dmckeon

Cool tools to leverage human effort in effective ways. I’d love to see a “smells like homework” tag or review queue to catch the questions that sound a lot like homework assignments from first courses in programming, so willing respondents can more readily draw out the querent’s understanding. (“print the squares of the first 10 integers”, “swap the first & last line of the input”, and similar)

> April 22, 2019, is a prominent example, though we don’t know for sure what happened that day to cause it.

Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover, Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm for SF.

First sentence of the paper:

> 1.INTRODUCTION For a vehicle travelling in empty space it’s momentum, as well as it’s energy, comes from it’s fuel.

His, hers, its - are all possessives.

This is why one should have papers for publication, a CV, or a résumé proofread by someone who can spell correctly and understands grammar. Spell-checking software is fine, but it will not catch everything. If it is important, read it aloud to yourself, then get a friend to read it aloud to you. Yes, here the intended meaning is obvious, but this left me wondering about the accuracy of the rest of the paper, which is not a good start for any reader of anything written.

For travelers wanting a rough-and-ready conversion of miles to kilometers, the ratio is useful: 3 miles ~= 5 km; 8 km~= 5 miles; etc.

Discussion at: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/2zop5o/i_realised_the...

As the article & comments say: dilute bleach and water; wait a week or two for algae, moss, etc to die; rinse off detritus, and add zinc strips to the roof to inhibit future growth. Vary to protect nearby shrubs, fish. etc. Never use more than low pressure. Move carefully, have adequate health insurance, or both.

Statement from webmin here: http://www.webmin.com/exploit.html

I would settle for a meta-recommendation service by subscription. Subscriber and housemates list 40 to 100 things they want to watch over the next few months to a year, and set a monthly video budget in money and time, and the service suggests: subscribe to streaming service A for N months & watch <list of shows>, and in some future month subscribe to service B and watch <list>, C, D, etc. with suggestion updates every month, and additions to the “want to watch” list whenever. Service subscription can overlap, of course.

Viewers/subscribers get to watch what they want (and perhaps a bunch of other stuff from service A, B, etc.)

As time passes, want-to-watch lists get longer, or pruned, and recommendations of other shows to explore, like TiVo or Netflix, can improve.

> common web bugs in Blackboard's Community Engagement software and Follett's Student Information System, including so-called SQL-injection and cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities

About 5,000 schools, about 5,000,000 records of students, faculty, staff. The teen had some difficulty getting anyone at the companies to accept disclosure.

Back in the 1970s I hitched across the US about 3 times, over various routes, and all of Heren’s story rings true to me, especially the huge variety of drivers willing to offer rides. About a third to a half of the people who picked me up remarked, in almost the same words, “I used to hitch when I was younger, but it feels too dangerous now” [<1980]. It was troubling to find, more recently, that my youthful sense of immortality had faded, leaving me saying the same words to younger people.

- Our waiter, Bob, was really good. Bob took our order, brought our food, and kept our beverages filled. Bob is a great waiter. <signed> totally-not-Bob.

Or, for a pre-split alternative, foam water pipe insulation: https://www.homedepot.com/p/M-D-Building-Products-1-in-x-72-...

Pollens, bones, coproliths, footprints, and many “extremophile” micro-organisms which could advance our understanding of unfamiliar biological processes.

Not military or enforcement, but well-known, and published: https://newskete.org/dog-training

> lower quality leases are being thrown into securitization pools

Shocked, shocked, do you hear me!

Not to snark at this poster, but in general, if we learn anything from experience in markets, we learn:

People want higher returns without higher risks, and other people can profit from convincing buyers that the returns are higher, or the risks are lower.

Also, money is more nimble than legislation. While Congress is trying to outlaw the most recently exposed scam or malfeasance, people are inventing the next several workarounds to existing or upcoming law.

Be careful with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_Go...

It may not change this encounter much, but it could change the orbit just enough for some future earth-orbit crossing - as could the gravitational effect of any of the other planets, their moons, and all the other asteroids change the orbits of anything out there. Solar systems can be messy places, over geologic time frames. Sometime, sooner or later, we will have a significant impact.

NYT title, but Epstein is not the important part of the story.

> The articles in praise of Mr. Epstein came about partly because of an online publishing model adopted by some news organizations that relied on outside contributors who often wrote for little or no pay, with little or no input from editors.

So, formerly trustworthy news sites are serving as pass-through conduits for whatever content PR firms can pump in through a “contributor”. Oh tempora, oh mores.

While Frost is beautifully right here, of course, there is a mild irony in that many of the rocks in New England walls were brought there by repeated glaciation, so cold both made the walls possible, and, as frost-heave, both surfaces buried rocks, and breaks down dry walls made with the generally rounded glacial rocks.

A secondary cause for spilling the upper boulders is the behavior of herds of dairy cattle, with each cow reaching over the wall to reach that one extra blade of tasty grass, with eventual wall collapse.

Try findmnt(8) like:

    findmnt --df --types

Or appear every 13 or 17 years, like some cicadas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas#Lifecycle

The judge's order makes the sequence of the case and the methods of the defendants much clearer:

https://www.scribd.com/document/139843902/Prenda-Sanctions-O...

edit: and has numerous easter eggs for Star Trek fans.

Luckily, this was far from population centers - epicenter about 10 miles from Ridgecrest, a town of 30,000 people just south of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, and just east of US 395, about 80 miles east of Bakersfield.

Informative USGS links include:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183...

Select "View Neaby Seismicity" to see the 47+ recent quakes in this area.

> I would not want to be on the receiving end of that!

If things go wrong, you would not want to be on the sending end, either. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion

Remove the food, but also clean away the formic acid pheromone trail that each ant leaves, and they will forage elsewhere instead of following their path to where the food was.

For SV folks who want to see a (not operational) Fresnel lens, there is one nearby at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_Point_Lighthouse

Previously posted at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701806

Thanks to HN poster acqq for finding the source paper:

http://www.oseagiuntella.com/resources/GM_SLEEP_june2017.pdf

"Sunset Time and the Economic Effects of Social Jetlag Evidence from US Time Zone Borders

Osea Giuntella, University of Pittsburgh, Fabrizio Mazzonnay, Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI)"

Another sets of examples is that of Christian missionaries in foreign lands and remote monasteries trying to get permission to stretch the rules about fasting days to accommodate local wildlife. Beavers and capybara spend much of their time in and near water - can they be considered fish? How about turtles? Mollusks? How about a species of bird thought (at the time) to develop from a shellfish? Were land-going crabs meat, or seafood? Rules-lawyering for hungry holy men, trying to comply with strictures applied from a distance.

Depending on the wooden sign material, and the desired life expectancy of the sign, close kerning might leave a narrow bit of word that could warp and chip away after a few years of exposure to the elements.

Suppose an existing company, not a startup, but an Fortune 1000 or so, wanted to shift to this model going forward. How would they approach it?

The real longevity plan for plugs is not X,000 cycles, but “Will it work until I lose it?”