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mbrookes

336 karma · joined November 15, 2016

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mbrookes··on Ask HN: Can anyone make good use of currencycare.com domain?
Done!
mbrookes··on Show HN: Cheaper flights when flying multiple destinations by route optimisation
The "something went wrong" if you don't delete the empty fields is confusing...
mbrookes··on [dead]
Why isn't Wipro on this list?
mbrookes··on Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble
That isn't true at all. Most US networks, and may others globally support VoLTE. The difference in sound quality is remarkable, to the point of being unnerving at first.
mbrookes··on Show HN: Replacing WordPress with GitHub Issues-like Blog Comments
What was the reason given?
mbrookes··on We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2
> How to Hack Your Way In To The Climate Change Revolution

This is just a list of (mostly) ill-informed questions rather than "Thought-Provoking Climate Change 2.0 Ideas", and certainly don't answer acabal's question, or the address title of the post.

mbrookes··on Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives
I first came across that issue during one of the many Facebook privacy scandals. I'd found some juicy bits in (IIRC) a much earlier version of their privacy policy. But when I went back to it later, the robots.txt had been updated, and the earlier archives had been obliterated.

That just seems wrong.

mbrookes··on McDonald's Real Estate: How They Really Make Their Money (2015)
Ah, right, no. "i.e." is an abbreviation for the Latin "id est", meaning "that is".

"For example" would be "e.g.", ("exempli gratia" in Latin.)

"E.g." is illustrative, whereas "i.e." is exhaustive.

I hadn't heard "i.e." expanded to "in example" before - that explains one source of misunderstanding (despite being grammatically incorrect in its own right).

Edit: It seems you've since been unfairly downvoted for explaining what you meant. Please folks, don't do that. I asked the question, and @fraserharris answered honestly.

mbrookes··on McDonald's Real Estate: How They Really Make Their Money (2015)
> Other chains (ie: Burger King) have had more significant problems with enforcing franchise standards.

Why have Burger King in particular had this problem?

mbrookes··on Drinking While Jurying
> The Ouija board seems highly inappropriate, since I believe jurors are instructed to not use outside research

Outside research? Do you genuinely believe they consulted the spirit world?

At most this this would surface their collective belief in the guilt of the accused. An unconventional means to arrive at a consensus, but no more outside research than each of them writing a verdict on a piece of paper.

mbrookes··on Drinking While Jurying
> The Ouija board seems highly inappropriate, since I believe jurors are instructed to not use outside research

Outside research? Do you genuinely believe they consulted the the spirit world?

At most this this would surface their collective belief in the guilt of the accused. An unconventional means to arrive at a consensus, but no more outside research than each of them writing a verdict on a piece of paper.

mbrookes··on Slate.js: Customizeable rich text library inspired by Draft.js
Yes. (That much I figured out). :-)
mbrookes··on Slate.js: Customizeable rich text library inspired by Draft.js
By "substitute" (poor choice of words), I meant - can this be used to allow live editing of parts of page, with their layout and formatting intact?

Thanks for clarifying the data model & serializers.

mbrookes··on Slate.js: Customizeable rich text library inspired by Draft.js
Two probably dumb questions, but I can't tell from looking at the examples and a brief scan of the docs:

1) Can this be used as as content-editable substitute? 2) What format is the marked-up text stored in, and does it require Slate to be rendered?

mbrookes··on Pixels Don’t Care (2013)
The link from hackerfall to your page breaks due to the trailing slash. Probably something easily fixed on your server...
mbrookes··on Building a simple e-ink display from scratch
> They are a Cleveland-based hardware startup > Disclaimer: I am the Director of Architecture at BluBoard

Then you should probably say "we are" rather than "they are" so that it's clear from the outset. (PS. When you disclose something, it's a "disclosure".)

mbrookes··on Letter and symbol misrecognition in highly legible typefaces (2015)
Ironic then that this article is set in a hard-to-read typeface!
mbrookes··on In love with the BBC micro:bit
Incorrect: https://community.tes.com/threads/the-micro-bit-school-regis...
mbrookes··on COAP endpoints on IKEA Trådfri
bigclivedotcom has done some positive teardowns of IKEA electronic products: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ikea+bigclivedo...
mbrookes··on In love with the BBC micro:bit
In case anyone gets the impression that bluetooth is completely unavailable, you can use Espruino (JS) http://www.espruino.com/MicroBit, Microsoft's http://codethemicrobit.com (scratch-like drag and drop), or C / C++ amongst others, including bluetooth access to the compass and accelerometer.

Here's a rundown: https://blog.bluetooth.com/developing-applications-bbc-micro...

mbrookes··on In love with the BBC micro:bit
Not every child - every Year-7 (11-12 year old) child, whose school had a teacher interested enough to apply for them.

My child's DT teacher did, but they used it for one lesson, then were given it to bring home. It's now in a drawer somewhere.

That was last year. I haven't heard of any plans to repeat the exercise.

mbrookes··on For 18 years I thought she was stealing my identity, until I found her
>people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it

people from other countries might enter it correctly without thinking about it

mbrookes··on Show HN: Redux Offline – Build Offline-First Apps for Web and React Native
Also not relational, but Meteor (MongoDB) with GroundDB for the client provides optimistic UI, offline persistence, and sync on reconnect. Unlike Couch / Puch, you can easily share a DB between users with authentication / authorization. Synced content can be controlled with subscriptions.
mbrookes··on Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
> meaning it needs to ask for less from the taxpayer

Or they could align their charges to their costs, and have the users pay for the service.

mbrookes··on Tacotron: A Fully End-to-End Text-To-Speech Synthesis Model
It was pointed out the last time I posted this that the demo is "fake" at least in as much as the inserted words aren't being synthesized but rather copy-pasted with existing intonation intact.
mbrookes··on Show HN: Polished – A lightweight toolset for writing styles in JavaScript
Thanks for the clarification "SASS-like mixins for CSS in JS" sums it up.

I did look at the docs, but that doesn't have an explanation of what value this is trying to offer either.

If designers are being asked to write CSS-IN-JS, I can get where there the difficulty comes from, but I'd still argue that most of these functions are just moving the chairs around.

This [1] IMHO is the defacto JS color lib, but again can see how, if the only thing you know is SASS, it looks a bit to much like real code.

[1] https://github.com/brehaut/color-js#color-methods

mbrookes··on Show HN: Polished – A lightweight toolset for writing styles in JavaScript
> this seems to be a way to write the complete CSS in JS, and then to have it compiled into CSS.

That isn't what this is although I also had to poke around the source code to figure out what it is exactly.

It's a set of mixins and utility functions that return a js object that is then used as input for either inline styles, or for one of the may CSS in JS libraries that convert do a JS object to CSS.

As for how useful? Well, the color utilities seem to replicate what color.js does, so nothing new there. The mixins seem to be mostly about prefixing, and you're going to need to prefix the rest of your CSS-in-JS anyway - for which there are various standalone libraries, and plugins to the aforementioned libraries.

The shorthands let you do things like:

borderWidth('12px', '24px', '36px', '48px')

=>

{ 'border-top-width': '12px', 'border-right-width': '24px', 'border-bottom-width': '36px', 'border-left-width': '48px' }

Thing is, I can already do that without the expansion:

{ 'borderWidth': '12px 24px 36px 48px' }

As much as I respect the guys behind this, I'd question how useful it is overall.

mbrookes··on The new £1 Coin
"Hidden high security feature – a high security feature is built into the coin to protect it from counterfeiting in the future."

So you never know - but how would that work inside a metal coin?

mbrookes··on Show HN: Ctxt.io – share context of whatever you see with others in seconds
Same. Something is broken. Also using FireFox...
mbrookes··on YC AI
Not exactly.

The time you spend on the course, and the time spent by your instance running workloads are two completely separate things.

Your cost per-hour is accurate (plus a few bucks for an IP address), but the number of hours is off by an order of magnitude.

Also, I'm paying double that per instance per month for SSD using the provided scripts to build the instances. It's the smallest part of the cost, but I mention it because it can take newcomers to EC2 by surprise if they have an instance shut-down but consuming disk space.

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