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spattenon Find the oldest line in your repo

I ran into that too. Turns out that you need to add in the path you want to search when invoking the command. If it's your current working directory, use `.`

spattenon Just 2 cans of soda per week is too much – even if you exercise

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

(I'm just going on Googling here, not an expert)

From reading that link, I think it works like this:

A hazard ratio of 1.0 means "no hazard, or no difference from the control".

A hazard ratio of 1.21 means "21% more hazardous than the control"

spattenon The lost ways of programming: Commodore 64 BASIC (2020)

In C64 Basic, "$" declares that a variable is a string, like this:

``` A$ = "Hello World ```

So you say this as "A-string equals Hello World"

I still pronounce "$" as string however many years later

spattenon Canada: Hundreds of unmarked graves found at residential school

There are many people still living who were teachers and administrators at these schools.

If we believe that this was genocide (and I think it's pretty obvious that it was), then they should be held accountable for their crimes.

The fact that they haven't been speaks volumes.

spattenon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2019)

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Remote: Yes -- I've been working remotely for > 5 years.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript (Node, React, jQuery, Backbone, Meteor, and a wide range of other Javascript frameworks), Serverless, Erlang, LaTeX, AWS, Ansible.

Resume: https://linkedin.com/in/scott-patten/

Email: scott@scottpatten.ca

I'm one of the founders of Leanpub (https://leanpub.com), and I'm looking for something new (don't worry, Leanpub is just fine). Leanpub is a well-loved, profitable company that has paid over $8 million in royalties to authors, and I was one of the people who built it from scratch.

At Leanpub I was responsible for the book generation engine, our Markdown parser, devops and infrastructure and the main Rails app. I jumped in on the React side of things when needed. I figured out requirements, talked to customers, did support and wrote documentation.

I have more than a decade of experience in software development with a wide variety of technologies. I'm interested in finding a position where I can have an impact on the company, learn constantly and be a part of a great team. I'm looking for a remote-first or extremely remote-friendly company.

spattenon Primitive Technology: Adobe wall (dry stacked) [video]

I had wondered what happened to his videos, as I hadn't seen an update in my RSS feed for a while. Turns out he's just stopped updating his blog!

I've got some videos to catch up on :)

spattenon Battery Power's Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas

I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...

spattenon Are robots better baristas? Berkeley’s Bbox café thinks so

Another, more human, take on this from Barista Hustle:

https://baristahustle.com/blog/the-death-of-the-death-of-the...

TL;DR (I watched this a couple of months ago, so this is an attempt a remembering the thesis. I also don't know if I agree or not that this is a good future, but it is the future presented in the video) -- the robots are coming, which is going to give us push-button coffee. There will still be people there to give you a human experience, and they'll get to focus on that experience instead of being split between making coffee and talking to you.

spattenon Fifty Fizzbuzzes

The Jupyter notebook is here: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/quasiben/fiftyfizzbuzzes/master?f...

The code on GitHub is here: https://github.com/vihart/fiftyfizzbuzzes/blob/master/Fifty%...

spattenon Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace

Telus, the big phone company and ISP in British Columbia, does this in downtown Vancouver[1].

IIRC, I first heard about this in Work Like Nature[2][3]

[1]: http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+dev...

[2]: https://leanpub.com/worklikenature

[3]: I have a double conflict of interest here. The author is my wife, and Leanpub is my startup.

spattenon Getting Started with Headless Chrome

scroll down a bit and look for `--print-to-pdf`.

spattenon Chop Suey Nation: Road trip uncovers the lives behind Chinese-Canadian food

If you'd like to hear more on this, they had a long talk with the author of this piece in episode 7 (titled "The Only One") of Colour Code, a podcast also from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/colour-code-pod...

spattenon Speech Is 3x Faster Than Typing for English and Mandarin on Mobile Devices

From the paper, the IST on the graph stands for "Initial Speech Transcription", and those data points are for the speech-input text before any corrections were made. The other "Speech" data-points include time to make corrections either by using the keyboard or using speech recognition.

spattenon Tasmanian Devils Developing Resistance to Transmissible Cancer

There's a fantastic Radiolab episode about tumors that talks about the discovery of this cancer:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-famous-tumors/

spattenon Async and Await

I agree, it looks great. Funnily enough I didn't even notice until you mentioned it.

However, I have to pedantically point out that the Markdown is not 100% visible. The author made the correct choice and just showed links as links instead of the raw Markdown syntax.

spattenon Ask HN: What's the biggest risk you took in your career that paid off?

I wrote this a while ago answering the exact same question:

http://scottpatten.ca/2012/04/no-excuses.html

spattenon My first DDoS attack for a $200 ransom

You do this by telling iptables to look at the X-Forwarded-For header when deciding what IP that request is coming from.

This blog posts explains the whole thing: https://centos.tips/fail2ban-behind-a-proxyload-balancer/

I have no idea if using .htaccess rules would be better than this solution, I just know that this one works.

spattenon Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.

The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.

Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.

spattenon A 25-Year-Old Turning a Profit Selling Pencils

She was also featured in this Freakonomics podcast about "I Pencil" (worth the listen): http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/

spattenon Work for only 3 hours a day, but everyday

I agree with everyone else about the physical hobbies, but I find you need something else to fill the evenings when you don't necessarily want to go outside, or when you just want to spend half an hour doing something that's not coding and not reading.

Music does that for me. If you're at all interested, check out justinguitar.com (no affiliation, just love what the guy does) and try it out. There's something about the meditative aspects of playing music that really works for me.

spattenon Investigate switching away from GitHub

Ansible has a nice workaround for this that might partially solve the problem and be less work than migrating away from GitHub. When you submit a ticket it forces you to fill in some required fields. Here's an example of a filled in issue:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/6112

They have more info here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/CONTRIBUTING.m...

spattenon Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

From what I can see, it's not available for OS X at all. According to Wikipedia[1], it is currently available for PC and PS4 and will be released for iOS "at a later date"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2016_video_game)

spattenon Org-Mode for Writing: Structure and Focus

I used org-mode for about a year, but then switched to Vim and none of the vim org-mode plugins looked great.

So I thought about what I used it for, and realized it was mostly cycling items between TODO and DONE with a keystroke and text folding.

So I forked vim-markdown and added syntax highlighting for TODO and DONE on header lines, and a mapping to cycle between TODO and DONE. Been using it for a couple of months now and I'm reasonably happy.

If you want to give it a shot, code is here: https://github.com/spatten/vim-markdown

spattenon The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Cool, didn't know about that. Does it search multiple files in a directory? I use it for work logs and keep one file per week.

spattenon The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

I have a bunch of org-mode files that I save into a Dropbox folder.

That gives me backups, and access from other computers / laptops.

Search is via ack or grep.

It theoretically also gives me access from my phone using MobileOrg[1], but I have never actually set that up.

[1]: http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html

spattenon Why Airbnb is dead to me

If you both review, then the reviews show up immediately. If only one of you reviews, then the review shows up after a waiting period (I think it's ~2 weeks). So presumably the negative review will show up soon.

spattenon E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead

Amazon publishes a command-line tool called Kindlegen[1] that converts epub => mobi pretty seamlessly.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

spattenon The Shazam Effect (2014)

Ahh, good point. That makes more sense.

spattenon The Shazam Effect (2014)

> ...it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify some 30 million songs ...

That doesn't sound right. On average one identification for every 16 downloads? I'm guessing that second million should be a billion.

spattenon Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

Maybe I'm just rationalizing it because I want to think of myself as a calm, non-ragey person, but to me it feels like something else.

I agree with others that it feels rude when someone else takes up the whole sidewalk.

But it's also that I walk a lot, and use it as a form of transportation. I go twice as fast as a lot of people on the sidewalk, and it seems like if people just sped up a bit they'd find walking more useful, which would make them drive less, which is a good thing, and it drives me crazy that this isn't obvious to them.

Like I said, I'm probably just rationalizing :)