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catbird

533 karma · joined May 21, 2015

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catbird··on New iPad Pro with M4 chip and Apple Pencil Pro
Could you elaborate a bit more on your note taking workflow? I have an ipad and a macbook but I haven't figured out the best way to use them together that doesn't involve connecting with a cable and manually dragging files around in the finder. (The corporate admin has disabled icloud, which doesn't help).

I have a lot of pdfs on the laptop. I'd like to send one to the ipad, jot some notes, and send it back in a seamless way. Or generate a quick drawing on the ipad and easily add it to a document on the laptop.

catbird··on Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later
Even if a passport was required, I think the same problems would appear. There are plenty of people with no interest in ever posting on Reddit. Some of them might be convinced to allow someone else to use a bot to post on their behalf if there is money to be made.
catbird··on 46% of Americans didn't read a book in 2023
Any suggestions on a puzzle game like that? I recently finished Stephen's Sausage Roll (excellent game!) and I've been looking for something else that will let me feel clever.
catbird··on Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
Yeah I use swiftkey with the arrows and number row. Also I have it set up so the keyboard appears in the middle of the screen where my thumb can actually reach. I have no idea how anyone can use one of today’s giant phones one-handed with the default keyboard.

Reading this article I realized I didn’t even know how to cut and paste on android, and I’d long ago resigned myself to deleting and retyping.

catbird··on Akiyoshi’s Illusion Pages
That was a fun little project. It looks even better in person!
catbird··on Show HN: Rethinking Tabs in Firefox
How do you take backups of your session? Is there a built in UI, or another add-on? I’m a heavy user of tree style tabs and would love to be able to “save” a window with 100 tabs in a complicated tree, close the window, and be confident I could open it up again later with the tree structure intact.
catbird··on FTX balance sheet, revealed
Thank you for the explanation!
catbird··on FTX balance sheet, revealed
What does it mean here that “the shareholders will take a hit?” Do the shareholders normally receive some regular payments that would stop (or be reduced) in that situation?

I know nothing about finance, but the stories unfolding this week have me interested to learn more about how all this works.

catbird··on How to Teach Math?
Thanks for your comment. It sounds like you have learned these lessons through a lot of experience - do you have any suggestions on a book to read to get the very basics of teaching?

> When they train you to teach...

I started a job as a professor this year and never got any of that basic training. Before this I was a postdoc reading papers and writing code all day. In job interviews my lack of teaching experience wasn't seen as an issue. The faculty would say, "oh teaching isn't so hard, you'll figure it out quick enough." So far I have been muddling along ok, but I have this anxious feeling that there are a lot of aspects to this that I don't know that I don't know, and don't know where to get started on finding out about them.

catbird··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Cool idea! The Mac OS dashboard used to have a feature where you could save a cropped view of a web page as a widget, which would automatically refresh whenever the dashboard was opened. I used to use it to show a couple of weather radar and forecast maps. Sadly it was taken out in more recent versions.
catbird··on Segway ends production of its original scooter
I definitely recommend it! The tour I did went around the tidal basin and visited all the major monuments on the western half of the mall. I really enjoyed the stories and factoids from the tour guide—she pointed out a lot of stuff I had missed on self-guided walking tours. I think the tour agency to was somewhere near the GW campus, but I forget the name.
catbird··on How to use the “past exonerative“ tense
Recent events reminded me of an old McSweeney’s piece [0] on the clever use of grammatical forms to remove any implication of agency or culpability from a description of past events. When I went to search for that, this new article popped up. English is a fascinating language.

[0] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...

catbird··on The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death
Wow. That was beautiful. I just spent the last couple hours reading through it. Being stuck in my house looking at the world through a screen, I can empathize with that little trashcan hurtling through space. Thanks for sharing.
catbird··on So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery (2014)
Cloud brewing is definitely a thing, but I think the name for it is "contract brewing." A larger brewery will allow a smaller/startup brewer to rent their facilities to make a few batches.
catbird··on How do wombats make cubed poo?
Prof. Hu has a delightful pop-science book about animal-inspired engineering called "How to walk on water and climb up walls."
catbird··on Bring Back the SE
Or ebay. I got one for my dad last week, new in box for $165. For his light usage (calls, texts, maps, and photos), it works great.
catbird··on Android 10
After reading your comment, I went through my most commonly used apps and found that they all have a hamburger button in the top left corner that brings up the same menu as a swipe from left gesture. Somehow I never noticed those buttons before, leaving me feeling a bit spooked. How is it that something I look at dozens of times a day could go unnoticed for so long?
catbird··on Android 10
I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?

Then again I still miss having physical back and home buttons since I upgraded to a newer android phone. It would be nice if manufactures added more buttons to the side of the phone so the other fingers have something to do.

catbird··on Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day
There is no "average HN user." Some people on HN hate ads, and some people on HN write ad software for a living. Some people on HN own a business and sympathize with Amazon over lost profits. Others can't afford nice camera equipment and (maybe) would prefer a society where wealth is more evenly distributed.
catbird··on The Cassowary: World’s most dangerous bird (2016)
Zoos with flamingos tend to have a lot of them. I would guess they are hard to tell apart.
catbird··on Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing
If your taxes aren't complicated (i.e. you use the standard deduction), there's a service called "Free Fillable Forms" through the IRS that allows you to fill out your tax forms online and e-file them for free. Many states have an equivalent system as well.

Last year I went to an independent preparer, which cost me around $160 and took an hour. This year I wanted to save some money so I decided to try filing myself and it was pleasantly straightforward, only taking two hours. The only tedious part was copying over the info from the W2 for both federal and state.

catbird··on Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try
Yes! I used to have an extension that allowed you to resize any image (even in the middle of a page) by holding a button and scrolling. It was fantastic, but was never migrated to the new extension format unfortunately.
catbird··on This Startup Does Not Exist
Would it make sense to compare the output images to their nearest neighbors in the training set in order to establish some metric of "originality"? Sorry if that is a basic question, I haven't read much on image synthesis with neural nets.
catbird··on China ‘Is the Only One in the Race’ to Make Electric Buses, Taxis and Trucks
Philadelphia still has trolleys running on tracks, though maybe less routes than before.

http://www.septa.org/maps/trolley/city.html

catbird··on Fun with NFL Stats, Bokeh, and Pandas
Oh wow, that site is excellent. I think this is the query I was thinking of before, the percentage of passes conditional on down and distance:

http://www.yardsgained.com/#(passes_~_sacks)_~_(passes_~_sac...

catbird··on Fun with NFL Stats, Bokeh, and Pandas
Very cool! I would love to see heatmaps of play type with downs on one axis and yards-to-first-down on the other.
catbird··on Show HN: Polar – an offline web browser with annotations and tagging
I think they are asking what happens if another program edits the index while the Polar program is running, which still might happen if the library is stored in something like Dropbox and multiple computers have it open at the same time.
catbird··on A Parasitic Vine That Slowly Sucks the Life Out of Wasps
Bravo to The Atlantic for actually linking to the source journal article.
catbird··on What It Takes to Hold Your Breath for 24 Minutes (2017)
Thanks for sharing - that was an incredible story. I find David Blaine fascinating because many of his magic tricks aren't tricks per se, he just does things that would be unthinkable for the average person. For instance he often takes a bite out of a wine glass and chews it up, and it seems like there must be some trick to it, except in one of his TV specials he goes to a dentist and reveals that his teeth are all worn down and messed up from eating so much glass.
catbird··on The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
That all sounds great, but how does it actually work? So there's an immutable entry describing you in a database, then how do you convince someone that you're the person it describes? Do you need to memorize a private key? If it gets forgotten/compromised, then you've lost your identity forever.

The only way I can imagine physical verification would be to have a microchip implanted in your arm, but that would be unthinkably worse than the current system of (thankfully) mutable, replaceable paper documents we use today.

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