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ngd

266 karma · joined November 27, 2010

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ngd··on Muse Gadgets
Thats very @dps
ngd··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Every example from the tweet influencers I saw was about spending money. The exception I got excited about for a second was about saving money but alas it was just about spending less money
ngd··on Invisible Companies
I worked at a small bike shop in the 90s and when we had issues with our point of sales system we would call a number on the till and it connected us to the single developer who maintained all the software for it!
ngd··on A History of IDEs at Google
I started a touch before this in London. I recall before Blaze and git5 - every morning we had a ritual of checking out google3 and making sure we could get some sort of build working for the day so that we could then attempt to write some software on top of it. The builds in play were “Mach” and “quickie” or something like that. It was so painful we used to agree that we wouldn’t grab food or coffee or anything until we’d worked out what CL we should sync to for the day to do some work on.

Pair programming was very in vogue and I used to get in a little later than some which was a great excuse to just hop on someone else’s machine who’d already gone through that pain

ngd··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
The cycling fans among us were quite bashed around over the past few years getting access to cycling coverage in Europe. The were the glory years where GCN Plus was extremely cheap (it was too cheap) and the coverage was ad-free and excellent. Then we got bashed around to Eurosport which was fine, more expensive but still ad-free. Then we got moved to Discovery+. They weaseled out of their ad-free coverage for a bunch of races and jacked up the price because they bundled the cycling in with football and we suffered a price hike from $3-5 per month to $30+ a month, yes a 1000% hike, over the past 5 years.
ngd··on Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss
There is also a conflation of a slowing metabolism and low energy availability, which can reduce the amount of energy expended during the day (because you feel tired and do less). It can be quite subtle but when I've done some extended periods in a calorie deficit I start to notice subtle things, like a propensity to sit a bit longer, or to reduce my overall body movements. My resting metabolism is the same (I've had it measured a few times) but my body looks for ways to expend less energy.
ngd··on Broken legs and ankles heal better if you walk on them within weeks
Sorry to say I'm in almost an identical seat. I broke my thumb and have a gnarly but closed tuft fracture - after 4 weeks I saw a specialist who said there wasn't much healing or bone growth yet, and so decided to do a more aggressive splinting and lock down the whole thumb for another 4 weeks.

Oddly enough I had a similar injury 10 years prior on a different finger and that healed up in 6 weeks as if nothing ever happened to it.

ngd··on Sora is here
What’s next, Tiagra?
ngd··on How to Start Google
I'm generally interested if people here think that to a 14-15 year old, do those companies sound tremendously cool and does the premise of their value stir exciting thoughts and motivations? My slightly younger kids don't really what Google, Apple or Facebook/Meta means. If I explained this essay to them, I'd at least say "the iPad", "YouTube", "the Oculus" to make it more relatable.

To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.

ngd··on Chris Seaton has died
When I was 15 I had to move high school after the death of my mother. I started to socialise at school and joined the investment club. It was a tough time for me and I desperately wanted to make friends and fit in. I wasn’t really into investing but a young man by the name of Chris Seaton was building their website and I loved computers so I wanted to help. Chris taught me how to program, first HTML websites, then PHP based apps, then C# and VBA native apps. Im pretty sure Chris invented the password manager before it was a thing too.

I spent the next few years at high school and sixth form trying to sit near Chris in lessons and talking to him on MSN Messenger and ICQ incessantly about programming, he taught me a lot and set me on a path to choosing computer science as my degree, I just copied him to be honest.

I’ll miss you Chris

ngd··on More Casio Watch Mods
That's a cool recommendation. Thank you!

Like many others on here have noted, there are some really nice Seikos and Casios that look great, keep fantastic time and won't break the bank.

I am not a completely reformed addict though in this regard, as I do have a handful of Seikos and Casios, and recently picked up a Serica 4512 as my dressy / special occasions watch.

One thing I've realised about this world and "collecting" in general is there is nothing wrong with trying things out and refining your collection / process as you learn more about yourself and what you get out of it all.

I've learned that the more traditional expensive time pieces are just more of a headache then I care to bare. A Rolex or Patek sitting in a safe because you're stressed about using it, scratching it or getting robbed just isn't worth it for me personally. No judgement passed on what other people do or don't do with their stuff though! If a Patek in a safe brings you joy, all power to you!

ngd··on More Casio Watch Mods
I also found that being able to always reach to my wrist for the time has become a habit and when I tried an Apple watch that was scuppered by the off wrist charging so like you say, I treat that right wrist as the "data collection" wrist, which for the last few years has been home to a heart rate and HRV monitor.
ngd··on More Casio Watch Mods
I've been wearing a Casio F-91W for a number of years now and it really is a joy. It's always there, and it always works.

I've gone down the rabbit hole with expensive time pieces but they become a burden / obligation rather than a tool - especially as the prices of certain pieces in the secondary market have gone so high - so over time I've reverted back to much cheaper watches and find myself getting more joy out of the cheaper & much better value for money brands.

Very occasionally I'll take it off in favour of a dress watch for a special event but otherwise I just wear it all the time, knowing that if it finally fails I'm looking at $10 to replace.

ngd··on The history of Google messaging apps
There's a screenshot of the Google Buzz "Bullhorn", as we used to call it, which was fun to reminisce about, I'd forgotten about it.

This was a small widget right on www.google.com, you clicked it and could post a tweet (let's call a spade a spade) right from the homepage. I always thought that was a pretty gutsy move.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/32.jp...

One of my favorite ideas that was kicked around by Brett Lider during these days was the ability to double like something, and perhaps even let people give as many likes as they wanted! It sounds silly, but if you have a product where you might be able to sneak in a "double like" button I say do it!

ngd··on HUD for being on time to remote meetings while coding
Every evening I look at my calendar and I set an alarm clock entry on my phone for 1 minute before each meeting. I have found this to be the most robust method for never being late to a meeting.
ngd··on Opt Out From Online Behavioral Advertising By Participating Companies
13 years ago?
ngd··on China’s stock market bubble: A goring concern
How about an airline run my a record label?
ngd··on Bazel – Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone
This is an open sourcing of Google's internal build tool.

I know it as Blaze, which Bazel is an anagram of. Many files in the source have references to Blaze.

ngd··on The Apple Watch
You cannot imagine a more useless product?
ngd··on Google Acquires Titan Aerospace, The Drone Company Pursued By Facebook
I think it's naive to assume that Google's investments are always a couple of steps away from making money via ad impressions. Listening to Larry Page speak never leaves me with that impression, it usually leaves me inspired and of the opinion that Google truly wants to improve the human race, and the world, through technology.
ngd··on Robinhood: $0 commission stock brokerage
They've got a few revenue generating plans:

* charge for API access * provide a margin facility (charge interest on a loan provided to facilitate trading).

ngd··on Bitcoin Companies and Entrepreneurs Can't Get Bank Accounts
A large number of bitcoin businesses are exchanges of some sort - ones where people are looking to exchange dollars to/from BTC. Going BTC all the way down is going to take a long time.
ngd··on What killed Blackberry? Employees started buying their own devices
In my experience the same "force" occurred with the iPhone. Execs bought them and wanted their corporate mail on them.
ngd··on Our Double Robotics Telepresence Robot arrived today
We attached a small bell to ours. A silent omni present robot was too much.
ngd··on Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'
He did a talk about Project Grok, a piece of internal Google infrastructure he created, back in April at an Emacs conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRO3dNJx5Dw
ngd··on IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released
I tried it out, you can now make an Eclipse like experience, albeit requiring many key presses to invoke compiliation and execution of code. It's not as slick as Eclipse, but its possible.

As for the merit of the technique - try it out. I've found it allows a level of experimentation not possible without the option; personally I've found that useful when it is not obvious what the right thing to do is upfront, I can try out a small change to a chunk of code, try it out via unit tests, then update all call sites appropriately; as opposed to attempting to "upgrade" call sites appropriately using a canned refactoring before I've validated whether or not I'm going to be able to achieve what I want for a few test cases.

ngd··on IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released
One thing I miss from Eclipse, for Java development, is the ability to run unit tests (or a whole program for that matter) while compilation errors exist in the code. Intellij forces me to make all my code compile before I can try out anything - I believe I do less iterative development and make less exploratory changes to code when using Intellij because of this. I've found I can live with it, and do, because my team uses Intellij, but I sure do miss executing code that won't compile.

If you have never seen this feature of Eclipse, I encourage you to try it.

ngd··on Katahdin - A language where syntax and semantics are mutable at runtime
This was a Computer Science dissertation (by a good friend of mine). It scratched an itch, furthered someones education and checked the box of a required component of a degree course. I don't think it was looking to change the world. I don't think anyone is writing apps in Kat.