chaffneue

I grew up loving my visits to Radio Shack for hobby electronics when I was a kid. It seemed like a place that would be a straight up dream job. Eventually, I worked at a Radio Shack up in Canada to pay for University and I felt the pain of this stupid competition with your coworkers to make $1 more in pay day to day only to have someone return some high commission item days later and put you on the shit list again. If the commission went into negative territory where I live, they still had to pay minimum wage. Commissions were just a bonus and usually only available during Christmas when the malls are busy. I usually went for the "spiffs," which were some kind of payout based on selling special/discontinued goods and often paid better than having to stretch to a 2000-3000 revenue day. Ahh retail. Don't miss it.

This might be something to build an awesome community around. Giving users way to add more than just comments: stuff like a way for the public to do more than suggest products - add them to a pool of incumbents that others can talk about immediately, a way to discuss personal experiences, ratings, photographic examples of products after x years of use - examples of failures after x time stuff like that.

I'd love to see a 100 year old Lodge pan or a pair of those keen sandals after 3 years :) Obviously clothes and cast iron posts have significantly different lives.

Anyone reminded of those pandemonium toys in the 90s? like a pendulum stick man sort of thing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87HvVqa4t7k&t=30s

Out of curiosity, how did you handle the mobile web with this project? With my pet project, Streeme, I had non-stop issues with the music streaming stopping on lock screens. The root cause was javascript not triggering the next track unless you unlock the device. I also found that formats/codecs could be problematic between mobile devices and different software stacks (mobile firefox, chrome, safari). Is there some alternative interface for this nowadays that doesn't need javascript? Have they settled on a common codec yet? I got pretty fed up with iOS fundamentally changing Safari's HTML5 Audio behaviors with every OS overhaul as it was my main listening device on the bus and at work. Even though it still works on the desktop, mobile clients really killed my passion for trying to make a web based media player.

I really like that my phone has replaced my watch.

No disgusting strap, no having to take it off to code, no watch tan, no stupid thing on my arm to fiddle with and besides, the really important thing is I really don't need to know the time most of the day (the same applies for tweets, sms messages, missed/incoming calls, the latest in game ads I forgot to disable and google chat pings) Smart or dumb, a wrist mounted realtime information monitoring device is kind of the last thing I want from technology.

Sad thing is.. they're going to be mandatory to own in order to live in cultured programmer society in 3 years. So, I hope they at least make them as nice as my old Nixons that are now sitting at the farthest back corner of my dresser.

On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site.

The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.

I remember a tenor sax hanging off my neck was enough work let alone having its entire hard case attached :) It seems, to me, the best solution for all of these issues is just to rent a practice space and go play until your cheeks and lips fall off. I am pretty amazed with how the trumpet output sounds through that Yamaha mute, though - it looks like you could even circuit bend that gadget to do some nasty things to a trumpet's tone.

I have an 11" Macbook Air from 2011 and it's been great. Went from snow leopard all the way to mavericks without a hitch. Use it mostly for web coding stacks have been Java, Python, Scala, PHP and the occasional Photoshop/Xcode. The only environment I have a hard time with was Scala just because the compiler is a bit of a beast, especially when getting a project up and running with SBT where a new artifact could be added every day or two. I ended up offloading Scala compiles to my home PC, but you could probably get a cheap VPS for the same effect. Great little machine, make sure to only use homebrew or your own source compiles and never trust the Apple shipped packages. Also go with the most storage you can afford - it's annoying to run out.

Are you using adblock plus by any chance? I had to switch to adblock to fix that on ars a while back.

And it's not even good or recommended as a cache at any kind of profile. So I guess their most valuable niche is low traffic/prototype sites with poor architecture discipline or genuinely unrelated data sets. There are so much better tools for caching (memcached/redis), durable persistent storage (postgres), session storage (memcached/redis/browser hybrids) and document storage (postgres). Mongo is just one of those brands that quickly solved a problem that most of the better technologies missed - the user interface.

Haha! good point!

This article is just purple prose nonsense that takes advantage of their audience's natural distrust of information that surrounds the human mind (see the author's reference to multiple benign conditions to discredit the work) and the author's own hang up about some sad end where "human beings are individuated, sick, and alone." From pioneers like Freud to the modern psychoanalysis spectra we have today, I see much of the body of work around human mental states being about classification/categorization, statistical aggregation, symptom/diagnosis tracking and vocabulary. The article is more or less reading a collection of codified medical anomalies and then attributing a singular, malevolent narrative tone to it instead of just reading it for what it is: a standardized professional manual with a strict written style and many collaborators. There's no narration let alone an "unreliable" narrator, there's minimal subjectivity, there are no actors, there's just some observational information presented in a standard way. While I'm aware the DSM has its critics and naff list of non-disorders, I don't believe that committing to basic research and presenting objective findings is a madness that itself belongs in the DSM. What if the goal to this manual is altruistic? What if even one patient benefits from a faster recovery from some mental malaise because of this manual? I'm inclined to say keep researching!

I work in an office with a bunch of broken Mirras that have all failed by the plastic shearing off near the shoulder mount point. I wonder if they fixed that bug in the refresh - Might even consider picking one up for home. That said, I still find HM's cloth lined chairs (Aerons and Embody) more comfy than the half poly ones.

Wow - another great example of a young craftsman doing amazing work. That workshop looks like a great creative space. I have plans to extend the pinstriping site concept to wall dogs and sign writers next. Seems like the disciplines have a lot of overlap. I think I've even used a few of the brushes and paint brands in that video :)

I'm one of those people that answers this question, "absolutely not!" Even though it's not in the news or on everyone's Facebook timeline, there are amazing craftsmen still roaming the earth and passing their craft down to beginners. My evidence? I run a website that's dedicated to a traditional art called Pinstriping http://www.pinheadlounge.com/ . Even though the legendary masters may not be directly connected to the site, you can clearly see their influences on the craft. I think it's careless to assume just because someone isn't tweeting their entire life or making huge waves, that they're not training the next apprentice. A lot of this work has always been a little behind the scenes, offline and a definitely has its share of trade secrets. I see many young people on this site doing killer work and this is only one, tiny sampling of the niche.

Take one of the most well regarded users on the site and an aging craftsman (almost 40 years of experience):

http://www.pinheadlounge.com/photos/0/644/12032/lg_DSC02868....

And compare it with a upcoming novice, who's just doing killer work (and is a woman, I might add):

http://www.pinheadlounge.com/photos/2000/2793/170630/lg_1233...

I've also worked with metal smiths, letterheads, prepress/letterpress/typesetting/lead pros, hot rod enthusiasts and all kinds of other "lost arts" that are readily being passed to anyone who wants to learn.

There's still demand and still a market for this stuff even among younger people (I'm fascinated by it and I'm in my 30s) and it's not going to be digital any time soon.

It's quite a pretty site, but the home page loads very slowly on my quad core I5. Something about this page is hanging up the dom onload event pretty significantly - Network tab showing about 7 seconds. Got a screenshot of the network tab here: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3769/9399721127_a63086e535_o.j...

Luckily the api docs and tutorials are unaffected and load quite quickly.

I like the concept. White layout with bigger, more readable blocks and less wasted space above the fold, but some of the fun they had with the footer and javascript on the page should probably be dropped to make the page load a bit smoother and yeah mobile has definitely not been considered or tested against. I also wonder if these pages are completely dynamic as they seem to load very slowly even in a logged out state.

Side by side speed comparison:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2859/9133368868_54f4a8cabb_h.j...

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3700/9131157097_923af39b1b_h.j...

Iphone rendering:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7402/9133398088_4cd5d18661_b.j...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7288/9131186519_b00acc38a0_b.j...

I feel a betrayed, too. I really don't understand why the plan went up in price and has less features. I have the attitude that I want to store (indefinitely), search and link my photos without being visually distracted with ads or pagination limits. In 7 years of using Flickr, I've only uploaded about 30GB of photos mostly just for archival use. Only a small group of Flickr users curate more than 20k photos. Most of the high interestingness (and ostensibly talented) Flickr members store less than 5000 photos and in very small file weights so their photos aren't reproduced in print. So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions. I can't see myself paying more for Flickr without some kind of incentive. Hopefully they don't kill off their fairly loyal subscriber base, but stranger things have happened.

Really all I feel we need to regulate is the blatent keyword/SEO spam and link bait from various online publications. Other than that, I find most of the content on HN hasn't changed all that much from a couple years back when I started reading. There's already a flag button on the interface, but perhaps some kind of spam score or feedback system would help the community point out misleading articles and marketing efforts. I don't know if registered users in the community are the ones from which to demand karma unless they're known to post such links repeatedly.

Same problem here. Seems to happen when you're in a logged out state. Wonder how QA missed this. Maybe we can help out, go star this issue in the Chromium bug tracker in case it affects the FOSS edition as well. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84679&...

This project is awesome mostly because you can see blogspam and linkbait immediately. There are some glitches of articles with no screenshots and the borders on images are HUGE. The github link really should open a new window as the socket connection can take a bit of time when you click back. A link to flag a post and endless scrolling/more would be great. I've used it for a few hours and I'm relieved it gets around the expired or missing link bug that HN suffers from.

I'm excited about the digitzation project, but the search experience is so poor that it's difficult and cumbersome to locate any actually digitized work. Some of the digitized documents appear to be broken - like this one http://new.alberteinstein.info/vufind1/Record/EAR000016939. Those that you do find are virtually impossible to read, because they aren't actually transcriptions, they're relatively low-res image scans of his manuscripts. http://new.alberteinstein.info/vufind1/Digital/EAR000000025#... - then there's access wall pdfs embedded in some of the DB entries https://sec2.einstein.caltech.edu/CookieAuth.dll?GetLogon?cu... What a mess. I can only hope they make it much better in future revs.

Agreed. I run an open source project and would love to make an iPhone app, but it's an out of pocket expense that I can't justify. It's a shame and I'm sure it's a pain other open source projects feel. I really hope they don't go fully down that path for OSX. Maybe an alternative would be a free software key, or something just to help collaboration and improve the social coding aspect. They could even corral the apps in a different way to lower the QA stakes, so our free spirited hacker lifestyle doesn't have to mess with Apple's mojo.

Not to mention smart meters - those new radio based power meters that contact the utility to digitally report electrical usage. Our electrical utility is poised to install them in BC and publications are dirtying the water with paranoia like this: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/08/09/SmartMeterSkeptic/ and http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110808/bc...

Paranoia like this from the original WHO doc http://www.magdahavas.com/2010/12/02/are-smart-meters-safe/

and then there's whole orgs worried they're gonna get cancer http://stopsmartmeters.org/2011/08/11/smart-meters-not-green...

One random dude handed me a pamphlet about stopping the smart meters, citing that it was 10 feet from his head when he slept and that he'd have to find a new home if they actually install it.

I feel like I'm watching people make themselves crazy with panic over something that has little science to back it up.

It's a fun guide, but a couple of things irk me. Bending the leads out is a serious no-no - makes it very hard to desolder the component. if there are a lot of components, it' better to solder them in by height, so you can allow tricky parts like diodes, resistors and inductors to rest face down on the table/workstation pad. I think that the things sticking out of ics and semiconductors are usually "pins" not leads. Banging a board on the table can chip the board or get you burned by molten metal... it's better for the entire job to clean the pads of solder with a vacuum tool or desolder braid. Holding your hand over the excess while side cutting is going to hurt and having slivers of tin, copper, nickel and lead in your palm ain't worth it. They should have also had a little aside about wattage as starting with a 45 watt pencil iron is going to suck.

I lay my styles out in 1 file and I don't often comment them. Stylesheets cascade to much to pin them to a specific area of use - it's easier to debug them by clever naming still - sigh. IE specific files loaded after and only contain 1 or two tricky IE tweaks. Javascript /Jquery plugins sometimes come with their own stylesheets, and in those cases I'll leave them where I found them. For some of the bigger sites with very different looks and feels, I'll often have a boilerplate (reset to skeleton level) and each page or section will load in their own stylesheet. Just depends how big the site is.

Order is: * Reset (only for early IE )-http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/ I find myself using it less and less

* Global Styles - HTML tags - global font faces

* Clearfix - http://www.webtoolkit.info/css-clearfix.html

* Skeleton/Structural Styles - grids/divs/columns

* Headers/footers/persistent styles

* Page specific styles and IDs

* Conditionally load IE Styles if they're required

* load javascript plugin css with the plugin's preferred dir if possible

As for pipelining them, I usually just use a gzipped connection and still serve them individually, since internal image paths for backgrounds rely on the CSS path. CSS caches very nicely, so take advantage of it on the HTTP side.

example: http://code.google.com/p/streeme/source/browse/trunk/web/css...

A scaled up aerial photo of the blown out building #3 now the smoke has cleared.

http://gigazine.jp/img/2011/03/14/fukushima_daiichi_3rd/Capt...

NHK is saying it's another blast like Fukushima Daiichi #1 on Saturday/Sunday - Hydrogen collecting in the reactor building because of the fuel cladding burning and then being vented with the steam to reduce pressure.. according to the authorities so far, the reactor containment was undamaged and workers in the area are to remain indoors.

Video Here: http://my.firedoglake.com/scarecrow/2011/03/13/japan-nuclear...

I think there's a few huge positives about using a framework that outweight the cons. He's right about singletons and other anti-pattern oversights and he's right about bloat and performance hits over inline mysql_query(), but here are the reasons I won't be going back to php direct for any project I expect to scale.

* My home rolled framework has no docs. I will have no idea what my mindset was 3 years from now and I'll have nothing to look up but a few one liner method descriptions. No thanks.

* As Cal Henderson said in his I hate Django talk, 90% of the framework is right and speedy to develop on - hacking around the stuff that's wrong takes time, but few people even get there in their projects.

* PHP sucks (You're still okay, php). PHP's docs suck. Save yourself the time and pain of learning poor functional design tips on php.net, almost any framework now will help you to separate concerns of your project. Best practices are not PHP's strong point - Have a look at almost any web designer's "well made" code and you'll see that PHP simply doesn't teach SoC.

* You usually get XSS, SQL injection and CSRF protection in a framework. nuff said.

* Unless database mapping is what you know and do for a living, the database abstraction layer that you build will not be as good as the ones that already exist. It's a rule.

I used to be a stubborn framework hater, but after using a framework for a few projects, I'll never be back unless there's some impossible performance or disk space consideration. Pick one and learn to love it.