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mdcurran

51 karma · joined February 26, 2020

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mdcurran··on You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account
The US also incurs a toll of $40 for visitors using ESTA.
mdcurran··on Try and
'Go put your shoes on' is sensical in British English. If I heard someone saying this, I wouldn't bat an eye.
mdcurran··on Lord Kelvin and his analog computer
I feel embarrassed! Despite being from Glasgow, until now I've never made the connection between the River Kelvin (and the surrounding Kelvingrove and Kelvinbridge), the statue in the park of someone called Baron Kelvin, and the unit of measurement.
mdcurran··on SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra
This doesn’t totally solve the issue of SELECT’ing first then filtering, but for complex queries I’ve found CTEs very useful (whenever the database/SQL dialect supports it).
mdcurran··on Let's create a Tree-sitter grammar
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39762495
mdcurran··on To all the newspapers I loved
The Times could perhaps be leaning “right”. But the FT is, in my opinion, a legitimately neutral publication. At least through Britain’s default neoliberal lens.
mdcurran··on The British Library URL has been offline due to cyberattack for 10 days
I visit the British Library often. It's a great place to work if no meetings are on your schedule that day. The library has been noticeably quieter the past few weeks. Perhaps it's the time of year, but many individuals use the library for researching family histories or accessing esoteric items in the catalogue. I hope this is resolved soon. Public libraries are a really wonderful utility.
mdcurran··on Speech and Language Processing
I used the 2nd edition of this textbook in my undergraduate studies extensively (linguistics). Coming from a non-technical background and starting to take technical classes, certain chapters were wonderful ways for me to bridge that gap. Specifically the second chapter on text normalisation helped me apply things I’d learned in 100 and 200 level classes and ultimately set me on the path to becoming an engineer. And I still use that text processing knowledge a lot in my day to day work.

I’m forever grateful to the authors for making these drafts freely accessible (there weren’t many copies of the second edition in my university library!)

mdcurran··on Scottish Power: "Billing chaos caused by a new IT system"
I think there's a much deeper problem at Scottish Power than just IT systems. I spent close to a year trying to get them to fix an incorrect bill and nobody I talked to had any idea what to do (probably 6 or 7 people across various departments).

I know many others who have had similar problems with Scottish Power, and I'm sure there will be more testimonies in other comments.

The question on my mind is how does a company resolve such deep-rooted institutional failings?