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froindt

1,896 karma · joined September 12, 2016

I'm an industrial engineer in the Midwest with experience in manufacturing systems/IT, supply chain, and as a manufacturing engineer.
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froindt··on CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back
I have never viewed my employer as family. I have been laid off though. My manager and HR were in the room. They handled it incredibly well, and I have spoken of them very highly for years. I can't imagine I'd feel the same way if the CEO spoke to me during a mass layoff.
froindt··on How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
A friend is searching for a job right now and was surprised to encounter an online job posting requesting mailed in resumes.

Next we need a service that will tailor resumes to job descriptions using LLM's (already easily available) while also having an integrated "mail this resume" function.

First class postage on printer paper will be the default, but you can pay more for cardstock, pink paper, and a scent to give it a little something extra.

froindt··on German button maker searched rivers of American Midwest for valuable shells
There was a button museum at the time, though I never made it in. I'm not sure if the museum is in the same spot as the restaurant was, as I was there in 2017.

One block over from the museum, there was recently a partial building collapse. 20 buildings were evacuated and 17 are still not able to be occupied.

froindt··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
While it may be dirty sourced electricity, there are still significant benefits many people don't think about. As (or I suppose now, if) the grid moves towards cleaner electricity sources, the total emissions go down, where the ICE vehicle will always be an ICE vehicle.

Generators are also much more efficient at converting fuel to electricity. They don't have to provide pretty good power output at all RPM's, they are much more fine tuned. There are also emission reduction options that are economical at the scale of a power plant, but not when attaching to millions of cars.

froindt··on Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
The best demonstration of the delay is typing Calc in the Win+R Run dialog. There's a difference between instant and "way faster than Word".

On Windows 7, you could hit enter and immediately start typing numbers and it would work. I have never worked on a Windows 10 or 11 machine where it launches instantly.

I get a similar lag when launching Notepad. Not a huge disruption to the day, but annoying to see on a simple utility that used to be better.

froindt··on A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life
I'm on a Pixel 10 for these instructions, not sure if other manufacturers offer the same options.

Modes is an available option in the tile list. You can go to Modes, create a custom mode, and under display options you can set greyscale. You can also set modes to turn on automatically based on calendar events or a schedule. Notification tweaks are also available in the same area.

froindt··on Life saving / first aid posters
Here are quite a few with a maritime angle to them.

https://www.american-club.com/page/posters

https://www.american-club.com/page/comics

https://www.american-club.com/page/education-training-tools

froindt··on Private equity bought America's essential services
Relatively famously, the Nevada public pension investment manager relies entirely on indexed funds. He has one person he works with on the investment side, avoids the expenses of consultants and a large office, and maintains incredibly low fees.

He has been in the role over a decade.

froindt··on Claude for Legal
Minor point, but law school is only 3 years long.
froindt··on More than sixty percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions
Salt Lake City area is not particularly cold. It definitely gets hot in the summer, and snow in the valley melts within a day or so.

Looks like the cedar rapids site is also closed loop, with the full buildout being a hair over 1 gigawatt. Compared to salt lake city, colder in the winter, and a bit cooler in the summer but with very high humidity comparatively.

https://corridorbusiness.com/qts-data-center-project-will-pu...

froindt··on More than sixty percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions
Looks like QTS is doing closed loop cooling.

https://kutv.com/news/utah-water/questions-grow-over-water-u...

froindt··on I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
That experience is ridiculous, I'm sorry you had to go through that. My cousin is a teacher and is trying to support one of her students who is very food insecure. She's currently putting a box of food into the kids backpack every day, so the kid doesn't feel different/shame bringing a bag of food home. The one consistent meal the kid gets per day is the school lunch.

It wasn't that child's choice to be born. Some of the biggest lifetime ROI's out there are ensuring a childhood isn't filled with trauma, involves enough nutrition to help their bodies and brains develop, etc.

I have no time for people who make an argument about "the government shouldn't be providing food because it creates a dependency or expectation they'll want for life". Their lifetime earnings and contributions to society will be vastly larger if they aren't hungry during the school day.

It's tough to focus and learn when you're only eating a few hundred calories per day.

froindt··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.
froindt··on A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs
My brain couldn't decide which word to use. I asked my mom when someone had moved into their condo/condominium, which came out as condom.
froindt··on A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers
It's great to see an automated method for this, even if it still needs to be reviewed by an expert. Back on the 2011-2014 era I was on a team which helped make materials available for a chemistry grad student. I wasn't aware of the standards book, but followed more or less the same process outlined in the paper, using GIMP to simplify images, paste into Word, and add textboxes with braille font to the images, and then embossed. It was probably 5-10 minutes of effort for a basic graph, and we were doing the work for entire math and chemistry books. This would have saved so much time for us!

We also had to figure out how to represent electron clouds. Some could be done as 2-D representations, but eventually 3-D was required. We created a plugin for Blender which would import a MacMolPlt save file, generate the structure for the molecule (coordinates for each atom, bond types connecting the atoms), and a point cloud for the electron cloud. Each column of the periodic table was a different shape, each row was a different scale. It worked pretty well, and generating STL files was automated.

The program is somewhere on my hard drive not available publicly and probably technically owned by Iowa State or the federal government, whether they know it or not. I'm curious how much it'd take to get out running on a current version of Blender.

froindt··on GSA Eliminates 18F
My understanding was they don't pay interest on tax refunds, but you pay interest on unpaid tax liabilities.

Do you have a source handy? My Google-fu is failing and only bringing up interest on unpaid taxes.

froindt··on Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
I've seen Saturday for payroll week start. It naturally makes sense to align other business calendars accordingly.

It does get funky with overtime. If weather cancels a Monday-Friday shift, you might schedule a makeup shift on Saturday. What would typically be straight time in the same pay period is now going to cause overtime in the following week.

froindt··on Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
6-week December threw off a bunch of reporting last year for my company. The reporting group was not aware of the 6-week fiscal month, and the date dimension table didn't reflect it.

Thankfully no particular harm was caused by it.

froindt··on Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
Late reply, but that experience was actually in grad school. I was involved with research as an undergrad as well, but it was definitely confusing from how I stated things.

I was funded through a DARPA grant. It was definitely not a training exercise.

froindt··on When your last name is Null, nothing works
A coworker used to work in a meatpacking plant. There were two people who had the exact same name, first middle and last. They worked in the same department and in fact on the same machine.

They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B.

Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.

froindt··on Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
In my AP Statistics class, we had a few weeks after the test before school was out. We had to do a statistics project, and the teacher didn't particularly care what it was.

We were checking which candy was most popular from a giant bowl, and went classroom to classroom just asking a randomly selected student to pick a piece of candy.

We got 100% on the report, which included "We didn't inform the participants of and potential harm from participating in the study. We're heartless bastards, oh well."

Then I went to college and helped in quite a few study designs with a Professor who had worked with over 30 IRB's across his career. Ours was by far the most strict. We were primarily doing software usability studies, and every single question we would ask a participant needed to be verbatim. Your data anonymization, destruction, and analysis plans had to be fully defined, including storing the participant name to UID key separately from the data.

Deviation or asking follow-up questions based on a prior response was either not allowed or a whole additional huge layer of SCRUTINY (I'm not sure). I'm genuinely curious how any sort of therapy focused study could have occurred with that IRB.

froindt··on Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?
Yes, doubling your income and maintaining your lifestyle would make a huge difference. In many cases such an extreme bump isn't reasonably available.

I believe GP was more referring to the rough rule of thumb is to have 25x your annual expenses by the time you retire. +5k income versus -5k expenses, you're better off cutting your expenses. By cutting expenses, the target drops by 25xExpensesCut, and you're throwing an extra ExpensesCut towards savings, helping on both sides of the equation. Going from spending 95% of savings to 90% makes a huge difference on the timeline, but 50% to 45% is much more modest since the timeline for compounding growth is so much shorter.

Using 70k income, 50k expenses, and a 5% return, this would take about 30 years. [0]

75k income, 50k expenses goes to 25.2 years [1]

70k income, 45k expenses goes to 24 years [2]

150k income, 50k expenses goes to 10.6 years [3]

Another detail often forgotten about, salary is stated before taxes, spending is almost always after taxes. That further increases the power of decreasing expenses.

[0] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=70...

[1] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=75...

[2] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=70...

[3] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=15...*

froindt··on A sweary, ranty YouTuber who's become an isolation cooking sensation
That's hilarious. It reminds me about the insults and alliterations they throw around on Letterkenny Problems.

https://youtu.be/Z0sq3T5fErQ

froindt··on Show HN: Full Text Search on Podcasts
I've wanted this product in the past and found the economics to be similarly challenging. [1] Some podcasts already put out professionally created transcriptions which is great, but I'd need to compile them in one place to figure out who said that one direct quote I remember.

Having people transcribe 5 minutes of audio/month in lieu of a subscription cost equal to 3 minutes of professional transcription was one model I had in mind.

I'm also hoping this works out well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15826604

froindt··on Fed to buy junk bonds, lend to states in fresh virus support
To put some guesstimates on it:

Say 50k average cash compensation (low for tech, but most businesses aren't tech). Health insurance, social security, medicare, 401k match, etc. would add to this number.

10k employees * 50k/year / 12 months = 41.6 (repeating of course) million per month.

froindt··on How airlines plan to make billions from rewards cards
I wish so much we would adopt rules like the EU has.

* No significant rewards because the fee is capped at 0.3%.

* Chip and pin because that decreases fraud more than chip and signature.

For many businesses, a 2-3% fee is so much of their total profit margin. For example, Google tells me a full service restaurant averages a 3-5% profit margin.

Dropping a transaction fee 2%->0.3% would mean a 3% margin turns into a 4.7% margin. All else equal, 56% increase in profit!

There are other considerations, like would people spend as much if they didn't get rewards. I don't know the answer, but another question is "what's best for society?". In my opinion, credit card companies commonly act as a low-value-add intermediary and a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. [1] People are paying more because that fee is baked into every single transaction, whether credit, debit, cash, or check.

They do provide a great indisputable paper trail for many transactions, and going 100% cash probably isn't best for society because there would inevitably be more "untaxed revenue", but 2-3% is outrageously large fee to pay.

[1] https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/public-policy-discuss...

froindt··on Google allows G Suite administrators to monitor and audit user emails
>G Suite has implemented recently an option that lets you email sensitive content with a timer. The user receives the email and no content is in the email, instead a link is shown, and the content will be deleted after some kind of triggers (e.g. after X minutes, or after having been read once)

I knew that capability existed, and it sounds like a great avenue for phishing. People who routinely receive highly sensitive messages like that are going to be more apt to open a link than my mom, who is aware of phishing and whose spidey senses would be tingling.

froindt··on Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
That reminds me about stories of people trying to record nature untouched by man-made sounds.

It has become increasingly difficult to find locations which are purely nature. I wonder how much easier it has become since the number of people generating "work noise" has fallen so much?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/24/machine-...

froindt··on UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
I'm curious, what's your interest in the train schedules?

One day at an antique shop, I came across a book from ~1910 which had hundreds of pages of annual reports from railroads with many metrics we'd expect to see in the 10-K reports public companies file.

The book was published annually, but had much of its data in tables with grouped headers and cells, which could make automated OCR-ing with a good (useful) end result challenging.

I think it'd be interesting to map out the Railroad consolidation, track all their financial metrics over time, and do some level of forensic accounting to see if/which companies probably had funny business going on.

froindt··on The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014)
Thanks, I learned that since posting my comment but hadn't heard it mentioned as a symptom.

From reading I did earlier, GI issues may be more common in older groups.

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