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iamkroot

462 karma · joined December 26, 2018

https://www.timothyrice.org/
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iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
You're right, I should have said equivalently :D
iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
For a little while, yes. Ice has middling thermal conductivity, it'll eventually homogenously warm to the melting point.
iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
The ice actually comes up to the temperature of the water while it's melting. That's what the equilibrium temperature is: the temperature of the entire ice / water system until it's been converted to all liquid or all solid.

Naturally there's some small local variations, but if you let the system come up to steady state, that's what will occur.

iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
Delicious, of course!

And yes, the other commenter is correct. LNO2 works so well because it freezes the ice cream so fast that the crystals don't have time to grow very large, which produces a nice and smooth texture in the final product.

iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
OP author here.

Yes, though you have to be careful. If you add too much alcohol you'll prevent your mixture from properly freezing.

David Leibowitz, author of "The Perfect Scoop" recommends no more than 45ml of 80 proof liquor per 1 liter of ice cream mixture.

iamkroot··on Why do we salt the ice when making ice cream?
Author here.

Hah, that's true, but I didn't want to mention it as it's not entirely in the aim of the essay :)

iamkroot··on Non Fungible Tickets
I've always figured you could just do an auction.

Say you have 500 tickets. You give everyone who wants to go 48 hours to submit how much they're willing to pay for a ticket. At the end of the time period the 500 people whose bids were the highest all get the tickets.

You could publish the current price of the tickets during the bidding time frame and allow people to modify their bids at any point.

The final price would be whatever the 500th lowest bid was. In the event of a tie, choose randomly among the people tied for 500th.

I imagine this would be greeted with complaints about how it gives the rich an advantage, but I can't think of a fairer way to distribute tickets that also avoids the scalper problem.

iamkroot··on Clinically clean lenses are destroying what makes cameras special
You're really going to write an entire diatribe about how the image quality of new lenses is aesthetically inferior to old lenses and not include a single example comparison??
iamkroot··on PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities
Wait, is this an official MS utility?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Why aren't these just bundled by default??

iamkroot··on Winning Wordle
This is why I switched off of hard mode, after trying it a few times. For me while it was technically harder, it lost some strategic depth and the games became a lot less interesting.
iamkroot··on A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
Grazie!
iamkroot··on A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
Do you have a link to this? Every search query I try produces results for the character Monica from Friends. Seems like exceptionally poor SEO, heh.
iamkroot··on Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
I was a Lego obsessed kid through the 90s and 00s, and now I have a school age son who is similarly devoted to it. Lego today is waaaayyy cooler than it was when I was a kid.

I got the very first Lego Star Wars set, Lukes X-Wing [1], and while I loved it as a kid the newest Xwing that my son just got [2] is so much better on every level. It's bigger, more detailed, looks sleeker, and has this really clever mechanism that opens the wings synchronously when you press down on a piece.

All the new sets are this way. The care and detail that Lego puts into them has dramatically improved in the last 20 years.

He still takes them apart a few months after he gets them and builds something new. I don't think that will ever change, the thrill of making something on your own will never go away. Furthermore, the online community of people making things and sharing their creations has exploded since I was a child. We had a single user forum (LUGnet) where a small handful of people congregated. All images were uploaded to a single, tiny website (brickshelf) to be shared. Now you have youtube channels, instagram pages, tiktok creators, subreddits, you name it. The resources available for creating and sharing your own designs is massive!

1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9yXo6HF8hTo/hqdefault.jpg 2: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...

iamkroot··on Teachers are leaving and few people choosing the field
Weirdly (to me, at least) private school teachers make substantially less than public. The ones I know say it's worth it to be free of the onerous beauracracy that plagues public education.
iamkroot··on Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?
Didn't Rogan emphatically endorse Bernie last election cycle? Have the alt right become socialists when I wasn't looking?
iamkroot··on Stalking her daughter’s killers across Mexico, one by one
Beg your politicians to support open borders, so that the individuals who live in these countries have the freedom to leave them.
iamkroot··on Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in
Of course, they're almost always very qualitative discussions. If you have a track record of discussing improvement points, hopefully both you and your manager will be able to agree that any metrics that might appear during year end reviews are mostly extraneous.
iamkroot··on Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in
I agree with this. I think it's also important to regularly check it with your manager and ask about how your performance is being perceived and if there is anything they could suggest that you improve upon. Keep the feedback loop tight so that both of you can address any problems as quickly as possible.
iamkroot··on Low parental income in childhood linked to increased risk of mental disorders
Is the problem inequality or that the income is below a threshold that would guarantee safety and pray of mind?
iamkroot··on Low parental income in childhood linked to increased risk of mental disorders
"Parental income as a marker for socioeconomic position during childhood and later risk of developing a secondary care-diagnosed mental disorder examined across the full diagnostic spectrum: a national cohort study"

Full article headline, for those who read the title and thought "... obviously?"

iamkroot··on Behind Cambridge Analytica lay a bigger threat to our democracy: Facebook
I have often wondered: if Brexit and the 2016 presidential election had gone differently, would we still have this panic surrounding social media?

To me, a lot of it feels like people can't believe that a thinking human would ever vote for "the bad guys", so they go searching for some other explanation. It must have been some sort of brainwashing, that's the only reason someone would ever fall for their obvious lies!

Curiously, I very rarely hear people who complain about social media admit to it influencing their own political decisions, it's always their opponents who are being led astray.

iamkroot··on I suspect many task deadlines are designed to force engineers to work for free
More like the managers make promises they don't understand.
iamkroot··on I Want to Fix Goodreads
Can you share this script?
iamkroot··on Technical Debt Doesn’t Exist
Technical debt is not just limited to programming, either.

Consider the cabling in a data center: It's very easy to create a new connection by dragging a cable down the aisle from one device to the other. But do this over and over and you'll be left with a tangled mess that's impossible to maintain, understand, and document.

Short quick fixes can be appropriate under the right circumstances, but it's important to go back and clean them up at the earliest opportunity.

iamkroot··on When Asbestos Was a Gift Fit for a King
Has anyone compiled a list of all the everyday things that used belong only to the fabulously wealthy? Ice cream remains my favorite example.
iamkroot··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
I have always been curious about this. What did the drivers do before these services existed? What prevents them from returning to their previous life if workings for Uber/Lyft is really as bad as I have been told it is? Why did they start driving in the first place?
iamkroot··on New fitness habits being created during Covid?
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

iamkroot··on Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?
Agree, I can do several books a week if I'm motivated and they're excellent enough to keep me engaged.
iamkroot··on Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?
Can you show your work for how you arrived at this range of values?
iamkroot··on Instagram Morphs into an Information Powerhouse
Friendly for Instagram: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.friendly.in...
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