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adrianhowardon Give Your Metrics an Expiry Date

<nods> another of my fave things for expiry dates are regular meetings — never set them to repeat forever. Six months max. That way you have to be intentional about keeping them going & talking about their value (or not ;-)

adrianhowardon New Sublime Text update

Me too. I poke at Atom every few months — but speed + battery time are why I'm currently sticking with ST.

adrianhowardon Solving the cash problems from self-funding rapid growth

Doesn't sound like a fairytale to me.

It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business.

In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.

adrianhowardon Startups that demoed at Y Combinator W16 Demo Day 2

Having family with catheters they would have loved this / love this.

The external valves, and associated bags, are all additional causes of infection — and this would cut those out.

It's really hard to change those bags without spillage. This cuts that out.

The external pipework getting caught on things and causing pain. Solved.

You have to adjust the kind of clothing you wear so that you can have space for the catheter bag. This would cut that out.

The location of catheter bags means that people with certain kind of mobility problems can't change them themselves - this would cut that out. This one directly affects a friend of mine right now. Four times a day that have to be around somebody who is willing to change a catheter bag with them. They cannot get up at night without somebody to disconnect/reconnect the night bag.

The whole issue of not knowing how full the bladder is - this would cut that out.

Never being able to go swimming. Never being able to have a bath. Solved.

If this can be made to work well, and it's a big if I'm sure, it is a game changer and a major quality of life improver.

adrianhowardon In memory of Ed Yourdon

I'd say so. His Death March is still a very relevant read for example. IMHO anyway.

adrianhowardon Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?

This year's finished reading so far https://gist.github.com/adrianh/f6aca0e6ac3b2e9aec94

(doesn't include stuff skimmed or unfinished)

adrianhowardon Train vs. Airplane Energy Efficiency (2010)

Another factor is the energy cost of building & maintaining the infrastructure. Aiports, ATC, etc. vs stations, tracks, etc.

adrianhowardon The first photograph taken from the surface of Mars (1976)

First image of Mars ever taken from the surface of Mars — yes.

The first image from Mars (although from all accounts not actually a successful picture of the martian surface) goes to the 70 scan lines that poor old Mars-3 sent in 1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry.2C_descent.2C_lan...

adrianhowardon Polari, the Lost Gay English Dialect

More on Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

I grew up listening to recordings of "Round the Horne" in the UK, which included two characters Julian & Sandy that chatted a little in Polari during their sketches. A bunch of Polari words and phrases have migrated into general UK slang — so it's not really a case of dying out… more migrating and changing — as languages & dialects often do.

adrianhowardon Management things I learned at Imgur

""It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t."

But it is your job to figure out why you got unmotivated people.

* Is your hiring process borked?

* Is there something wrong inside your organisation that's regularly breaking motivated people?

… and so on …

adrianhowardon 30% of US Workforce Need License to Perform Their Job

I'm a licensed CSSTWP http://csstwp.com/ ;-)

adrianhowardon Convert Servers to Docker Containers

> While you lose out on some of the benefits in the short term, in the long term you get the benefit that previously hard-to-decompose monolithic legacy setups can be sliced and diced gradually until you have units that are reasonable to start rebuilding cleanly. This one of those areas where layers etc. really are quite useful.

So. Much. This.

I work with very view greenfield projects. I work with a lot of existing, complicated, annoying monolithic architectures. Approaches that let me start refactoring those into something vaguely sane are a godsend.

adrianhowardon Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome

Because http://www.xkcd.com/1526/ made me look it up…

adrianhowardon Ask HN: Do you still purchase physical books?

Yes. But a lot fewer than I used to. Mostly because of space issues (I have about 40 years worth of books hanging around. Last time I moved I bottomed out the suspension of the moving van with the weight ;-).

These days I tend to get physical books when:

* They're significantly better "things". I have some lovely books that are lovely objects in of themselves. Well typeset, bound well, quality paper, folios, etc. For example my hardcover of "The Timeless Way Of Building" is a beautiful object — as well as a wonderful book. I like having beautiful objects around me.

* When the format doesn't work as an e-book. For example Stephen Cole's "The Geometry of Type" would be completely useless to me as an ebook. As would most of my books on photography art and architecture. They're not just lumps of text that can be trivially reflowed. This is something that might change if we get some really high-quality A3 portable ebook reader type things in the future.

* When I can't get them as an ebook. There is still a stupid about of immensely useful content out there that you cannot get in ebook format. For example I'm currently finishing up a re-read of Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World". Which you cannot get as an ebook.

That said — my default for fiction/reference purchases tends to be ebooks now. With occasional upgrades to paper books if they're something I really liked and I can get a "nice" physical edition.

adrianhowardon Antimarket opportunities

"What's the motivation to work on a potentially big idea rather than something you personally find great interest in"

The two aren't contradictory. All the academic folk I know work on ideas that they find interesting. And some of those things are big ideas.

The difference is that there isn't a short-term economic benefit attached to the vast majority of those ideas.

adrianhowardon Ask HN: What are your personal backup / sync strategies?

No. But I only keep the last four months.

adrianhowardon Ask HN: What are your personal backup / sync strategies?

For our "internal" stuff:

* Monthly whole drive snapshots to an external HD

* Daily Time Machine backups to an external HD

* Everything backed up continually with CrashPlan

* All work stuff synced continuously in DropBox

* Monthly restore-a-random-file test to sanity check

adrianhowardon Can life exist on a planet without a star?

Not quite that scenario (ice encased planet orbiting a sun) but close in this rather nice SF short "That Other Sea" http://escapepod.org/2014/01/31/ep433-sea/

adrianhowardon $1B TSA Behavioral Screening Program Slammed as Ineffective Junk Science

This happened pre-TSA and pre-body scanners too.

Literally every time I went UK->US 1996 to 2010 I got "randomly" selected by some/all of immigration, security, and customs. I can only assume I looked/behaved dodgy in some way, was on some kind of list, or was just darn unlucky!

Incidents within the EU. Zero.

I've only just got the point where I've stopped scheduling a couple of extra hours of security-slack into my travel schedule ;-)

adrianhowardon $1B TSA Behavioral Screening Program Slammed as Ineffective Junk Science

I'm just glad that I seem to have passed through whatever set of factors that caused me to be "randomly" selected every time I entered the US for years on end.

adrianhowardon Queen Elizabeth's death will be the most disruptive UK event in 70 years

Rain? Never.

Light dusting of snow on the other hand… ;-)

adrianhowardon Queen Elizabeth's death will be the most disruptive UK event in 70 years

"For at least 12 days — between her passing, the funeral and beyond — Britain will grind to a halt"

This is just nonsense.

No it won't. It didn't for the Queen Mother. It didn't for Diana. It won't for the queen. While the majority of the UK is largely pro-royal, it's not stupid about it. And a hefty chunk of us (around 20%) are pro-dumping the royals.

We'll just carry. on. It's the British thing to do ;-)

adrianhowardon Inside GOV.UK: chaos and nightmare as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt web

"Some stuff is much better and some stuff is much worse, as people have said in other comments."

Agreed. And GDS are also very public about what does work and what doesn't work via their service assessments and self certifications https://gdsdata.blog.gov.uk/all-service-assessments-and-self...

See, for example, the rather damning report on the VATMOSS service https://gdsdata.blog.gov.uk/vat-mini-one-stop-shop-service-a...

This is leagues ahead of the previous approaches to developing governmental services. Like you I'd happily take gov.uk over DWP or the NHS PfIT. Even their failures are handled more productively.

adrianhowardon Inside GOV.UK: chaos and nightmare as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt web

"NIH syndrome runs deep in GDS. They commissioned their own typeface [1] with tax payer's funds and then refused to make it available to the public."

Erm. Not true. GDS did not commission Transport or New Transport.

Transport is a font from the 50s. New Transport is a refined digital version of that from Calvert and Kubel. GDS didn't commission it or cause it to be created in any way. They were just the first web site to use it.

adrianhowardon How Likely Is It That Birth Control Could Let You Down?

Since I know of two people it failed on (one got pregnant, one caught it and had a second op) - it sounds right to me.

adrianhowardon Straighter Teeth by Mail

Define 'crooked" ;) I certainly see kids in the EU with teeth that would be "corrected" in the US. I get the impression that the aesthetics vs clinical need / risk line is drawn differently.

adrianhowardon Straighter Teeth by Mail

Something I've chatted to about with fellow UK folk occasionally (insert joke about "English teeth" here) is how, from our perspective some USA folk's teeth seem to cross the uncanny valley in the wrong direction.

They're so white and so even they look false to our eyes.

adrianhowardon Ask HN: How do you read HN without “mark as read” extension?

I just read it once a day — because I have shit to do. So revisiting old stories is rarely a problem.

adrianhowardon UK government 'most transparent' in the world

The phrase "damned with faint praise" comes to mind…

adrianhowardon Lessons learned from the big rewrite

For those who've not already come across it I would thoroughly recommend folk taking a gander at Michael Feathers book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" on this topic.

Lots of solid advice and patterns for approaching thing sort of thing.