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jjp

1,722 karma · joined January 3, 2013

Used to program mainframes, then I architected solutions, now I manage products for a large corporate. Hobby sites of climatespy.com and fuelNow.co.uk
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jjp··on Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
Yes in that it has no consideration on when the data was captured or acquired. And there is a trickle down to anyone you have or passed the data onto.
jjp··on Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
Not sure whether it's influenced by your existing karma. My perception (with sample size of one) is that when my karma was lower I accrued at closer to 1:1, whereas now definitely not accruing at 1:1.
jjp··on 10,000 steps a day: Might there be something better?
Think some of the comments don't have some context. This is a piece of news from the BBC about a BBC TV programme that is part of a wider education campaign to deal with an inactive population. This link [1] has more details about the reason that the UK population is being 'nudged' into being more active. - 6 million adults aged 40-60 do not achieve 10 minutes of brisk activity in a month; - population is 20% less active than in the 1960's - the campaign is aimed at the low active (not the fit)

For more about the campaign by Public Health England [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/6-million-adults-do-not-d...

jjp··on Ask HN: How to make fewer mistakes?
You say that "there is always a corner case that i don't think about or some test that is trivial to the QA team but i didn't do, and my code end up being broke". Is the corner case that you missed a technical issue or is it that the QA team has a better understanding of the business problem that is being solved and that hasn't been translated into a requirement/user story that you would even know to code against.
jjp··on Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-To-Coast Forest
See http://www.dartmoor.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/81447... for some history of farming on Dartmoor and https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/regional-climates/sw for climate.

tldr - forest was cleared by about 2000-1500BC primarily for grazing although some evidence of cereal being grown. However, by 1000-1BC the climate deteriorated and spread of peat led to abandonment of higher moor.

Climatic improvement in early medieval times led to re-occupation, but by mid-1300's the population had moved again to better land. Black Death reduced Devon's population by 2/3 and meant that if you survived you went and farmed better land.

Farming is still hard on Dartmoor, driven by soil and weather. For example Princetown is 23Km and 400 metres away from Plymouth, but rainfall doubles from about 1000mm to 2000mm per annum.

jjp··on We Know Almost Nothing About This Secret US Government Airline
All the writer had to do was a bit of googling and they would have had so much more to say [1], but then they would probably have missed the quota of articles they had to write.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/this-is-the-only-airline-with-non-stop-...

jjp··on From Bootstrap to CSS Grid
I believe "working together" would be more about aesthetics than technical in this instance.
jjp··on UK Cops Want to Use AI to Spot Child Abuse But It Mistakes Desert Pics for Nudes
Gizmodo rewrote http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/12/18/artificial-... and didn't include some interesting details.
jjp··on Blink has been acquired by Amazon
Would be too strange a coincidence if not, and with the increasing level of device support on Echos will be interesting to see whether they stop supporting Smartthings hubs there as well.
jjp··on Beyond Horizons: 443km world record of distant landscape photography
Perhaps this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861075
jjp··on Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
The PDF is a great read to understand the projects motivations, data collected and examples of how the data analysis could help anybody using the underground network make better informed routing decisions.
jjp··on Uber London loses licence to operate
The TFL press release summarises the points on why the licence is not being renewed - https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2017/septem...

  TfL considers that Uber's approach and conduct demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility in relation to a number of issues which have potential public safety and security implications. These include:

  Its approach to reporting serious criminal offences.
  Its approach to how medical certificates are obtained.
  Its approach to how Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks are obtained.
  Its approach to explaining the use of Greyball in London - software that could be used to block regulatory bodies from gaining full access to the app and prevent officials from undertaking regulatory or law enforcement duties.
jjp··on Ask HN: What's the one thing that let you grow the most as a developer?
> There's nothing like fixing a stupid but critical bug in old crappy code that is so bad you can't imagine how anyone wrote such garbage and considers themselves a professional.. and then realizing you were the one that wrote it. That's a nice wake-up call.

Alternatively there's nothing like having a junior colleague investigating a defect in code you once wrote ask you what it does and then have to publicly declare that that it was crappy garbage that you can no longer decipher.

jjp··on Meteorite recovered in Australia with the help of stargazers and science app
More details on the Desert Fireball Network - http://fireballsinthesky.com.au/about/
jjp··on HP Unveils Mini Workstation
Based on a google site: search and an eyeball of the first couple of results pages I'd summarise as

www2 - partnering, alliances education [1] www3 - investor relations, careers [2] www4 - central european languages [3] www5 - japanese [4] www6 - no results found www7 - open vms [5] www8 - seems to be the primary site for english content

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com [3] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com [4] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com [5] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com [6] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com

jjp··on Island Generator
Thanks for taking the time to explain some geology/plate tectonics in an accessible way. HN is great for the random educational diversions away from plain old tech.
jjp··on Scouts and guides provide ‘mental health boost for life’
More details on the study from NewScientist [1]

They analysed data from a long-running study of almost 10,000 people across the UK who were born in November 1958. They found that 28 per cent of the study’s participants had been involved in the Scouts or Guides, and that these were 15 per cent less likely to suffer from anxiety or mood disorders at the age of 50 than their peers who didn’t join. Scouts or Guides were not more likely to come from families of any particular social status. However, people from poorer backgrounds do have a relatively higher likelihood of mental illness – but this effect seemed to be reduced or even removed in those who attended Scouts or Guides.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2112209-scouts-and-guid...

Submitter but not involved in the study

jjp··on Writing more legible SQL
Would have been useful to see some thinking on joins and the naming conventions when you have the same column in both tables
jjp··on Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?
Content, content, content and then presentation.

You need to think of yourself as the product and work out what's the best way to describe and package the skills and experiences that you have already acquired and how they can be applied to whatever your target companies are looking for.

Also think about whether you are using your portfolio site for lead generation or lead qualification. Lead generation means that you'll have recruiters finding your portfolio off the back of your SEO and they contact you. Whereas lead qualification means you are selling your self to a hiring manager/expert after they've read your resume and decided that they want to check your credibility before interviewing.

jjp··on Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
For an summary of all the environmental/physiological factors that affect work performance in the office take a look at Creating the Productive Workplace [1]. Research material covered include affect of temperature (high/low and variation), humidity, indoor air quality, ventilation and it's control, lighting, crowding, daylight (too much/too little), artificial light (wrong type) and noise.

One of the points that comes out quite strongly is that whilst each of the environmental factors does adversely/positively impact your performance your ability to control (or lack of control) can have a greater impact. For example you will tolerate colder and warmer environments if you know that you can have some influence on the temperature .

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279190533_Creating_...

jjp··on Boom Wants to Bring Supersonic Civilian Travel Back
Good read, along with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project
jjp··on Falsehoods programmers believe about networks
Seems to have missed the falsehood that everything on the network will respond really quickly and so it's fine to have loads of blocking calls on starting an application
jjp··on An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf]
This is an editorialised title. The blog posting is a boring "Test Driven Development". The blog posting and the paper that it fronts has a conclusion that no significant difference between TDD and iterative test-last (ITL) development, which is quite a bit different from TDD has little or no impact on development time or code quality
jjp··on LinkedIn will now let you quietly signal when you’re looking for a job
Hope there is an option to not show your intention to some recruiters especially if they are also employed by your current employer. Otherwise I can see a potentially uncomfortable discussion when the recruiter who finds you is an internal recruiter for your current employer.
jjp··on The eye of hurricane Matthew passes directly over a weather buoy
Raw data is reported in different units and presentation in formats that the consumer might find useful - See http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/measdes.shtml for explanation of the raw data.
jjp··on The most commonly used photo camera-lens combinations
The blog post about the infographic says that it's a crawl of Flickr, 500px and Pixabay. [1]

If you drill through to the camera/lens combination you actually get to see some of the photos that have been crawled, and then it will take you back to the original source.

[1] https://explorecams.com/blog/

jjp··on Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
Hans Rosling's original Ted talk, which has so much passion about data visualisation and making information accessible - http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
jjp··on Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up
Try the previous discussion for more details - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188144
jjp··on Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
Try Synology Hyperdrive. I'd assume that all the other NAS vendors do something similar.
jjp··on Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet – Schneier on Security
Also being discussed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12491084
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