niccl

That was fascinating. And contained some interesting stories relating to the function profit = f(lives_lost)

A way to think about it I've seen a few times: continental drift is roughly the same order of magnitude as the rate your fingernails grow!

> Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a legitimate disability

so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?

is it intentional that one arrangement of the letters is correct when another, equally correct, arrangement is wrong? eg 'L L I P S' can be 'SPILL' or PILLS, but only PILLS is accepted. Similarly for NOTES being 'correct' but STONE being wrong.

Any time you have a character with a special meaning you have to handle that character turning up in the data you're encoding. It's inevitable. No matter what obscure character you choose, you'll have to deal with it

Excel.

Before you dismiss it as 'not a language, people have argued that it is. And you can definitely program stuff in it, and so that surely makes it a language

but it doesn't seem to happen the same way in other parts of the programming world. Even in Django, yes, there are squillions of libraries for different things, and many of them haven't been updated in years, but the long-lived ones don't tend to have breaking changes in (at least in my experience). It just seems to be front-end stuff where people will make breaking changes in some long-lived package, and for no obvious reason.

Make a new package, or a distinctly different version of the original package that won't get imported by a simple upgrade.

Or am I missing some reason that it's not as simple to do this in front-end stuff as it is in other areas?

including, IIRC, at least one FPGA-based circuit that had a blob of logic not connected to anything else (ie could not possibly be involved in the logical functioning of the circuit), but when removed the implementation stopped working. So the actual circuit wasn't a sensible design option, just a very implementation-specific local minimum.

I think the original design challenge was something like a tone discriminator circuit. I can't recall the details

yeah, but _lots_ of style points!

XOR is used in one of the LEET fizzbuzz answers: https://tech.marksblogg.com/fastest-fizz-buzz.html

absolutely agree. We get lots of csv files to process and most of our consultants will check them in excel and totally mangle them one way or another. You _can_ make excel import them without messing them too much but it's several hoops away from the normal file open procedure so they forget. Libreoffice Just Works. Love it. And the way it can split a multi-tab excel file into separate csv files from the command line is a godsend. Although the documentation for the incantation for the filters to make it do it is rather lacking. But once you get it, it's fantastic

napkin is literally a small piece of napiery (cloth)

There's a laundry folding section at the end of that isn't cut. Looks reasonably impressive, if your standard is slightly above that of a teenager

I'd read the title as 'if you see this there's a nuclear war going on and it will escalate and you'll die'

Maybe not what was intended but that's how I see it

who pays for moving the observatory?

This sounds slightly familiar. Were you in the UK at the time? There was a series on BBC during the children's watching time (pre-6:00 pm, I'd guess, about the same time that Belle and Sebastian [0] showed) that had Slavic fairy/folk tales. Not quite cartoons, but definitely a cartoonish vibe. A little like The Story Teller [1], but much earlier.

Sadly, I can't recall any more about it than that, but maybe it'll help that you're not alone. And of course this could be nothing at all related to what you're after.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_and_Sebastian_(1965_TV_s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(TV_series)

sounds interesting. How does it work?

maybe not, being stainless steel (at least the body is. Don't know about chassis, if there is one)

:-) clever

Isn't Electron Beam Lithography [0] that sort of thing? slow, obviously, and I'm not sure about resolution,

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography

Not OP, but... It suggests that it's less different than one might have originally thought. Bats using echo location can build a persistent model of the environment, in just the way we can. I'd be prepared to bet a small amount that this gives bats the same illusion we have of moving in a static 3d space.

I think Derek Sivers [0] had something to say about this. He used to run CD-Baby, and IIRC was also a musician with some well known bands from back in the day. I've found his stuff about different ways of approaching live music very thoughtful

0: https://sive.rs

I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737795

That's a really good idea. Thanks

In the course of interviewing a bunch of developers, and employing a few of them, I've concluded that this ability/inclination/something to do this deeper digging is one of the things I prize most in a developer. They have to know when to go deep and when not to, though, and that's sometimes a hard balancing act.

I've never found a good way of screening for the ability, and more, for when not to go deep, because everyone will come up with some example if you ask, and it's not the sort of thing that I can see highlighting in a coding test (and _certainly_ not in a leet-code test!). If anyone has any suggestions on how to uncover it during the hiring process I'd be ecstatic!

It's typically buttons and programming stuff on the right. So you could argue that it's right handed because the keyboard stuff is on the right. But when you're running a show, it's the faders you need, and need to manipulate accurately and carefully, not the programming stuff. If they were for people who were most used to manipulating things accurately with their right hand, then I think the faders would be on the right.

So I guess it's a long winded way of saying that it seems as though most lighting operators are fundamentally left-handed, which is quite .. curious? I don't know what the right word is

Curiously, almost every lighting control desk I've ever seen or heard about is left handed: the faders for controlling the lights are almost invariably on the left.

I can't tell if this research still applies. There currently appears to be an emphasis on CO2 as a particularly Bad Thing, but the research in this paper suggests that CO2 is less of an issue than just temperature in deciding whether a space is pleasant or unpleasant to work in

there is something of a difference between 'per household' (US) and 'per head (Germany). So maybe introduce a factor of 4.something and the US doesn't look _quite_ as extravagant, or Germany _quite_ as frugal, depending on which way you look at it

Congrats on shipping. And double congrats on coming up with a pricing model that is a bit different from the normal SaaS monthly fee type arrangement