roberthahn

Yeah I like that idea too. Theres a lot of people who would have trouble with that approach though.

The testing that would be required to support toggles would be for 2^n. I’m not sure that’s a good solution.

I think you’re off by an order of magnitude. With those numbers, a 12” board would expand and contract 1.2”, and an 8’ long board would vary by almost an inch.

Much more reasonable would be 1% across the grain and 0.1% along it. You can confirm this in some of the wood movement calculators found online.

To those learning about wood movement, these ratios are decent but approximate; if you end up caring about these things you’ll want to check the species of the lumber you plan to work with.

I see a couple of sibling comments giving you great tips already. I am still in the painful stage of failing my way to success (though closer to the end than the beginning)

I will suggest a few things. Follow up each of these points with more research if you can.

Spend as little money as possible and prove to yourself you’ll actually like it. Then buy only the good tools you actually need for the project at hand. I have tools I bought that remain unused and I regret spending the money. Its not the tool’s fault but me going in a different direction.

It doesn’t matter what species of wood your first projects use. Prefer wood with straight grain and you should be fine for your first half dozen projects.

Read widely or watch many YouTube videos. There’s a lot of space for ideas, from carving spoons to making stick chairs to making furniture of any style. Note what inspires you but be aware the path to making what you like may take awhile.

First project: make a cutting board (only one piece! Learn how to make it look great and learn a finish) Second project: make a simple box (learn how to make things square, learn some simple joinery)

Safety first! I put this last so it’ll be the first thing you remember. There are so many ways to ruin your health, from breathing sawdust to using toxic finishes. Hand tools are generally better for your lungs than power tools. Soap or wax finishes are healthy and easy to apply. Just about everything else is toxic and you must protect yourself accordingly. Invest in safety glasses, masks and gloves. And a first aid kit.

Woodworking is an extremely rewarding pastime and I hope you get hooked. Best of luck!

As a hand tool woodworker, I’m inspired to make something similar out of a block of wood.

When I saw the title on this page, I was hoping to see a version that was inspired by Apple’s iSight camera (with the perforated aluminum)

None of this is intended to take away from your work - it’s just so dang inspiring!

Apologies for going off subject but I want to ask about that background image on that page.

I remember seeing that art a long time ago and I remember that it was algorithmically generated but I don’t remember anything else. Does anyone have a name or link they can share to the original source?

Thank you for the information!

Sometimes it’s worth pausing a moment when seeing a “It’s well known that…” to check the timeline because the construction of Arecibo might well have taken place (or planned) before it was known (let alone well known).

Edit: a bit more searching suggests that this was studied in 1947 (Andrade’s Creep Law and the Flow of Zinc Crystals, by AH Cottrell)

Could you cite sources? Specifically, when was it discovered that zinc flows under high stresses? By whom?

(Not a materials engineer so I’m not sure what to search for)

I would be very interested in seeing what definition of “pattern” this discovery is using.

Most definitions I could find (I am not a mathematician) seems to imply one of: repetition, growth or shirking.

This shape appears to have none of these properties but they still call it a pattern.

I found it more readable for coding even though I don’t have dyslexia. Surprised me when I found that out.

Some countries (I know Canada is one, Germany, where the artist works, is possibly another) have the concept of moral rights enshrined into law. Boiled down, this means that anyone who wants to use an artist’s work in some context must get permission and/or be prepared to compensate the artist (ianal but I did study copyright law for artists in Canada)

The canonical example Canadians refer to is the Eaton Center adorning Michael Snow’s sculpture Flight Stop with ribbons over Christmas. Snow sued the Eaton Centre for compromising the integrity of his art and won.

If a similar mechanism exists in German law (my quick research suggests it does) then the artist may well have an argument to make about AI comprising the integrity of his work.

CGPT: "Hi, Mr Anchovy, my name is William. Welcome to the career counseling session today. Any time you want to end this session, please type '$exit'. Can you please introduce yourself? Please start by introducing what you are doing and what are any other industries and nature of the job that you are looking for"

Me: "I am a chartered accountant but I want to become a lion tamer!"

CGPT: "That's an interesting career change! Let me help you explore what other industry is suitable for you and what different job positions you can pursue.…"

Looks like even CareerGPT has reservations about going from a CA to a lion tamer.

I see a few people advocating for putting one person on support each sprint, rotating through the team.

This works fine for small teams but for larger (and with large, older codebases), the ramp-up time for being an effective support dev becomes a drag because it can be months between support stints. We don't all have eidetic memories and forget the tricks we use to diagnose production issues.

To counteract that we've recently put a developer on a 6 month rotation, and support them with a rotating backup. This allows the primary support developer to not only stay productive fixing issues but also surface intelligence around the problem areas in our app (ie: what's always needing support) and construct tools to make resolution easier or better yet convert to a self-serve.

I infer from your comment that you're a smaller team so perhaps you won't need to put someone on a long stint, but you might want to consider doing so anyway in order to have a resource pave the proverbial cow-paths and make it easier for the team in the future.

I am very much in favor of putting engineers on customer support/success. I believe it is important to develop empathy and understanding of the user's experience with the product you build. Not only will it help you implement what they need, it will also serve as a way to call BS against product managers who try to get you to build things that look good on their resume (but don't help the customer.

But after reading through the comments from those who are against the idea, I wonder if there might be a productive middle ground - have engineers listen in on (but not participate in) any calls between the customer and the Support/Success team. This doesn't need to be done for a solid week, but perhaps a steady diet of 2 calls per week for a few weeks would help.

I'm sure you could imagine other 'middle-ground' ways to achieve this - but clearly nothing will work until engineers at a minimum buy into the reasons why some direct exposure to customers would be a good idea.

I'm so happy to see people talk about this! I too am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems.

Hillel's thoughts are completely unsurprising to me so I guess I've come to similar conclusions.

I do notice that we seem to care about different things though - where Hillel appears to focus on tag types (and the implementation challenges that go with that) I focus more on human factors like what problem are we solving? for who? How do we maintain relevance (and power) in tagging systems (and for who?)

I'm of the opinion that tagging systems should not be made by the few for the many but by each person for themselves. Which, of course, sucks because that puts the onus on everyone who wants tagged content to do their own work. But I believe the output of that investment would be quite valuable and useful!

An easy example I could use might be recommendation engines. Assume I have a database of tags (a tag cloud?), and I know you have similar interests to me. If you also have a tag cloud, I could input links to both of our tag clouds into a purpose-built recommendation engine to discover new content I might not have consumed yet.

I expect you're going to get a lot of good advice. My small contribution is this: whatever you do, document it. Write down the date, what you did, what settings you tweaked. (or use Github to manage your changes - that still counts as documentation!)

Someday something's going to click for you and you'll realize you should have done something differently, but you won't remember what you did (or how to undo/change it). Keeping good documentation - especially as you're learning, is going to save you from wiping and re-installing your machine.

Great story, Michael, thanks for sharing!

I have a disability (profound hearing loss) and I've started 2 businesses in my career; the first was a freelance gig, the second was a health recordkeeping app for iPad. Neither have been successful enough for me to sustainably provide for my family but I'm hoping the next one will succeed!

Really glad to hear your story - it's very inspiring!

I would have expected that you'd _want_ to factor in air noise because humans don't only hear fan noise in their computers. Or am I misunderstanding?

I purchased my current vehicle through an auto broker - for a fee, a description of the model/trim level, and the name of the dealership I want to pick the car up at (anywhere in Canada), they would negotiate on my behalf. Once they have a final price I sign off on it, and would be told the date to pick it up and make payment.

It was a stress-free experience and I would definitely recommend you look into that if you really hate the idea of buying a car.

This makes a ton of sense for B2C contexts, but my gut reaction is that the conversational approach might be too high friction in B2B contexts. To be clear, the friction I'm thinking of is this constant cadence of stealing/borrowing attention.

Perhaps this needs to be thought of as part of a larger communications strategy - who here is part of a SaaS that sends regular 'marketing' emails to existing customers? :)

Maybe the defaults (boiled down, the provided examples appear to be "opt-in" if you're not in, and "opt-out" if you are in) are designed to streamline the process so conversations are ignorable so that's okay?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something! I definitely want to hear stories of this model working in the B2B space.

My next woodworking project will be building a Dutch tool chest. After some searching (too many pages only show the _outside_ of the chest, this page shows you some of the potential of storing and organizing literally dozens of tools in a box you could load into your car.

https://www.lumberjocks.com/BrandonW/blog/35335

Another excellent way to store and organize your tools is in an English tool chest. https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/04/06/anarchists-tool-che...

That would presume the cursory research turns up clear answers. Or that the answers the interviewers give will match the answers online.

I have seen both presumptions invalidated enough not to think poorly of anyone asking and if the interviewer decides I’m wasting their time if I ask questions like this then it was never going to be a good fit.

Yep!

The scale I have seen used includes the terms “mild, moderate, severe, profound”…

… ah. Here’s a chart that might help:

https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/degree-of-hearing-loss/

I’m not an audiologist so while this is a great question I don’t have these answers at my fingertips :)

At any rate, my “definition” was intended to clarify what mainstream meant in this context.

A lot of folks here wants you to ask him what he wants.

Be prepared to hear that he doesn’t know what would help. But he will appreciate that you’re giving him agency.

One of the challenges I have with this question as someone who is mainstreamed, profoundly deaf (this means I don’t know sign language) is that deafness takes a number of forms, so there’s no real one size fits all solution.

But far be it for me to point out problems not suggest solutions!

* ask him if it would help to provide a real-time transcription service. This is not an automated system but a specially trained human who will transcribe meetings in real time.

* ask him if he wants someone to write a meeting summary that captures decisions made, action items delegated etc. then make sure that happens.

* ask him if an ASL interpreter would help.

* sign up for sign language courses yourself and use your professional development budget to pay for it. If he doesn’t know ASL ask if he would want to learn also. Pay for his training.

* help him find a professional community of deaf persons to be a part of. Give him options. No group is perfect for everyone.

* the biggest barrier he will face in his life is isolation. So support him so that he doesn’t feel isolated.

* if your company throws company events for everyone to participate in, try to create a something similar, running concurrently, that’s accessible for him. Solicit ideas from him but it could look like a small group chat online or playing games online.

* hearing aids (if he needs them) are REALLY FRICKING EXPENSIVE - benefits typically cover up to $500 and aids can cost $2-7K. Offer to buy his next pair.

This is all off the top of my head. I could probably think of more with some time.

I hope this helps. Thank you for taking the initiative to make him feel part of your team.

(Edit: formatting)

Thanks to everyone who replied to this. I am thrilled to learn about these options.

To my Portal idea the closest I’ve found was Superliminal. There’s something wrong with the graphics though, it makes me nauseous to play.

But I will definitely check out your suggestions! Thanks again!

A game that rewards actions driven by empathy rather than combat, death or killing.

Real empathy is hard and the real world could stand to see more of it.

I have two game themes to call out:

1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.

How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.

2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?

Good work! I might just try this out in my next attempt to GTD

I’d like to suggest thinking more deeply about dates. I love that you opted to use the yyyy-mm-dd format and I also think it’s great that you’re making things flexible because life is messy.

The problem I see is this; suppose I’m in a text editor and I want to see my todos ordered by due date. This will help me see what’s coming up.

The advantage of using a yyyy-mm-dd format is that it makes things really easy to sort in reverse lexicographic order. However, with dates coming in at any point in the todo, sorting might be tricky. The week-style date format would also be tricky to sort properly.

Granted, this is an option for tools to solve! But if the primary tool is a text editor, then this might be an area that could use refinement.

Again: love the work you put into this and I also love the ergonomics! Thanks for sharing!

What is obvious today might not have been obvious in 1996.

Our experiences and training has changed dramatically over the past 26 years.

I find people’s reactions to microservices to be fascinating. I have always looked at them with the same framing as Unix userland tools - many small, focused apps that do something really well, coupled with a super generic IPC mechanism - in Unix’s case, using pipes or message queues.

But Unix isn’t all small tools. We have servers for the heavy work- like databases.

The challenge then becomes; how do you design that IPC mechanism? Maybe it exists! I don’t know the answer yet. But it’s something I think about a lot and I haven’t seen compelling evidence for “microservices are always bad, no exceptions”