driscoll42

NCEES which administrates the regulation of Professional Engineers in the US made a Software Engineering Exam which had some standards: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Software-Engine... However so few people took the test they discontinued it. But I at least liked the idea of it.

Is it healthy? At one point the team was funded enough to create the api, and now it can only maintain it. What if it was never funded enough to create the api in the first place? I realize there's a risk of building complexity, but don't mistake "healthiness" for "inability".

Best way to file taxes. I'll usually do this and one or two of the more expensive services just to make sure my numbers line up, and then file with FreeTaxUSA.

It would be mildly useful to get alerts when a load is done. I know I've forgotten about laundry in the washer for a while that I wouldn't have minded a notification on my phone that it was done. Or if some maintenance needed to be done, a reminder. Or one could schedule usage during certain hours to minimize energy usage.

But these are not super important use cases.

There was a good discussion here on Hacker News about a study from the Federal Reserve related to this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34492502

The general education requirement is one of the single most important things that universities demand. A well rounded, liberal arts education is crucial to making sure people who come out don't just come out with a hyper specialized knowledge and know nothing else of the world. I agree that it could be taught better, in fact there should be more gen ed reqs added, not fewer.

For Chicago specifically, there are two solutions I can offer:

1. Chicago Engineering Tech Communities and Organizations - https://github.com/driscoll42/chicago-engineering-and-tech-c... 2. Chicago Tech Community Events - https://chitechcommunityevents.softr.app/

The first is a list of all the tech/engineering orgs in Chicago I maintain. Many are still on meetup, but not all. Unfortunately there's not one calendar to find everything. The second is an attempt to make a calendar of Chicago tech events, but it's not perfect. I don't run it but I highly recommend it.

I do recommend joining local community slacks/Discords. There's a good one for slacks here (https://github.com/thisdot/tech-community-slacks), e.g. for Chicago there's the Chicago Tech Slack (https://join.slack.com/t/chicago-tech/shared_invite/zt-1cb3m...), but you'll need to explore around.

I recall a story I once read about an elderly woman showing her family videos from her trip to the Grand Canyon decades before. You could hear her shooing her family out of the video so she could get a good view of the Grand Canyon, and afterwards she just wished she had more video of her family, not of a landmark. There are innumerable photos of most of these places, only a few of family and friends.

There's a significant difference between buying something and reselling, and then having bots buying hundreds/thousands and reselling.

No, even in comparison to the times. The Casablanca-class escort carrier were 8,200 tons and could go 19 knots compared to the Essex-class carriers at 30,800 tons and 33 knots. the US made 122 of the slow, small carriers, only 24 of the bigger ones (with others in between, and then one bigger, i.e. Midway, which never saw service in the war)

Can't edit my post but the ReadMe has been updated! Looks great now.

I opened an Issue on the Repo for it!

Agreed, this repo is in desperate need of a few screenshots/video on the ReadMe to showcase what it looks like.

I got Atmos with my new Soundbar, a Samsung Q990C, which admittedly was not cheap, but with Atmos it really does work well. It sounds like thunder is above me, planes flying above, with the sound bouncing off the ceiling. I was quite impressed.

Each article has been posted to Hacker News a few times before, worth going back and looking at the discussion. But really I love this blog, fantastic set of articles. I'm quite looking forward to the Vita and 3DS articles.

For anyone that is on a rewatch and never read through them. The Lurker's Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html) for the show is a wonderful companion. The Fandom wiki doesn't have nearly the detail this site from when the show came out (and still getting updated) has. Wonderful behind the scenes quotes from AOL chatrooms, how episodes link to an the overarching plot, and other trivia

Can someone elaborate why Mozilla gets hate? I don't pay much attention to that and just use Firefox.

I think you mean this blog? https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , it's been shared a number of times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=justinobeirne.com here with this one being the most popular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 , though that's six years old. Still well worth reading

To be a bit more fair to the Chicago Field Museum, the base ticket price is $30 for out-of-state adults, only more if you want access to one of the extra ticketed experiences, which are nice, but you can kill a full day on just the base ticket and have a great time. Ticket prices are also cheaper for Illinois and even cheaper for Chicago residents.

What is particularly lousy about Plex as a product? Overall I'm quite satisfied with it, it's gotten better over the past few years noticeably I felt with the downloads actually working, collections, more suggestions, etc... I will say the genre filter for movies/shows is quite useless though.

$10-$20 per query? Can I get some sourcing on that? That's astronomically expensive.

It depends on your setup and use cases. There's three major considerations:

* What language are you trying to OCR? And only language or also things like math symbols? * Do you have a GPU or not? * Are you trying to OCR handwriting or typed words?

I explored OCRing English documents from the 1960s that were primarily typed, though some handwriting. I tried out PaddleOCR, TrOCR, Tesseract, EasyOCR, and kerasOCR for FOSS, and then Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for paid.

To be clear, the paid solutions beat the FOSs ones handsdown, no question. However for FOSS I found that TrOCR was the best for both typed and handwritten, however for typed, it was closely followed by tesseract, but for handwriting TrOCR was by far the best with all the others basically being worthless. However, TrOCR took ~200x longer even on GPU than Tesseract on CPU (Tesseract if fastttt, even more if you parallalerize it). Tesseract isn't the best, but it's the best all around, it's the one the Internet Archive uses.

Need to write up a blog on this. And the docTR looks interesting, I'm going to check that out.

There's only 1.9 million samples in their database, and to be fair, the people who go to that site to test their fingerprint, are probably the kind of user who is going to have a unique fingerprint, notsomuch a common user. So a common user going there is likely a bit unique.

I'm in Business School and took a class in Finance. In a lecture the professor presented what to do if a company has too much cash, the options where:

1. Invest in positive NPV projects 2. Store some for a rainy day 3/4. Pay divdends or stock buybacks

Only after did I think "You know, what about lowering prices or paying employees, these options are soley about shareholders". But... yes, managers are taught to think about increasing shareholder wealth above all.

You're right, Google showed $125k from other articles and some looking at this earlier (a year or so ago) and $125k sounded right. I guess they doubled it!

Costs about $250k per person - https://oceangateexpeditions.com/tour/titanic-expedition/ (Site looks to be down at the moment, probably overloaded due to people searching after this news). I don't think it's particularly crowded, but certainly could become one day in theory.

Cached Link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bwPF96...

Rotarians are... older, and often not good with tech. I've been a de facto tech support of mine a few times. They really would see some good overall growth if they invested in that some more.

I don't think Rotary globally is facing an existential crisis, but it is in the US. It is very popular abroad but has been dying out in the USA.

I'm a member of my local Rotary, the one I'm part of does a lot of good work around the city. I'm also part of a non-profit, the Chicago Engineers' Foundation (https://www.chicagoengineersfoundation.org/) that I get a lot of value and connections out of. Also a city club to meet other professionals and chat.

But my main was going back to school to get a MBA, met a ton of people that way.

What you want is called a "third place", which has sadly died out in many ways recently. A great way to just meet people from different backgrounds with different interests.

Interesting. I tried easyOCR, I found on handwriting it was about 35%, on typed it was 95.7%, so not bad at all with typed, but for handwriting pretty bad. I focused on Tesseract and TrOCR since it wasn't working out that well, still could easily have just been my particular use case.

I also tested paddleocr and keras ocr to round them all out.

At some point I really need to finish my project enough to write up some blog articles and post a bunch of code repos for others to use.

This was a couple months ago now, so not that long ago. For OCR I have found that it highly depends on the type of image you are looking at. In my case these were all scanned documents of good but not great scan quality, all in English. I expect if you were talking about random photos with text in them, you'd see the FOSS solutions do much worse, and much more variance in the Google vs Amazon vs Azure. I would be curious about the academic deep learning one you tried.