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chrisbrandow

1,061 karma · joined August 15, 2012

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chrisbrandow··on Apple squandered the Holy Grail
the example he gave was multiline with variables. That's somewhat different than what search engines do.

Also, it's almost exactly what Solver has done for years.

chrisbrandow··on University of Alabama Engineer Pioneers New Process for Recycling Plastics
It is just the press release. There’s a submission to ACS that looks completely valid.
chrisbrandow··on Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk
I'm not sure it's equivalent to building a mental map of a 3D space. It certainly might be, but I can also imagine that it might have key differences.
chrisbrandow··on Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk
The correlation alone provides evidence of something worth pursuing and understanding.

They do have some possible causation when considering hippocampus development observed in taxi drivers in other studies.

chrisbrandow··on Bird flu kills more than half the big cats at a Washington sanctuary
I hear people saying this, but at the same time, I feel like I read about bird flu almost daily in stories that involve scientists and researchers, so I’m not sure who is ignoring it or what we should be doing differently.
chrisbrandow··on The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X (2012)
You can actually find some NX stuff in active headers as well
chrisbrandow··on Tsunami Warning for Northern California
typically, yes. Tsunamis are usually unnoticeable away from the shore. They aren't like a massive, traveling, cresting wave. They are usually a pulse of high energy that can move a lot of water just a few feet, which can be devastating when it reaches the shore because it is relentless as it moves up to that height.
chrisbrandow··on The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright
I’m so freaking sick of tall cars/trucks with LED beams that are so bright.
chrisbrandow··on California teacher dies from suspected rabid bat bite
I remember when I briefly lived in WV, we had a bat in our house and after knocking it down with a pillow, I needed to remove it, and i was WAY too much of a scaredy-cat to remotely touch it bare-handed. I came up with an elaborate procedure with an upside down bowl, took it outside and ran away as soon as I freed it.

Glad to see my hilariously overweight instincts validated.

chrisbrandow··on Watch Out for Counterintuitive Implicit Actor-Isolation
Harder and harder to use swift to just build apps without getting caught up in some detailed computer science concepts.
chrisbrandow··on Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles
Not sure if it's remotely correct, but I immediately thought of Bone Tomahawk. <shudders>
chrisbrandow··on Ask HN: Why isn't having two or three careers the norm?
At any given point people are more likely to offer you more $$ for accumulated skills rather than pay you while you learn those new skills.
chrisbrandow··on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
Her main point was absolutely defensible. Making embarrassingly false statements should never have gotten past the editors of a scientific publication.

Honestly, just to protect the author who clearly did not have the background to be expected to get that statement entirely correct, which is truly fine. But not fine for the publication.

chrisbrandow··on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
all of the "Trust/Believe X" statements would be profoundly improved by substituting "Take X seriously". It makes the same point without posing the obvious problems with trust and believe
chrisbrandow··on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
only a problem when it leads to publishing obviously false statements and never correcting them, such as the "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured".
chrisbrandow··on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
I remember when that article wildly mis-describing the normal distribution came out and I was so sad. It was just so embarrassing. The author was in no way qualified, yet the burden rests on the editors of a publication with the reputation to catch this incredible incorrect statement to come out.

I usually think woke/antiwoke complaints go too far, but that was such a failure.

chrisbrandow··on Tickets Are for Remembering
When my grandmother died, she had a little box of programs, a couple letters, and a few little clippings of newspaper items. It was such a special thing to discover. I can’t rule out that digitizing everything makes such moments impossible, particularly with photo albums, but there is memory contained in physical objects that is not the same as just taking some time to remember.
chrisbrandow··on Minnesota map to find out if your home's drinking water comes through lead pipe
a water test is the only reliable way to know if the lead pipe to your house is a problem. typically they get coated internally, and barring water acidity levels a la Flint, there is no leaching.

But either way, testing the water itself will give you the real story.

chrisbrandow··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
frustrating. I have sympathy for them, b/c it is actually a catch-22. one rogue prescribed burn can cost millions and millions.

meanwhile forests keep burning in unplanned ways.

chrisbrandow··on 300 people applied to rent $700/month sleeping pods in downtown San Francisco
Make boarding houses legal again!!
chrisbrandow··on Apple acquires Pixelmator
Even if there’s a risk of a “Dark sky” outcome, I’m still happy, because I figured that Pixelmator was at long term risk of getting squeezed in the photo-editing market. It’s just tough for indie devs playing with the big boys.
chrisbrandow··on NandGame – Build a computer from scratch
yeah, there's something missing in the instructions regarding the first Nand gate. I understand how a NAND Gate is constructed but I can't figure out how to combine the outputs of the two relays in this tool
chrisbrandow··on PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
for a $500 plane ticket and a 4 hour drive, seems like someone has surely gone there by now, just to ground-truth this. Otherwise, seems like a fun (with plenty of risks, obvs) way of being "the first" to lay eyes on this.
chrisbrandow··on We Can Terraform the American West
It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.
chrisbrandow··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
There’s just so much guesswork with these as interview questions. The number of different problem spaces is non-trivial, and understanding the nature of the problem space for use in work is quite different from being able to work out a problem in 30 minutes in front of other people often in a code editor that is unfamiliar.

We lack an agreed upon, specific way to evaluate someone’s talent in 30-90 minutes. LC problems are not a terribly efficient way to fix this.

chrisbrandow··on How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
I like this idea, but I wonder if the people (like me) most likely to benefit from this idea are precisely the people that would turn the holding pen into an undifferentiated trash bin in the same way that any empty surface gets filled over time.
chrisbrandow··on No Salt
Beautiful
chrisbrandow··on Smith Premier 1 Typewriter
That is pretty
chrisbrandow··on Zen 5's 2-ahead branch predictor: how a 30 year old idea allows for new tricks
A post-doc in my chemistry lab had the saying, “two weeks in the lab will save you a day in the library”
chrisbrandow··on Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs
Any idea how long is this rollout going to be? I still don't have access to it. (not that you're in charge of the rollout pace)
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