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karlerss

165 karma · joined October 23, 2016

karl.erss [at] google's mail service karlerss.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-sander-erss/
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karlerss··on U.S. Strategic Command response to FOIA request regarding gibberish tweet
At our workplace it is standard & strictly enforced (called out) policy to lock your screen before leaving your computer unattended. For me this has become an automatic action.

I think USSTRATCOM could benefit from the same policy.

karlerss··on How to price your SaaS product
My quip with value-metric based pricing has always been that by making your user pay for the useful thing, you disincentivize usage since it instantly means a higher cost for them.

At an early-stage b2b SaaS catering to a rather cautious clientele, I feel this could affect adoption/activation negatively. Conversely, pricing per-seat creates the "I have paid for this, I should adopt and evangelize this in my org. as deeply as possible".

Does anyone have experience with switching from seat-based to value-metric based pricing?

karlerss··on Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser
I was hiking with a friend in northern europe. It was +25C and we were being harassed by mosquitoes, horseflies and who knows what else. Naturally the same idea occurred to us - to use a head mounted laser to fry the wings of anything that approaches us. We were joking about the bulkiness - that you would have a power hungry i7 on your head, doing live object detection, a heavy power supply for computation and a strong laser, servo motors whirring directing the laser. It sounds unjust - the forest being their home and couple of city-dwellers killing the creatures for a bit of convenience.
karlerss··on I Miss My Bar
Air travel worldwide is just fine. In airport transit zones all you need is a mask.

We flew from Northern Europe to South Asia a week ago and the flights were filled 60-70%.

karlerss··on Stop defacing quotes with brackets
Why can't "[the bracekts] “[...] be transmitted over news wires.”"?
karlerss··on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
https://get.recruitlab.co.uk/p/job-builder

It's a WYSIWYG job ad builder tool I built over a few days.

It was supposed to be a lead generator for our ATS product, but the functionality does not seem to be useful enough yet.

karlerss··on Should I Buy a House?
The article just means "young/poor people don't buy homes", not "buying a home makes you rich".
karlerss··on In study, acetaminophen makes risky moves seem less dangerous
My headaches (and I guess many others) are often caused by caffeine withdrawal. Taking caffeine without a painkiller usually solves the problem.
karlerss··on Longbets: A bioerror will lead to one million casualties by Dec 2020
Maybe the quick and wide rollout of the covid vaccine is the bioerror - say the mrna translation products causing some kind of amyloid-buildup. One year after vaccination people will be showing signs of dementia. Since the elderly get vaccinated first, it isn't noticed that fast.

For precedent of "new drugs have tragic effects you only notice in a ~year" see thalidomide.

karlerss··on How to Think for Yourself
I have found it useful to ask "why do you think this true?" instead. When there's enough time of course.
karlerss··on How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements and Statement Expressions (2016)
I'm sorry:

x = ["foo", "bar"][y]

karlerss··on Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
All of those statements are statements of value.

Maybe, in the past stupid was mainly reserved for people who knew very few facts. Knowing or having access to facts was much less common before the internet. So people used to argue about facts. But since those arguments were about facts, they always died down (someone was right and someone wrong) and you did not have a feeling of "expanding stupidity".

Since access to facts is pretty much universal now, people have started arguing about values. If someone states they have different values than you, you call them stupid. Since no one is right an no one wrong, the arguments don't die down and you perceive expanding stupidity.

karlerss··on Costs of running a Python webapp for 55k monthly users
A single VPS set-up might be OK for serving content over web, but in my experience, the pain begins when your software starts doing async processing - long-running cron jobs, queue processing. If you're doing it on your web server machine, there will be downtime.

I know this, because I have gone through these issues with each of my projects. Just recently an infinite loop bug in a cron job ground my "single VPS" setup to a halt (and took the web server with it).

karlerss··on Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes
I think most test runners have a --stop-on-failure feature, but using it has the downside of not giving you the complete list of failing tests.

If you haven't touched your gitlab pipelines for a few months, check out DAG pipelines [0] - I got my web project deployment pipeline down from 25 to ~12 minutes by running tests sooner.

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/

karlerss··on Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
> I mean why shouldn't people prone to depression die off?

"Having a child will make me happy". And hell, maybe it will - it's the perfect ruse by our genes - keep us depressed until we reproduce.

karlerss··on What's new in PHP 8?
As long as weak typing is not abandoned, the Java-like language features are great.

I am really looking forward to generics in PHP.

karlerss··on Yahoo Pipes
Alteryx is a 7B dollar company. Their Alteryx Designer product looks like this & does the some of the same things.
karlerss··on L.A. temporarily suspends Uber’s permit to rent out electric scooters and bikes
> data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules

Sending all ride data seems excessive. A few photographs taken by city officials showing scooters in wrong places should do the trick.

karlerss··on Influencers Are Abandoning the Instagram Look
I'm surprised that the article nor comments mention Lomography. When Instagram came along, the Lomography aesthetic was a major influence. I guess it goes in cycles.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography

karlerss··on Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

> narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602.

karlerss··on Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption
The high CO2 emission comes from the mineral content of the oil shale. Since the oil shale has to be heated to 1100C, the emissions include a significant amount of CO2 from CaCO3 → CaO + CO2.
karlerss··on Live display of CO2 emitted to produce electricity in European countries
There's an oil shale museum in Estonia. The tour covers visiting actual underground oil shale mine tunnels and a general museum about oil shale enrichment, chemistry and energetics. See: http://kaevandusmuuseum.ee/eng/
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