for distributing private network addresses (they're administered by different companies or organizations perhaps). I don't know how common this is anymore, but I've seen it in the past.

Someone has thoughtfully folded Plex Sans JP in with Plex Mono to make a nice monospace which also handles Japanese pretty well. It's called PlemolJP[1]. I've been using it for one of my projects[2] and have been happy with it.

[1] https://github.com/yuru7/PlemolJP [2] http://lofi.limo

> In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.

Reading carefully, I don't think OP made this claim exactly. I suspect all three of us might agree that there are good reasons to add settings and that we should be careful of adding them for bad reasons.

I think in many cases a setting gets added not because an individual /refused/ to make a decision but rather because no individual was /empowered/ to make the decision. I find it easy to imagine a meeting (perhaps a meeting with too many participants) that gets deadlocked on some question and the only apparent way to get out before lunch is to compromise on making it a setting. And maybe compromising the design is the best way to go, but then that's how it will be.

Around here, you'd spread the work of one new server to folks you've already got or spread the cost of new hires to a large number of servers.

I think it's also worth considering that many outfits wouldn't get good value from the 24/365 coverage you propose and don't care to pay for it.

The companies I've worked for have had periodic (every 6 or 12 months) performance evaluations with associated pay adjustments. The pay adjustment would be broken out into a cost-of-living increase (notionally tracking inflation) and a performance increase (or decrease I guess) based on the employee's performance evaluation. I'm sure it varies by employer, but this seems to be common in my area and industry at least.

We do have unions in the US, though I've not worked in a union shop before. Union contracts vary, but I get the idea it's not uncommon for them to include pay adjustments based on inflation.

I'd lean toward restoring from backup either way, since the hardware failure might have caused data corruption that's not immediately obvious.

> I remember when Ruby on Rails hit it big, one of its mantras was that it made coding fun. As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

I think Phoenix and Elixir are trying to. I like them.

I like Objective-C a lot too. It's a reasonably thin layer on top of C and has a dynamic flavor (which I prefer). The documentation is showing its age.