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ghubbard

474 karma · joined November 8, 2012

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ghubbard··on Show HN: Easy intro book to Clojure and immutability
I stopped reading because the letters kept "unlocking" and rotating in an annoying way. There are other less user-hostile Clojure guides.
ghubbard··on Radiation-hardened quine (2014)
This quine is covered briefly in Yusuke Endoh's talk from RubyConf 2017 https://youtu.be/6K7EmeptEHo?t=1500

The whole talk is awesome if you're interested in this kind of thing in Ruby.

ghubbard··on Self-solving Rubik's Cube
Unless you scramble the cube using more than 20 moves. http://www.cube20.org/
ghubbard··on Why a Typical Home Solar Setup Does Not Work with the Grid Down
Great article, lots of technical details. A simple answer to the 'Why' can be found in the middle under the 'Off Grid Without Batteries' headline.

> If you have a typical grid tied system (microinverters or normal string inverters, so easily 95+% of installed rooftop solar), the system is technically incapable of running off grid (without additional hardware). There's no waveform to sync with,

ghubbard··on Twenty years of speedcubing (2003)
Why is this tagged as 2003?
ghubbard··on The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work [Infographic]
That hourglass is really annoying.

It does have a hide button, but you have to click the hourglass first, something that years of annoying ads have trained me NOT to do.

ghubbard··on Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016)
And where in that book are the references to an actual study?

PROTIP: Books are often filled with creative writing.

ghubbard··on Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016)
While a nice story, I have been unable to find any citations that would indicate that this was ever an actual study.
ghubbard··on An answer to the “Sell Me This Pen” interview challange
> Actually. You know what? Just this week I shipped ten new boxes of these pens to Elon Musk’s office.

An example of sales people having no issue with casually slipping in outright lies?

ghubbard··on A list of practical projects that anyone can solve in any programming language
There's also http://exercism.io/ where you can solve problems and get/give feedback on the solutions.

The platform is all open source on Github.

ghubbard··on Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
If you want to teach without leaving the house or standing in front of a group of people, try http://exercism.io/ (Open Source and free).

Solve simple coding problems, review the submissions of others and help them become better coders. Trying to clearly explain concepts to others is the best way to make sure you really know them yourself.

This is also something that you can do for 10-15 min every day, which will add up over time. Ask for feedback on your own solutions and find out ways others think you could improve things.

ghubbard··on Images and video showing extent of Oroville dam damage
Juan Browne has a good series of video blogs about what is/has been going on at the Oroville dam.

In this video from 1st March he visits the site and surrounding areas and talks with some of the engineers working on the project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ

ghubbard··on Images and video showing extent of Oroville dam damage
The videos these clips are taken from can be found on the California Department of Water Resources YouTube page:

https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos

ghubbard··on Introducing Netflix Stethoscope
This was probably supposed to be a comment on the Anagram article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196
ghubbard··on Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
(2009)

Some discussion from the first time around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667801

Actual article title: On Influenza A (H1N1)

HN clickbait version: On Influenza a (H1N1): How many bits does it take to kill a human?

ghubbard··on Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
IWantSandy - An email-based automated personal assistant.
ghubbard··on Why Write in English?
Is the initial comment

"It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages."

missing a 'not'?

ghubbard··on Exploding offers are bullshit
What about offering an 'early signing bonus' which pays you $x if you sign quickly?
ghubbard··on 1.7 petabytes and 850M files lost, and how we survived it
Current HN Title: 1.7 petabytes and 850M files lost, and how we survived it.

Article title: The largest unplanned outage in years and how we survived it

Article overview: A month ago CSC's high-performance computing services suffered the largest unplanned outage in years. In total approximately 1.7 petabytes and 850 million files were recovered.

Although technically correct, the HN title is misleading.

ghubbard··on Show HN: Live streaming SVG plot microservice that just works
> I am very excited about pushing it to the limits!

Looks like you found them.

ghubbard··on Marvin Minsky: What makes mathematics hard to learn? (2008)
There is a popular [citation needed] children's song called Inchworm[0] that has a chorus that lists powers of two.

    Two and two are four
    Four and four are eight
    Eight and eight are sixteen
    Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two 
Everyone familiar with this song would know that 16 and 16 are 32.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchworm_%28song%29

ghubbard··on Show HN: An Interactive Audio Lesson About the Shape of the Universe
Is there any way to pause?
ghubbard··on Pipe Organ desk
Can anyone reccommend any resources for learning about pnumatic memory?

I tried googling various combinations of (pneumatic|air) (logic|memory|circuts) without much luck.

I'm familiar with how logic / electronic circuts work, but I'm interested in the magic required to make it work with air/fluids.

ghubbard··on A sheet of spider silk nearly half a mile long covers a field near Memphis
The question I had, "Why would someone want to make a half mile long sheet of spider silk and put it in a field outside Memphis?" is also answered by the original headline.
ghubbard··on A sheet of spider silk nearly half a mile long covers a field near Memphis
The article headline is: "Millions of Baby Spiders Create Giant Silken Blanket"

tldr; Baby spiders do what they do. Spiderwebs enuse.

ghubbard··on Show HN: Commandcar – a CLI tool that can easily communicate with any API
No tests?
ghubbard··on Activist tricked into 6-year relationship with undercover cop tells her story
The FBI does the same sort of thing: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced...
ghubbard··on Test-Driven Development is Stupid
None. He's still in university. [0]

[0] http://geometrian.com/about/cv.pdf

ghubbard··on San Francisco could lead on open-source voting
"Open a GNB account today - No ATM fees when you vote Republican"
ghubbard··on Teachers and students can benefit from knowing techniques of memory champions
> I meet someone named Jane Doe, and then while trying to think of a mnemonic to remember them with, something else happens and I lose the moment.

It's a good idea to spend some time pre-calculating mnemonic images for names before you are in a social situation where you need to use them.

Find lists of the most common first names and surnames and prepare against random combinations of those.

This process will also help you get better at doing it for the less common names on the fly.

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