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It is a well placed jab at Guido's (poorly worded) statement.

randleton Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?

Starting Strength stands out for me too. Starting a strength training routine has been a wonderful experience that I would highly encourage to everyone.

randleton Orion Flight Test Live Launch

"For weather, we tend to use whichever measure sounds more dramatic: Fahrenheit for hot summer days"

Strange...I never hear that in Ontario! Whereabouts in Canada are you?

randleton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2014)

"very year we take the company overseas for a month (on your own dime, sorry)"

You make your employees pay to travel for work?

randleton Social assistance computer error sees millions paid out by mistake in Ontario

A quarter billion dollars on a provincial software project. This is absolutely mind boggling. Between this and the Presto boondoggle[1] we are probably closing in on a billion dollars being lit on fire in Ontario alone.

[1] http://www.thepost.on.ca/2012/12/13/presto-yet-another-liber...

randleton Falling for a Hells Angel

I would be highly interested in knowing what the risk is for a population of mature riders, who wear proper gear all the time with 50000+ miles experience is. I'm sure my insurance company has the numbers on file...

randleton Falling for a Hells Angel

riding 4,000 miles a year for 40 years gives you a 4.2% chance of dying in an accident

No, it doesn't give me a 4.2% risk of dying. That 4.2% (assuming your math is correct) is a figure for the entire population which doesn't say much about an individuals level of risk.

It is possible to ride in a low risk fashion that will put an individuals risk at a significantly lower rate. There is a reason my insurance rates are drastically lower than a 16 year old on a super sport.

randleton Falling for a Hells Angel

Riding a motorcycle is not crazy. It is a risk/reward decision. The risk can be mitigated by always riding with gear (ATGATT - All The Gear All The Time) and making smart decisions about how & when you ride. For me the reward of being on a bike far outweighs the risk.

randleton On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

It probably varies. In my experience working construction this was absolutely not true. There was definitely some down time here and there but the majority of days we worked close to flat out from 7-4:30 (2 15min breaks + 30min lunch). Ditto for summer I spent working on an assembly line where there was even less downtime (although it was not nearly as physically demanding).

Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a lot of white collar workers.

randleton Calories in, calories out

I hadn't seen that yet so thanks for the link. Amazing gains by him!

randleton Calories in, calories out

kyllo, you didn't say exactly how long you did SS for, but it's my understanding that gaining even 20lbs of muscle in 6 months is virtually impossible:

"Under the best possible circumstances (perfect diet, training, supplementation, and recovery strategies) the average male body can manufacture between 0.25 and 0.5 pounds of dry muscle tissue per week"[1]

For sure SS will get you stronger in an almost magical fashion (I'm currently doing a modified SS program) but expecting to gain 20lbs of muscle in a short period of time is unrealistic.

[1] http://www.t-nation.com/portal_includes/articles/2006/06-154...

randleton Calories in, calories out

The MyFitnessPal app is great and includes a barcode scanner which makes it super easy to find the calories/macros for a big chunk of your food. It also allows you to set your goals for your macros (fat/protein/carbs) which is very handy. I'm able to hit my macro goals within +/- 5% a day which seems quite good.

I weigh and log virtually everyting (not coffee/tea/water though) but as you said, measuring calories is imprecise at best. I'm currently targeting ~3400kcal a day and I would estimate a healthy error margin of +/- 400kcal a day on that figure.

The biggest benefit is that it makes me totally conscious of what's going into my body and developing a feel for the caloric content of various foods (e.g. wow I had no idea 2 cups of spinach was only ~10 calories!).

randleton Writing C in Cython

It's pretty standard to use r as a position vector in physics.

randleton Career planning: Where do old devs go to?

I'm only 34 but already I'm finding most developer job ads target much younger developers who like to work hard and play hard. At some point Beer Fridays, foosball and video games stop being appealing "perks" and actually become a disincentive ("I don't want to work where everyone is 15 years younger than me and plays foosball all day!"). So if you're advertising jobs in this fashion you're self selecting for younger devs.

Older devs will just rely on previous connections to find new work or stay in positions that pay well and come with lots of vacation (as/more important than pay to me).

randleton Brain 'can classify words during sleep'

I've had similar experiences with the opposite result. A number of times I've believed I've solved a problem with a eureka moment in a dream only to wake up and realize my dream-solution was complete nonsense.

randleton Who's in the Office? The American Workday in One Graph

I don't have numbers to back it up, but I suspect there are a huge number of programmers who work in mega-corps where the office is empty by 5pm.

randleton Burger King in Talks to Buy Tim Hortons

Yes Ottawa is a great city but the climate is really bad (even when compared to somewhere as close as Toronto). The end of May/beginning of June and late Sept are usually ok...

I must be one of those aggressive drivers because I can't believe how slowly everyone seems to merge onto the 417 :)

randleton Revenge of the Types

On the topic of IDE's, WingIDE has an interesting approach where you can add `assert isinstance(your_var, SomeClass) to the beginning of your functions to help Wing analyse your code[1]. It's more verbose than type annotations and doesn't feel very idiomatic sprinkling asserts all through your code but I recall it being pretty helpful (I haven't used Wing in years now).

[1] https://wingware.com/doc/edit/helping-wing-analyze-code

randleton Double Pendulum in fewer than 100 lines of JavaScript

We used a combination of Goldstein (a classic as another poster pointed out) and Marion & Thornton's Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems (which was good but not great).

randleton Double Pendulum in fewer than 100 lines of JavaScript

Me too. Lagrangian mechanics are almost the only thing about my physics undergrad where I still recall thinking "wow this is awesome!"

randleton Bootstra.386 – A Bootstrap theme from the 1980s

Yes, very fond memories of using Turbo Vision in the late 90's came flooding back to me as soon as I loaded the page!

randleton Django 1.7 RC1

I bought one but ordered too small a size so I'd be in for purchasing another if someone were to make this happen. It's a nice shirt and I want one that fits!

randleton Show HN: A fast ISO8601 date-time parser for Python

I don't currently have a use for this library, but I'm going to bookmark it anyways because it looks like a nice introduction to writing a module in C. It does something non trivial but still is simple enough to grok quickly. Thanks!

randleton Show HN: A fast ISO8601 date-time parser for Python

Note you still need to convert your regex match to a datetime object which is likely going to add some significant overhead.

randleton That one pixel

You've got an off by one error in your link!

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063....

randleton Your next conference should have real-time captioning

This would be hugely welcome at conferences for me! I'm hearing impaired and while I can usually hear the speakers (with hearing aids), I sometimes struggle to understand the actual words they are saying (poor speech discrimination). Seems like something that could really increase the quality of conferences for everyone for not a lot of expense. Kudos to !!con for doing this.

randleton Couple Live Map

Ha...was coming to ask the same thing. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why there was so much activity on the shore of the Hudson Bay!

randleton “A Windows 7 deployment image was accidently sent to all Windows machines”

Reading that just made me feel sick to my stomach and my heart goes out to the poor gal/guy that pushed "Go" on that one. Shit happens, but a screw up that big can be devastating to ones psyche.

randleton We'd lose our security certificate if we allowed pasting

Yup this appears to be it. I just changed my password and can now use a longer password with special chars (no spaces though).

randleton We'd lose our security certificate if we allowed pasting

Strange. I tried just this morning before posting but I will update my password and try again.

edit: after updating my password it's now case sensitive, and allows special chars. As the sibling comment suggests, it looks like they have two different authentication routes and updating your password moves you onto the newer one.