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pablobaz

1,116 karma · joined September 24, 2012

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pablobaz··on Muse Spark 1.3
Left sided drive trains are tried every so often in track cycling with supposed aerodynamic advantages for travelling around the track. See: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/japan-unveils-new-olympic...
pablobaz··on When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
The bear case being set at 40% of employee costs is still quite wild.
pablobaz··on Peptides: where to begin?
Sorry to hear about your aunt. My condolences. I think your misinterpreted my intent, I would dearly love a good diagnostic test for ME/CFS and agree research has been hugely underfunded.

I have followed closely the research for many years and there has been false promise of good diagnostic tests previously. What I'm arguing for is that we need a test that is specific for ME/CFS. E.g. it will test positive for a patient with ME/CFS regardless of they are obese or not, but more importantly it will not test positive for everyone who is obese. This is known as the sensitivity and specificity of the test.

What I've seen in the past is some previous ME/CFS tests show positive for groups with related symptoms but who don't have ME/CFS. This then becomes a worthless diagnostic tool. For example this would not have helped your aunt.

Hope this explains my thoughts!

pablobaz··on Peptides: where to begin?
I think I would need to see testing on a control group of housebound patients with other conditions to believe this. It's easy for ME testing to pick up markers for being housebound and limited exercise for an extended period of time.
pablobaz··on A sufficiently detailed spec is code
which bits of this do you think llm based agents can't do?
pablobaz··on Anscombe's Quartet
Or:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Anscombe

:-)

pablobaz··on Atlassian terminates 150 staff
That could work. 15 managers doing 10 1:1 meetings each isn't so hard. It can get tricky with people being on vacation etc. But very possible and normal.
pablobaz··on The US island that speaks Elizabethan English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8 This Irish Sheep farmer is my favorite example of a hard to understand Irish accent. I've lived nearby to this location and can attest that it is quite common.
pablobaz··on The US island that speaks Elizabethan English
Some of the west of Ireland accent also reflects pronunciation prior to the Great Vowel Shift. For example pronouncing "tea" as "tay" and "meat" as "mate"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

pablobaz··on Take the pedals off the bike
If the child had practiced on a balance bike for balance and a tricycle for pedalling it all comes together quite easily.
pablobaz··on Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
In my experience with very large codebases, a common problem is devs trying to improve random things.

This is well intentioned. But in a large old codebase finding things to improve is trivial - there are thousands of them. Finding and judging which things to improve that will actually have a real positive impact is the real skill.

The terminal case of this is developers who in the midst of another task try improve one little bit but pulling on that thread leads to them attempting bigger and bigger fixes that are never completed.

Knowing what to fix and when to stop is invaluable.

pablobaz··on Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)
What you are seeing is probably cold induced vasodilation

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4843861/

Incidentally there are some studies that show you get better at it with more frequent exposure. I have kayaked for many years and have found this to be the case - if my hands get cold now, dipping them into the water to further cool then hence opening the veins is very effective if counterintuitive way of warming my hands up.

pablobaz··on The online sports gambling experiment
As the article discusses you don't need to ban alcohol you can just make it more awkward: - tax it - restrict the sales by age, location and time(see Nordic countries for a really strict version of this) - minimum unit pricing - warning labels Etc. You can argue if this is the right thing to do or not but it is enforceable and there's good evidence that these measures reduce consumption and harms.
pablobaz··on Behaviors reveal sophisticated tool use and possible “pranking” among pachyderms
It goes deeper than that. Fundamental forces have chirality. This was a little controversial when first discovered.
pablobaz··on The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
That's nice! Another one is remembering the phrase: Can I have a large container of coffee please sir.
pablobaz··on Roll-Invert-Unroll: An easier way to replace a duvet cover
As a kid we didn't have duvets. It was all sheets and blankets. Duvets were a bit new-fangled so it's not surprising the knowledge wasn't passed down.
pablobaz··on Roll-Invert-Unroll: An easier way to replace a duvet cover
IME lots of people just try stuff the duvet in and then shake it to get it in the right place.
pablobaz··on Roll-Invert-Unroll: An easier way to replace a duvet cover
My preferred technique is to also start with the cover inside out. Then put your hands inside the cyber into its corners. Then grasp two corners of the duvet through the fabric. A bit of shaking to turn the cover the right way out and you are done.
pablobaz··on Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

This is a great book for larger team sizes.

https://amzn.eu/d/hnEQvsV

pablobaz··on Gemini AI
> "Using the power of Google Tensor G3, Video Boost on Pixel 8 Pro uploads your videos to the cloud where our computational photography models adjust color, lighting, stabilization and graininess."*

I wonder why the power of Tensor G3 is needed to upload your video to the cloud...

*https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-feature-drop-decemb...

pablobaz··on A carbohydrate revolution is speeding up pro cycling
So many words but so little actual information as to how the increased consumption is now possible.
pablobaz··on I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
>The difference between the rushed 10mins you get with the NHS and the considered 30mins you get private is amazing. You leave feeling like you’ve been taken care of and all your questions have been answered.

This is true for fairly simple cases. But when something is complex or very serious you want a true multidisciplinary team that sees the most cases per annum - that is the NHS.

A private consultant in a nice office with a very nice efficient secretary is great for their particular expertise but outside of that poor. This is based on more experience personally and with family than I would wish anyone to have.

pablobaz··on Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
A friend once explained his philosophy to me, that I find helpful: "Once you've written it, it's just code. Someone can always find a better way or improvements and that's fine"

I think the second sentence is true for everyone's code and that's what makes the job interesting.

Also jobs rarely aim for perfection, they aim to create value efficiently for the business. If the best way of getting there is producing code with a few mistakes that are when later picked up in a code review then that's fine too.

If this resonates with you at all, then when something annoys you repeating to yourself "It's just code" might help. Best of luck!

pablobaz··on What It Was Like to Live Inside Habitat 67
Living there you are also beside a great river wave - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67_(standing_wave)
pablobaz··on “The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in areas they’re advising in”
It's often more to provide backup and justification for a decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte told me to do it".

While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the value an independent view can bring, especially to a big company suffering from group think - secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.

pablobaz··on Append data to the url query
I wonder will they have a party when they hit 250?
pablobaz··on Smart Audio for the Smart Home
Im my experience Serviio was the only thing that made DNLA even half work and even with that it was flakey.

https://serviio.org/

pablobaz··on What's New in SQLite 3.35
https://duckdb.org/ is good for these type of tasks
pablobaz··on Extruding Ice from Steel Fences and Pipes with Diurnal Freeze/Thaw (2008)
Reminds me of "ice jacking" that was blamed when a ski lift collapsed in Whistler.

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler-news/ice-jacking-...

pablobaz··on Airflow 2.0
I’ve used both extensively.

Here is my personal opinion of some Pros and Cons for the types of jobs that are in the fuzzy area of overlapping functionality.

Jenkins gui and interface handles lots of standalone jobs more nicely.

Jenkins has much better support for parameterised jobs that can be kicked off manually.

Airflow can handle dependencies between jobs in a much better way. Nicely defining and visualising dags of job really is the killer feature.

Browsing task/job logs is nicer in Airflow IMO.

Airflow scheduler is flaky - hopefully better in 2.0.

Airflow has much more “magic” than Jenkins this is often infuriating.

All that said, my preference is to move jobs to Airflow. Getting a nice gui for manually triggered jobs in airflow is/was the only large missing piece for me.

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