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AskewEgret

85 karma · joined October 5, 2017

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AskewEgret··on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
If I am understanding your problem correctly, I did that for a large American automotive electronics supplier back in the 1990s - though back then 30-40 megabytes of data was pretty big. We trained a bunch of American and Japanese engineers on how to do that, but I don't remember any Europeans.

I think I have an email address in my profile; feel free to send me something. I am fairly certain that your needs can be satisfied with existing Unix tools. Then again, the reason I worked on the problem in the 1990s was to free up engineer time so they could do more valuable things. A gui and other tools could be worth paying for if the bosses have that mindset.

AskewEgret··on Apple is a traditional business
> nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there

We used smartphones in the labs at Motorola when I started working there in 2001. They ran Linux and had all the capabilities you would consider essential to a smartphone, not just the form factor. They were targeted for public sale in 2002 or 2003, if I remember correctly, but got shelved because the dotcom crash caused the networks to delay upgrading their infrastructure (yes, high-speed data networks had been in the works since the 1990s). A smartphone for sale in 2003 would have been absolutely useless. You'll remember that the phone networks could barely handle (or couldn't depending on your viewpoint) the iPhone for the first few years.

I didn't work in the cell phone division so I can't say for sure, but I think that most of the manufacturers let their smartphone development stagnate or stall from the early 2000s until 2006 or 2007, while Apple kept plugging away at it. When they proved that people would buy a smartphone even when their mobile network couldn't handle the traffic, all the manufacturers put effort back into development but by then they were far behind Apple.

AskewEgret··on Hello Go
Of course. Get-Content puts every line of text into the pipeline as a .Net String object with a few additional attributes added on, including ReadCount which is the line number. For example:

Get-Content -Path TEXT.TXT | %{"$($_.ReadCount) $($_.Length) $($_.ToUpper())" }

For each line of text, this will print the line number, the length of the string, and the string converted into upper case.

PowerShell is very wordy, but very powerful.

AskewEgret··on Gwynne Shotwell: SpaceX's Plan to Fly You Across the Globe in 30 Minutes [video]
And a really interesting life story. I like how she randomly ended up in the job:

https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc...

> Four years into the job, Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.”

> Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee. She wrestled with the decision. “The history of startup rocket companies isn’t exactly great,” explains Hughes, SpaceX senior vice president and general counsel. “This was not necessarily the safest play.”

AskewEgret··on Why New York City Stopped Building Subways
You are correct, but the planned extension of the CTA Red Line includes a new station that is shared with the South Shore, creating a brand-new connection ability that never existed before. The planning for the new Union Station to McCormick Place link involves connecting the CTA, Metra and South Shore lines.

If you are standing in downtown Chicago, you can jump onto a train and conveniently go to O'Hare International (Blue Line CTA), Midway International (Orange Line CTA), Milwaukee International (Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (South Shore). South Bend has daily non-stops to NYC so I'm not sure why it's called a regional airport, but, well, there you go.

AskewEgret··on Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
The problem Apple had with Motorola was that Motorola couldn't get the chip yields they needed at high clock rates.

The problem Apple had with IBM was that IBM didn't care enough about power efficiency to make the chips viable in laptops. They also weren't that interested in fast iterations of incremental improvements.

When the G4 first game out, it was far, far ahead of x86. Apple offered it at 350, 400 and 450 MHz but shipped maybe a few hundred or a few thousand at 450 MHz and a few tens of thousands at 400 MHz. Those computers blew the Pentium out of the water. Intel eventually caught up and passed them purely on manufacturing ability.

Then the G5 came out, which was a beast of a processor. But it never came out for mobile, and IBM only upgraded the speed once or twice before Apple went for Intel.

AskewEgret··on The Dozenal Society of America
> the English system encouraging divisibility by 2/3/4/6

I'm not sure that the Old English system used sixths much. Eighths for sure though.

Fun fact: The NYSE and NASDAQ switched from fractional dollar quoting to decimal dollar quoting in the 2002-2003 time frame. The reason was to narrow the bid/ask spread, as 1/64 of a dollar rounds to 2 cents.

The side effect was that prices could no longer be represented exactly as standard IEEE 754 floating point numbers and all calculations now have some small amount of error. Or you could do decimal math and be 50x slower. Take your pick!

They should have just reduced the minimum bid to 1/128th of a dollar!

AskewEgret··on How to Quit a Top Tier Tech Job
I've found working with and improving legacy code to be some of the most compelling work I've done and I'm not alone in feeling this way.

But it's nearly impossible to find that kind of job because employers tend to go out of their way to hide the fact that they even have existing software, let alone that they want someone to work on it.

AskewEgret··on Windows chief Terry Myerson out as Microsoft reorganizes
You're going to find it very hard to have a gaming PC that is also stripped down to its bones.

Windows 10 Pro N is a good starting point for a non-annoying Windows "Experience", but I'm fairly certain you can't game with it.

AskewEgret··on Windows chief Terry Myerson out as Microsoft reorganizes
I just clicked on the start menu, and halfway down the list of apps is "Suggested: Fitbit Coach. Up your fitness level".

That's an advertisement. My computer has never had anything related to Fitbit on it. Ever.

AskewEgret··on How we interview engineers at CircleCI
Maybe the person was looking for a new job because the bosses forced them to use X in 2017.
AskewEgret··on Bus Lane Blocked, He Trained His Computer to Catch Scofflaws
> Bus lanes and stops are actually empty a lot of the time, they just need to be clear at the particular moment when the bus needs them.

Yes, this is true. Here in Chicago, it is only illegal to block a bus stop if it is interfering with a bus [1]. I would imagine that this is the case in NYC as well.

[1] https://chicagocode.org/9-64-140/

AskewEgret··on The IRS collects data on Coinbase account holders
We used Coinbase purely for trading and received a 1099-K
AskewEgret··on The IRS collects data on Coinbase account holders
Was it a 1099-K? [1] It reports gross payments, not profits. The IRS knows this; it's their form.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-1099-k

AskewEgret··on Apple Watch Adoption
> The only reason that my old Core 2 Duo is "future proofed" is because useful improvements have slowed down dramatically in the last 10 years.

I have four Core2Duo tower computers that I bought last year for $10 each. Three of them have 8GB of RAM and the other has 4GB. Each one has an Nvidia 1050 or 1060 GPU in it and they run TensorFlow just fine, though the computers are PCIe 2.0, so I'm "only" getting a little over 5 GB/s data transfer between the cards and the CPU. Gigabit ethernet makes that mostly irrelevant.

For the most part, when the GPUs are running all-out on something, the CPU is 75% idle or more.

AskewEgret··on Facebook turned on face recognition silently
It's probably based on a conservative guess about your location:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/facebook-...

AskewEgret··on Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)
In less than 50 years, Chicago went from a town of fewer than 5000 to the second largest city in America, with well over 1 million residents, yet during that period: a) Skyscrapers didn't exist until the end of the period b) Mass transit as we know it didn't exist until the end of the period c) Half the city burned down in a single fire, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless

My grandfather told me that his commute from Santa Clara to Lockheed in Sunnyvale involved mostly driving past orchards all through the 1960s and into the 1970s. He left the area in the 1980s, saying that traffic and livability had become too much of a problem. It's been decades of intentionally not addressing the problems - nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated.

AskewEgret··on Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)
Unmentioned in the linked article is the fact that sitting for the Patent Bar exam with the USPTO does not require a law degree but instead it requires an engineering or hard science degree.

If you like the idea of working with patents, trademarks and copyrights, you may wish to take that route. A lot of Computer Science programs at universities don't meet the requirements and you'd need to supplement your existing degree with laboratory chemistry, physics or biology classes at your local decently accredited college.

AskewEgret··on Keeping “Free Law” Free
This cannot be emphasized enough.

Accessing PACER from a courthouse is free. Accessing PACER for a case you are involved in is free. Getting judicial opinions from PACER is free. If you convince a judge that the cost of PACER is a burden to you, it is free. And finally, PACER doesn't actually charge you anything until you owe them more than $15 in a 3-month period - it is not cumulative: if your balance is less than $15, it goes to 0.

AskewEgret··on Google IT Support Professional Certificate
I understand the sentiment you're going for, but Gary has a commuter train that goes to downtown Chicago in less than an hour. With free (working) wifi. I've known some guys that have worked in high paying IT jobs in Chicago while renting a house on the beach in the part of Gary that is surrounded by National Park Service land (Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore). Rent and a monthly train pass was around $500 per person. They rarely locked their doors and one of the guys got his car broken into once in the 3 years they did it, which would probably be considered decent in SF. Their typical weekend involved dragging a cooler full of beer and a volleyball net onto the sand.
AskewEgret··on The Marriott Family's Civil War
This reminds me of how the family that owned the Hyatt hotels broke apart.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/05/andrews200305

AskewEgret··on Scott Wiener proposes 3 new housing bills for CA
The idea is not to have a 3 story house, but to have 3 housing units on that 5,000 sq ft lot - which is not even remotely Manhattanization of the neighborhood. However, unless this bill prevents or limits the applicability of minimum size requirements per housing unit, you've got a loophole big enough to drive a very tall single family home through.
AskewEgret··on Bitcoin Cash deals frozen as insider trading is probed
A 1-ounce gold coin issued by the US Mint is legal tender to the tune of $50. It says so right on the coin.

If you want to pay your taxes using gold coins, go right ahead. They will gladly accept it.

AskewEgret··on Where’s the Next Silicon Valley? VC Is Betting on the Midwest
I think that you are falling into a West-Coast trap that says Asian = Diverse.

San Francisco is 42% White, 33% Asian, 15% Latino, 6% Black.

Chicago is 30% White, 30% Black, 30% Latino, 7% Asian.

This is a great article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/normal-america-is-not-a...

AskewEgret··on I went to production heaven
I can remember reading Bertel Schmitt over at TTAC [1] years ago. You will find very few people in the world who can write well enough and have the level of car industry knowledge that he has. If I remember correctly, he started working at Volkswagen in the 1980s.

I can still remember an article about a Toyota factory [2] that is quite the opposite from this Volvo factory

[1] http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/author/bertel-schmitt [2] http://archive.fortune.com/2011/02/18/news/international/toy...

AskewEgret··on Is there data on the quality of management decisions?
Yes, I would expect that a drop in stolen base attempts would lead to a drop in errors by catchers.

Looking at stats from 2000-2017, total errors underwent a steady drop from ~3400 in 2000 to ~2800 in 2017.

On the other hand, it is not entirely clear that teams stopped stealing bases starting in 2012. Yes, 2015-2017 were far below average, but so were 2003-2005.

http://www.fangraphs.com/

AskewEgret··on Is there data on the quality of management decisions?
Ceteris paribus, base stealing doesn't make sense. But baseball is a game played by humans and even if it weren't, there are a large number of variables that don't go into the simple analysis.

For example: The members of the defending team adopt fielding positions based on a maximum potential for fielding a hit ball. But if there is even a threat of a stolen base attempt, the defense must change their positioning accordingly, affecting their ability to field a ball put into play.

If a player does make an attempt to steal a base, at least one defender must begin to change their positioning before the hitter has even had a chance to hit the ball. If they do not, they will not make it to the base in time to receive the throw from the catcher and either the throw will not occur or it will go out into the outfield and the runner may advance another base. Alternatively, the hitter may actually hit the ball and the ball may go to an area that it is statistically likely to go, where a defender would have been but for the stolen base attempt. What was to be an out is now a hit and the runner, having a head start because of their stolen base attempt, is able to advance further than they normally would have been able to. Because the hitter hit the ball, this situation does not get recorded in the statistics as a stolen base attempt!

Baseball is really a fascinating game to think about!

AskewEgret··on Finance information on Google
If clean data and easy access is a priority and you are willing to pay money, the gold standard is CRSP [1]. Full disclosure - I work there.

[1] http://www.crsp.com/

AskewEgret··on Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago
Nanoparticles. They irritate your lungs in ways that are very similar to asbestos irritation. And of course, it's your body's reaction to the irritation that kills you.

Example: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.7b01873

AskewEgret··on Ask HN: Engineer won't approve my PR
When you are new, you should be given a lot of leeway to ask questions. So, perhaps you should set aside potential motives and use these rejections as opportunities to ask questions.

Something along the lines of: "I've worked at a lot of places, and none of them have ever done the on-boarding process perfectly. One thing I try to do is to document some of the problems encountered as well as the solutions or mitigating factors. It will definitely help me become a productive member of the existing team with the existing culture, but all future employees will benefit as well. Can you help me understand the thought process that went into this rejection, what I missed, what I did wrong, etc?"

You would hope that management recognizes the long-term benefit of such an exercise and would support you. It also places a fair burden on the rejecting engineer to explain him or herself.

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