niccl

you've got me. What's the typo?

And then there's trucks flashing an indicator to say it's safe to overtake if you're behind them. In the UK it's the nearside indicator, which makes sense: it's a bit like the truck is pulling over to let you pass. In Aotearo, it's often the off-side indicator, so you think the truck is going to pull out in front of you. I've never understood what the Aotearoa drivers are thinking there

thank you. I knew there was something I was missing

Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.

All. The. Time. And I hate it. Imagine giving a customer a rebate based on buggy code. You fix a bug, the customer comes back and wants to check that the rebate was correct that last time. Now you have to somehow hard-code the rebate they did get so that your (slightly less buggy) code gives the same result. But hard-coding has the risk of introducing other errors on its own. Oh yes, and you've never enough time to do things properly because Customers (or maybe Management). A tangled mess of soul destroying lifeblood-sucking code and pressures ensues.

But at least they're taking _some_ stance. Yes, it could be higher, but it's better than nothing, and requires courage

I invoke Hanlon's Razor [0]. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.

Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.

Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/882/

This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)

Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.

I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.

0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)

_totally_ off topic, but what sort of brain must Ms Collier have that she can play a game at the same time as giving a cogent lecture on String Theory with very few hesitations? I could hardly concentrate on the lecture because of the game being shown in an inset window. Truly impressive

One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!

Brilliant! Mr Boole would love this

I really, really, hope so. Local live music seems to be dying where I live.

I had a gig last night. Small local band with a bit of a following that hasn't performed for a few months. Audience of 120 or so. Great fun. My occasional hobby is lighting live music so I have to take what bands I can. Fortunately I really enjoy working with these people.

After the show two of the band (40 and 37 y.o.) were talking about what next. They realise that, sadly, they're probably not going to make it big, but aren't sure that the occasional local gig with audience of 120, or supporting someone bigger but where the audience don't care, is enough. What should they do? give up? change mental focus and do something completely different (one thought about being a counsellor, the other about going into visual art). I'm older, so they were asking whether I'd had similar thoughts. Sure have. I long ago realised I could never make a living lighting live music unless I moved to the US, or possibly europe. For reasons, neither were practical, so I consciously decided that desgining hardware, writing software, and doing the occasional hobby lighting gig were enough. But for those two? No idea.

Not really sure where this is going, but the tone of the article really resonated with the discussion with those two last night, and my tiredness this morning.

I still think live music beats the pants off recordings. And show in smaller venues where you can really see and interact with the band are _way_ better than big shows where you just have loud television

It's just the way I am. anxiety disorder? I dunno, but conflict really stresses me

Not the original poster but:

  * that the interaction with a peer _is_ the problem. I know we should all be grown up and able to talk about these things in a mature and effective way, but I can't cope with conflict in any shape or form, so if someone says Boo to me I cave in which doesn't get me any further

  * because peers aren't the people that need to hear some of the things I've got to say, it's layers above me that need to hear it

In reference to the suggestion that the 1986 theft was an homage to a 1911 theft:

> In 1911, Picasso and his contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire were both suspects in the Mona Lisa theft

> but were cleared of any association with the crime

being dead is quite a good alibi

I understand many cars nowadays have some sort of auto-levelling feature that is supposed to adjust the where the beams point as the vehicle load changes or related to tire inflation. I know some cars used to have a manual control for this. I don't own a car, but often hire, and often it's seemed that the auto-levelling is just adjusted too high.

The first time I had a car with this I was getting flashed by about 1 in 20 other drivers because they thought I had the high-beams on. I eventually took that car back to the rental agent who said that yes, it looked like the beams were adjusted too high.

With a manual control it's easy to fix. With auto-smarts (tm), not so much

> But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Douglas Hofstadter went there with his Letter Spirit project/concept/something. I can't find a decent single link about it, but there seems to have been an HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37754559

A round-turn and two half-hitches is also useful.

And a highwayman's hitch, just for fun

I thought that. they look hand-wound. I'm sure they can't be, unless this is a prototype that escaped somehow

I'd really like to see a citation for 25 Hz. It feels to me like a decimal point might be missing. And how does the knife moving at twice the frequency of the vegetables being cut work? do they do two complete cycles of the knife for every cut of the veges? that's not what I've seen watching cooking shows (which might not be the best thing to watch for this to be seen, of course)

It's just dawned on me that one possible reason is that you don't know which docs to read. I've recently been forced into learning some JavaScript. Given the original question I wouldn't have known where to start. Now the AI has given me a bunch of things I can look at to see if it's the right thing

and the wonderful https://arovideo.co.nz

Hmm. and PERL is not one of the most popular languages these days. In contrast with Python and its

  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

It does not seem coincidence to me

I have a recollection that Intel used to do this when Andy Grove was in charge. There was a fair amount of noise about them 'spending through the recession': building FABs and other plant so that when the recession ended they'd be in a great place to take advantage of the increased demand. Sadly, I can't recall exactly which depression this was about.

Looking at Andy Grove's wikpedia page it could be that the above reflects his focus on "strategic inflection points"

So Intel used to do it once, but now, not so much

I much prefer the art of fugue on strings. The Delme Quartet is the best rendition I've found.

The two pauses in contrapunctus 1 are, in my opinion the two best pieces of silence in the whole musical canon. I always think of the chords that come after theme as 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped'. They can make me weep when I'm in the right mood. (sorry for the over-sharing...)

There was a deep technical reason for it, too. I suspect I'm one of the very few living people that know what it was., so I'll share it with HN so the knowledge doesn't die :-)

A relatively early type of mechanical telephone exchange was the rotary exchange [0]. The pulses from the phone cause a clutch to connect the rotary driver in the exchange which then moved the switching stuff around (details can probably be inferred from the linked article). One of the issues with the rotary exchange is the pads of the clutch wear, leading to unreliable connections. Aotearoa/NZ had an existing number plan when they decided to install rotary exchanges. Some bright spark knew of the wear issue, and calculated that, given the existing number plan, if they had the 1 position on the dial giving 9 pulses (etc.) then the overall wear on the pads would be much lower and so the maintenance requirement would be less. And that's where it started.

And another fun fact. I believe Norway chose the same configuration for their rotary phones. I'm not sure if it was for the same reason, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_system