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smeyer

1,455 karma · joined June 24, 2014

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smeyer··on Google OAuth is broken (sort of)
I changed my last name when I got married, and at the time I had a work email address that looked like oldlastname@company.com on the company's Google Workspace. Given that oldlastname was no longer my name, I changed my email address to newlastnmae@company.com.

This worked fine in Google services and some of the many work applications using Google for auth, but some of them were using the email address as a global identifier in a way that broke down when I changed my name. The services that migrated successfully were using a more stable identifier that persisted despite the address change.

smeyer··on Placemark is going open source and shutting down
I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly replaceable with zero transaction costs..

Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.

smeyer··on Find bilingual baby names
Others might care less about this than we did, but we were also thinking about popularity of names we were considering, including changes in popularity over time. There are names that feel very natural to me because they were common among my peers but that are actually pretty uncommon among children now and vice versa.

For the US, I found it helpful (and fun) to download the social security data on frequency of names for each year, so that I could then plot the popularity of a given name over time. This was also helpful for considering how unisex a name is or isn't.

smeyer··on Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage.

I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... .

I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.

smeyer··on How Soap Works: The Science Behind Handwashing
Yes, there are lots and lots of people who don't wash their hands with any regularity and others who don't wash them as often as they should. You can find statistics about the fraction of folks washing hands in a public restroom, or just watch for yourself the next time you're in a public restaurant or buying food from a restaurant with an open kitchen.
smeyer··on Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis
And yet, I've been to plenty of venues that were uncomfortably loud in back while not going to any (indoors, professionally set-up) venues that were uncomfortably quiet in back.

I think it's more than what you've described. I think it's that a lot of folks actually prefer dangerously loud volumes, and this contributes to a positive feedback loop of expectations for loud concerts. I wish most concerts were quieter, but I may be in a minority.

smeyer··on Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis
Do the same characteristics that make it the most regulated state also make it the state most likely to notice these hazards before other states do? If so, it wouldn't be very weird.
smeyer··on Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer letters
They don’t just feel like an ad, they are an ad. You might not interact with ads (I’m usually similar), but they may still get enough interaction to be worth it to YC.
smeyer··on Snoop unto them as they snoop unto you
Your comment is an interesting reflection to me of the expectations people have for cheap or free software. You were willing to invest your time and schedule into seeing this talk live, which for many people is a much larger investment than $10. My default assumption of folks on this board is that they're well-off tech workers, which would make it seem even starker in comparison to $10.

My comment isn't anything about you personally, and I've had similar reactions to even cheaper software. But it still find it striking when I think about it more.

smeyer··on Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN
That's a nice way to avoid scams, but the cost doesn't seem worth the benefits to me as someone who otherwise has good awareness about scams. I've made some nice friends off the internet and yet to fall for a scam, so it doesn't seem worth locking out that possibility of friendship just to reduce the odds of being scammed slightly more.

I could easily see giving very different advice to a friend with less scam awareness, though (like an older friend with limited knowledge of technology).

smeyer··on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
But someone with 5.5 years of experience isn't a person breaking into the industry.
smeyer··on ‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for controversial physicist
I assume there are folks faking data in all fields, but I also assume that the rate of faked data is not the same across all fields.
smeyer··on A world where people pay for software
Were people actually paying $200 for a piece of productivity software, though? I'm no expert but sort of got the impression that a lot of the consumer-facing software currently charging $10 a month used to retail for 2 figures, not 3.
smeyer··on Government URLs that don't end in .gov
I would hope that random "non-government related non-profits" aren't using .gov domains. Isn't the whole point of the domain that it's just for government entities?
smeyer··on If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit three engineer-years to no-GIL CPython
That also depends on the scale of the monetary sponsorship, though. If I heard something like "Meta/Google/Whoever is the main sponsor of Python for the next 3 years", I'd assume (perhaps incorrectly) much more money per year than it takes to hire a single engineer. On the other hand, someone just saying "sure, we'll do the silver tier at your next few conferences" is worth a whole lot less than one engineer.

Regardless, the previous commenter's point stands that the title could be a lot more informative.

smeyer··on May inflation (PCE) falls to 1.2% (3.6% Core) / 3.8% YoY (4.6% Core YoY)
Prices are much stickier for some products than others. There's a big difference between a lot of commodities being sold wholesale (oil or steel or whatever), products sold to consumers (cars or oreos), and services (especially ones with a personal touch or relationship like you mentioned).

I think it would take a lot of deflation for most salons to lower prices versus just delay future increases, but prices regularly fluctuate up and down at the grocery store or used car lot.

smeyer··on How my children (n=2) acquired absolute pitch
This is all fascinating! Thank you for sharing! If I can keep bothering you with questions (or if you happen to be able to point me to a place to learn more about harpsichord tuning), I have more questions. But I also understand if you don't want to keep answering them! Despite being someone who doesn't know much about nor listen to much music, I've always had a soft spot for harpsichords.

Why do harpsichords need to be tuned so much more frequently? How long did they take to tune (and how does that compare to tuning a piano)? How was the pricing structured with such a regular need? Were most of the harpsichords you were tuning in academic institutions, arts institutions, private use, et cetera? And not a question but another thought, I'm surprised there were even a handful of people tuning them in your metro area!

smeyer··on How my children (n=2) acquired absolute pitch
>I used to be a harpsichord tuner

I have to ask out of curiosity, does this mean you worked full-time tuning harpsichords or rather that you did a lot of e.g. piano tuning and also occasionally tuned harpsichords? I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.

smeyer··on Bill to allow corporate landowners to vote in elections in Seaford, Delaware
There's a big difference between giving a voice to "the people who work [there] " versus to the people who own businesses there.
smeyer··on An Excel error led Austria's SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner
Yes, it has been widely reported. If you do an online search for something like "rogoff excel" you can see reporting all across mainstream media.
smeyer··on SEC Sues Binance and CEO Zhao for Breaking US Securities Rules
I'm not sure why the tweet adds the brackets around the w, since I don't see it in the SEC complaint. Here's what's in the linked complaint. For clarity, the "emphasis added" part is from the SEC bolding the text inside the quote, not something I added.

111. As Binance’s CCO bluntly admitted to another Binance compliance officer in December 2018, “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.” (Emphasis added.)

smeyer··on NFL labor union is out almost $42M thanks to crypto collapse
This is exactly what I assumed when I read the headline. What did you assume when first reading the headline?
smeyer··on Setris – Tetris with Sand Physics
It's interesting that you chose Kleenex and Chapstick, because both are still protected trademarks in the US. Competitors to Kleenex still market themselves as tissues and competitors to Chapstick still use lip balm. If you try using the brand names on your Amazon listing or what have you, you'll get a cease and desist letter.
smeyer··on Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes
Is the 80% sampling a variety of manufacturers and batches, or a single batch of drives that were all ordered at the same time from the same manufacturer? If the latter, I'd suspect it's more of a realization that you got a flawed batch of drives (which is a real risk to manage, but not universal).
smeyer··on The Industrial Hammer Complex
I think the commentary railing against these sorts of trends talks about them in general, whereas the commentary promoting them talks about solving particular problems. So if you ask "how to fix foo bar issue with my system design" you might get people suggesting how to solve it with one of these "hammers" instead of a broader condemnation of overuse.
smeyer··on Breakthrough deal to prevent Colorado River from drying up
I don't think the metaphors would be evaded by using metric units, though. Would 4 Teraliters been more useful to much of anyone?

Converting it to gallons, liters, or any other common unit of volume probably leaves most people without a sense of relevant scale unless you use a metaphor (e.g. how many households it could sustain for a year) or otherwise tell them how much water the states use (e.g. including a percentage of total usage).

smeyer··on OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over
No. I don't always assume that just because a CEO makes a public statement they have internal data backing up the claim. Sometimes they do! Other times, they have data but are misinterpreting it or missing something, but it's impossible to tell if the data is just internal. Other times they're making a statement without data based on their personal beliefs. Other times, they don't even think the statement is true but are saying it for messaging, marketing, or communication reasons!

Like the previous commenter, I'd be much more confident an asymptote was reached if it was being demonstrated publicly.

smeyer··on The Cybertruck is years behind schedule, so Tesla is launching a $30 beer
We haven't met in person, but hi! Part of why I own a sedan rather than an SUV (although not the only reason) is safety of others. It's also part of why I avoided car ownership for many years!

I'd prefer that this safety consideration be handled via regulation, though. I'd love to see cars that recklessly endanger the lives of those outside the car banned, limited, or taxed.

smeyer··on The Cybertruck is years behind schedule, so Tesla is launching a $30 beer
>extremely safe

Do you care about the safety of others, or only yourself? You listed safety second in your list of positives, but I'm curious if you're considering things like pedestrian safety or just driver/passenger safety.

smeyer··on It's difficult to read an audiophile guide as an analogue engineer
>If you can't hear over 8 kHz

Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.

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