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percept

2,227 karma · joined September 29, 2009

percepthn at gmail
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percept··on Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration
If the novels were as bad as he says they were, maybe he can crank out some random(ly bad) prose to go with it, and get Amazon-rich.

(And/or, this might make an interesting companion project.)

percept··on Codemoji
Smart design--somebody had fun with this one.
percept··on Bulma – A modern CSS framework based on Flexbox
This looks interesting, and definitely addresses some common pain points.
percept··on Sheriff Raids House to Find Anonymous Blogger Who Called Him Corrupt
This may seem overly negative or (internet) contrarian, and I believe yours is a good comment, but these are subject to political forces as much as--or more than--any.

Put your time in (not bankers hours), move when transferred, whoa this is a lot of paperwork, climb the ladder, spend time at HQ and "make friends" at all your stops, go along and get along, now there are kids and spouse/house and schools, do your 20 so you can retire, start new job in security or back to private practice thanks to your well-tended reputation, etc.

Who's gonna stick their neck out anymore? (Besides Snowden.)

percept··on Ask HN: My infosec auditor rejects open source. What now?
From a business standpoint: play the game, check all the boxes. (And it never hurts to be flexible and open to different ideas, even those that seem counterintuitive.)
percept··on Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official
Prison rape and other violence, either.
percept··on Every Year on August 5th, the Curiosity Rover Sings a Lonely Birthday Song
"on Earth"
percept··on Huge no. of files for Angular 2
Wasteful yet subversive
percept··on Ask HN: Startups that allow cats?
All these years, and we're finally getting around to the important questions.

I don't have a cat (or a workplace), but cat cafes seem to be purring right along.

Digging a bit, it seems that one in seven kids has cat allergies, which is twice as much as the rate with kids and dogs. Either way, that's a fair number of people, so if there's any sort of discrimination involved, I'm sure cat lawyers will pounce.

percept··on Cross-Laminated Timber and the Race for Wooden Skyscrapers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_scaffolding
percept··on After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and uninhabitable
US assistance for UXO in Laos has been slowly increasing (though some point out it's only a tiny fraction of the amount spent bombing the country in the first place).
percept··on What Happened to Howard Stern?
If you enjoyed the Joel interview, a bunch of his Q&A's during college tours are on YouTube, and they can be quite funny and insightful.

Check out this one about 'Uptown Girl' (yes, I know, but there's interesting and funny stuff in there, from Beethoven to model-dating):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UqhaLFpBM4

Another one, on 'James' (somewhat about the song, but more about the songwriting process, for him and the Rolling Stones, he throws an impersonation in there too):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrYWXFynnQs

percept··on Real-time world air quality index
https://aqicn.org/contact/
percept··on Zapping Their Brains at Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcKUL5E2woc
percept··on Overview of all Amazon AWS APIs
I don't know if it's bad, or just rapidly evolving.

Somebody should create a cool map/visualization of the AWS landscape. (Possibly relating it to some other concept: AWS as a small town, Disney World, or Simpsons' Springfield?)

percept··on What is the fastest way for a robot with superhuman capabilities to make money?
Surprised nobody mentioned HFT.

He also sounds like the sort of candidate many startups are looking for in their job ads. So there's that.

percept··on Pokémon Go Is Teaching Americans the Metric System
You're both upvoted. I'm going to try the Fibonacci version for a while.

(Though perhaps as is suggested with languages, it's better to start applying the new system directly, instead of performing a conversion step first.)

percept··on Journalists confused an opinion piece for an alcohol-cancer study
"IARC list ethanol in alcoholic beverages as Group 1 carcinogens and arguments "There is sufficient evidence for the carcinogenicity of acetaldehyde (the major metabolite of ethanol) in experimental animals.""

(Wikipedia, citing http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/Classifications...)

percept··on How we broke PHP, hacked Pornhub and earned $20k
FWIW, it places well across TechEmpower benchmarks:

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

percept··on Visiting physician sheds new light on Lyme disease
Important:

“Sudden-onset dementia should really be a red flag for Lyme [disease], especially in people with compromised immune systems,” she said.

“Everyone over 50 has a compromised immune system.”

Dr. Zubcevik said that doctors and parents should know that Lyme presents differently in children than it does in adults. “71 percent of the time, headache is the most common symptom in children,” she said. “Mood disturbance, fatigue, and irritability are also frequent symptoms in children. If they are acting out in school all of a sudden, get them tested.”

“The bull’s-eye rash only happens 20 percent of the time,” she said. “It can often look like a spider bite or a bruise. If you get a bull’s-eye it’s like winning the lottery. Borrelia miyamotoi, which we have a lot in Massachusetts, will not test positive on either test. That’s a huge problem, so the CDC is moving toward a different kind of test.”

Crazy:

"Dr. Zubcevik said there are videos that show a white blood cell pursuing a spirochete, which evades capture by drilling into tissue."

percept··on Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?
I think those tend not to sustain themselves, for several reasons.

The topic may work better on a more general board like HN, and I hope it will continue to appear here occasionally (without filtering).

percept··on Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem
Productivity plummets worldwide (regex attack vector)
percept··on 99 Bottles of OOP
The author has good presentations on YouTube, too.
percept··on North Korea’s Naenara Web Browser: Weirder Than We Thought (2015)
Oh crap, you mean I have to support Naenara now, too?

(.00001% of the market)

percept··on North Korea’s Naenara Web Browser: Weirder Than We Thought (2015)
This had made the rounds a while back:

http://nknetobserver.github.io/

percept··on What are your rabbit holes on the internet? (For instance, HN one we all share)
My complaint about mathematics (and similar) articles is that they seem to be written for technical correctness, but not for instructional purposes.

So people who already understand the concepts can nod and agree "I find nothing (further) wrong with that," while learners definitely fall down a rabbit hole of successive links. At times it seems more like lawyering than teaching.

I've considered the argument that Wikipedia isn't meant for that purpose, that it's simply a repository for formulas and such, but I don't believe that agrees with any idea of human advancement and learning, and the site's own mission statement reads "to collect and develop educational content."

percept··on What’s Behind the Ballooning Upper Middle Class? Education
I'd throw real estate in the mix (probably ahead of others), and think education has the least to do with it.
percept··on If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island
Where your bad data goes.
percept··on Asciinema 1.3 Switches from Go Back to Python
This is a perfectly reasonable analysis of why a particular language choice didn't fit a particular project, without a lot of hyperbole or boosterism.
percept··on GitHub now uses native fonts (San Francisco in macOS and Segoe UI in Windows)
Much nicer--for a while there it seemed like they were headed for 2005 with the typeface, gradients, and other visual elements.
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