dkurth

In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"

When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.

Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!

Sad to hear! I noticed that some are available through the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/Hexaflexagons

You often don't know which work was "10x" except in retrospect, so this advice is a little like recommending people only invest in the stocks that are going to go up.

I solved this problem by taking a photograph of my library card. To check out a book, I load the picture and hold it up to the scanner.

As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."

It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case.

Re: the age of "That's what she said":

I thumbed through The Frogs (Aristophanes) at a used book store once. This play was written circa 400 BC. In the prologue, one character is offering to entertain the audience with a few jokes, and another character says, "Yes, but not 'That's what she said.'" The joke was too over-used.

I was astounded to think that the joke was that old! But it's actually not. The old jokes of ancient Athenians were a little too obscure, I guess, so the translator picked a modern example. Still, that translation of The Frogs is from the 1950s, so the joke was old at least that far back. (Here is the translation: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.65406/2015.6540...)

We are now, but there's a little more to it. When we first got this dishwasher, we never cleaned the filters. Our previous washer didn't need that, and we didn't know better.

So it got pretty bad before we realized we needed to do that. We cleaned it very thoroughly at that point and now clean the filters at least weekly, but we still have these problems.

I admit that I'm not actually sure. We got this advice from a local appliance shop.

Thank you! Another comment recommends the same video, so I will certainly check it out.

Thank you, I will definitely watch this. We have tried pre-wash detergent, tabs, liquid soap, powder detergents, in various combinations.

There may be something unusual wrong with our dishwasher. Although we clean its filter regularly, sometimes a kind of brown slime forms along the walls and around the filter, and I have to give it a deeper cleaning. Bosch had no idea what this was! I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something like that.

Exactly. We pre-rinse the dishes, get the water running hot before starting the machine, and choose the heavy cycle. Even so, the dishwasher barely cleans our dishes. And it's a Bosch, well reviewed by Consumer Reports when we got it!

People in this thread are talking about the SpeedQueen washing machine. Is there something similar for dishwashers? I would pay good money for a dishwasher that actually cleaned my dishes. I don't even care if it's loud!

> A digital book requires the same minus actor

The digital book also requires formatting work. Depending on the type of book and the publisher's workflow, this can be simple (an export from InDesign) or very complex (a custom process for converting a non-technical author's Word documents for a cookbook with an inconsistent layout into an EPUB that renders nicely across devices).

A while back, Gmail began blocking .js file attachments, but I didn't realize until today that this means my old JavaScript file attachments would be retroactively blocked. I tracked down an email from two years ago with a JavaScript file attached that I needed, but I couldn't download it!

I was eventually able to get it by doing "Show Original" in Gmail and copy/pasting the base64-encoded attachment data and decoding it. But it made me nervous about using Gmail as a way to hang on to files, since things I attach now might not be available later.

There's a musician named Andrew Huang who sometimes makes music based on song challenges from his fans. Years ago, I asked him to write a rap song in which none of the lyrics contain the letter "e." Like the person in the article, I had read "A Void" by Georges Perec, so that's where the idea came from.

And about a day later, he posted this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-WtH4ujps

According to that boundless.com link, "The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, so carbon dating is only relevant for dating fossils less than 60,000 years old."

There's some interesting analysis of the math behind Spot It! on stackoverflow [1].

That post mentions the Fano Plane, which, incidentally, I first read about in the book How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician quoted in the article about Set that started this thread. In the book, he uses the Fano Plane to explain how to pick numbers for a specific kind of lottery.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6240113/what-are-the-math...

Right before leaving my last job, I updated an internal web-based tool to add a menu item called "Add Unicorns." It just used cornify to show unicorn images when clicked. But I also made it only show that menu item at random and somewhat rarely, so I heard that it took some people a while to notice, which was fun. To my knowledge, that change is still there!

Since Bandcamp does not have a "random song" feature, I built a page that will let you hear a randomly selected album. I have a scraper that runs nightly to pull newly added albums, although it's not perfect (e.g., I never clean up deleted albums, but that's hardly ever been a problem). I call it Randcamp: http://dx3x.com/randcamp/

I thought this was fun. If it loaded quickly enough, I can imagine spending more time playing around with it. It's not loading reliably for me right now, but I got it to work a few times.

I enjoy an element of randomness in music discovery, and this combines that with beauty, IMO.

Another possible pro (from the site-owner's perspective) is increased user engagement. When you are quietly loading more content all the time, it's easier for the user to continue to say, "I'll just look at one more post."

On the cons side, as others have mentioned, if you navigate away from an infinitely scrolling page, then click the back button, you often don't land in the correct place.

Although "refurbished" wouldn't be the right word, I took it to mean that they would print out a new one for you, having already created the 3D model.

It also helps when the bug is ultimately not your problem, so you don't have any personal stress about getting it fixed. It's just an interesting challenge. Treating your own problems in this way can be tough, though!

And the weight of the hard drive would clearly be the cause of the pigeon getting pulled down into the chimney and unable to get out.

Right -- as improbable as that sounds, it pales in comparison to the likelihood of renovating your chimney and finding a pigeon with a coded message from WWII!

I don't know if you're joking, but I would love an app like Garage Band for making 8-bit/chiptune music!

Minor nit: HTML comments go in <!-- this -->, not <-- this -->.

Fair enough, I re-read it.

I'm thinking about "perspective" -- the word suggests a relationship to something bigger. For example, when an artist draws with perspective, there is a point on the horizon toward which lines extend. Removing constraints may be a useful exercise, but removing all constraints would, in a sense, remove all perspective as well. So I think I'm looking for a perspective that's constrained by what's true, rather than one that's unconstrained.

I guess this is what I find inconsistent. There's this idea: "Until we let go of our mental images of who we are or who we should be, our vision remains clouded by expectation." But in the same paragraph, there's a notion of "self improvement." If I remove all expectations of who I should be, how can I measure my self improvement (assuming I intend to improve myself in the first place)?

There's the potential here to replace stressing out over a question like "am I a good father?" with stressing over things like "am I nothing? Am I improving? Am I myself yet?" Might this be just another "path to insanity?" Just a thought.

On the one hand, he says, "if we aren't changing for the better, then we are just slowly decaying," suggesting that there is such a thing as "better."

On the other hand, he talks about "returning to zero expectations" and being "nothing."

I conclude that Paul wants to be a better nothing. Or possibly that he is slowly decaying. I'm not sure you can be nothing and also have a standard for getting better.

Here's Peter Norvig's toy spelling corrector (in Python), along with some helpful explanation:

http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html