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utborinon Shit User Story

  As a...
  – user
  I want to...
  – ensure the developers behind the product have robustly debated the benefits of tabs vs spaces
  So that...
  – I get more value from the product

Well that cuts to the quick.

utborinon I refused to become an FBI informant, the government put me on the no fly list

Probably would’ve still been harassed and wound up on the no-fly list, but yes, if the FBI tricks you into meeting them, walk away.

utborinon How did Microsoft make Flight Simulator seem so real?

Be careful with this. I used to give aircraft simulator instruction and had to learn that AC backwards and forwards. Bottom line is it's not enough just to get a certified yoke and throttle quadrant. The entire package, hardware and software together, has to be "authorized," not just "certified." The instrument for this is a Letter of Authorization (LOA) that spells out exactly which kinds of currency/experience can be logged on that specific Aviation Training Device, and the approved aircraft configurations (e.g. SR20, PA-28R, BE-76). No LOA, no hours. If you can get a copy of the manufacturer's LOA, and the experience you want is in that letter, go for it! Otherwise, you've just got a very expensive video game.

There's a list of current LOAs here: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...

And here's an example of an LOA: https://flypfc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/PFC-CAT-II-III...

utborinon Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines

Except as the author points out, we have more than just our own personal experience to go on. We have the experience of millions of college students, who, as the author notes, are not being dragged out in body bags by the thousands or even hundreds due to eating day-old pizza. Maybe the evidence isn't organized, easily referenced, or particularly well-controlled, but it exists, and to ignore it is just silly.

We're also talking about two different things here, one being the scientific method, the other being risk analysis. Output from the former can be an input to the latter but they're otherwise orthogonal.

On the subject of risk, I don't think the drunk-driving comparison holds because the numbers are completely different. We can point to innumerable cases of drunk-driving resulting in death. But day-old pizza? I'll be surprised if you can find (just picking a number out of my hat here) even ten cases of day-old pizza killing anyone.

utborinon How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

Or call them an astrologist. They love that.

utborinon Please don't upgrade Docker without asking first

That's fine for something a person is working on in their spare time, but when it's a multi-million dollar company whose mission statement is "we simplify the lives of developers who are making world-changing apps," I think it's fair to have different expectations.

utborinon Early-Retirement Update

> Doesn’t competition push down the price of [MRIs in the US]?

Oh, you sweet, innocent babe.

Praise your lucky stars for every single day that you don't have to deal with our "health care" system.

utborinon Early-Retirement Update

> I feel sure that some of them also felt that they were, you know, continuing to move and shake and improve their lives whereas, from their perspective, I’d sort of given up — my life appeared to be a static thing, unchanging, and therefore pretty fucking boring

This is such a gross element of our culture—what's wrong with just living?—and I feel like it's not even really a matter of working vs. retired. I know folks who have worked the same job for decades, and they get the same harsh judgment from others as the author. But this used to be the norm! When did we switch into this thinking that we have to be constantly racking up gold stars in order for life to mean anything? Where did that idea come from?

utborinon A new moralism is gripping the literary world

There's passion, and then there's dirty fighting. Name calling and dismissiveness. A veritable army of straw men. Unwillingness to even attempt to understand an opposing viewpoint.

Let's call that what it is. It ain't "passion."

utborinon A new moralism is gripping the literary world

> why is it considered anti-trans speech, when a villain is "a male serial killer known to have worn a dress"

That's not what OP is referring to. Go read her Twitter feed and blog.

utborinon I Don’t ‘Do’ Arduino

Yeah, this blog post is a real drag. Ok, so you've been at this for a long time and are super smart and experienced. Great. That's not who Arduinos are for. They're for folks who want to use a microcontroller and don't want to have to worry about toolchains, bootloaders, and programmers.

utborinon RegEx Crossword

Sorry, but you're wrong. There's nothing about regular expressions that means you have to use them to search for matching substrings. That's just one particular operation that uses regular expressions. It's not a quality inherent to regular expressions themselves. There are many different operations you can perform with a regular expression besides a substring search.

Python, for example, has a fullmatch method.[0]

libicu's matches() function returns true "if the pattern matches the entire string, from the start through to the last character."[1]

PCRE has various flags that change what it means for a regular expression to match, including PCRE2_ANCHORED and PCRE2_ENDANCHORED. Used together, these options would require a full match with no change to the regular expression itself.[2]

0. https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

1. https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/strings/regexp.h...

2. http://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/pcre2api.html#SEC27

utborinon RegEx Crossword

A full match has to exhaust all of the characters in the string. R*D*M* is indeed a match for a string of eight spaces, but it isn't a full match, because there are still eight spaces left over after matching.

    % python3
    >>> import re
    >>> re.search(r'R*D*M*', '        ')
    <re.Match object; span=(0, 0), match=''>
    >>> re.fullmatch(r'R*D*M*', '        ')
    >>>

utborinon Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

And if they sell four? Wish I still had a copy but there was a brilliant story printed years ago called something like "there are numbers smaller than 1%." It illustrated the fallacy in the thinking behind saying things like, "even if we only sell 1%, we'll be rich." Just because you pick some arbitrarily small number as your minimum sales doesn't mean it's actually the minimum, or even the most likely minimum. You could sell a couple hundred. You could sell ten. You could sell zero.

utborinon Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch

99% of folks here don’t deal with life and death matters. When you do, you get a lot of practice at canceling, which helps. There’s also the fact that you can say, “if you do this, people will die,” which is a pretty bright line when you’ve got something to back it up. I actually found it more difficult to take a stand in less consequential fields. But it’s still very, very hard to look someone more powerful in the eye and tell them no. I’ve had to do it and it’s not fun. (Nothing on the scale of a Shuttle launch. I once had to effectively revoke a judge’s flying privileges, for instance.)

McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.

utborinon Oakland bans the use of combustion engine-powered leaf blowers and trimmers

And some people like to have some peace in their own homes.

No one is picking on people for having a different life. I don’t care if people want to have lawns. I care if they run a goddamn engine right outside my home every single day of the week.

You can have your lawn. I really could not care less about it. What you can’t have is my acceptance of constant engine noise in the place where I live.

utborinon Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?

Oh man, this is the best news I've heard all week. I loved Secret City. Thanks for this.

utborinon Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here.

- Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods.

- Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results.

- Yes, this is doing more than just detecting a person's race, age, and/or gender. The classifier is still accurate when they compare people with the same race, age, and gender. See Results.

If you want to discuss actual limitations in the study, here are some the author points out:

- "A more detailed picture could be obtained by exploring the links between political orientation and facial features extracted from images taken in a standardized setting while controlling for facial hair, grooming, facial expression, and head orientation."

- "Another factor affecting classification accuracy is the quality of the political orientation estimates. While the dichotomous representation used here (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) is widely used in the literature, it offers only a crude estimate of the complex interpersonal differences in ideology. Moreover, self-reported political labels suffer from the reference group effect: respondents’ tendency to assess their traits in the context of the salient comparison group."

utborinon Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation

Someone on Instagram told Tom Morello to stop talking politics and stick to music.

Tom fucking Morello.

utborinon Flutter 2

> Our goal is to fundamentally shift how developers

I'm tired.

utborinon Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

Grandmaster: Revolution? How did this happen?

Topaz: Don't know. But the Arena's mainframe for the Obedience Disks have been deactivated and the slaves have armed themselves.

Grandmaster: Ohhh! I don't like that word!

Topaz: Mainframe?

Grandmaster: No. Why would I not like "mainframe?" No, the "S" word!

Topaz: Sorry, the "prisoners with jobs" have armed themselves.

Grandmaster: Okay, that's better.

utborinon Pattern matching accepted for Python

Oh, yikes. I understand what's happening here but this is going to bite a lot of people.

I might be misreading the grammar but it looks like you can produce the desired effect by using an attribute, e.g. the following would perform an equality check, not an assignment:

  match status:
      case requests.codes.not_found:
          return "Not found"

The tutorial seems to confirm this: "This will work with any dotted name (like math.pi). However an unqualified name (i.e. a bare name with no dots) will be always interpreted as a capture pattern"

utborinon Architecture.md

As someone who is in week two of spooling up on a multi-million-line codebase where most of the original authors have moved on to other projects, please, I beg you to heed this advice. I spend the vast majority of my time figuring out where a change needs to happen. The patches themselves are no more than 10% of the work.

(The other significant factor is running tests.)

utborinon Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a dummy: I find anything related to math on Wikipedia to be an incomprehensible nightmare. There's a consistent failure, in my view, to consider the audience. It's like people are writing to impress a technical in-group rather than to inform the general public.

Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/

utborinon I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

That's a legal disclaimer designed to head off a specific commercial legal liability. If you go looking to use law as a foundation for right and wrong, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

utborinon I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit

I understand where this thinking comes from but I still think it's kind of a simplistic attitude. People depend on the technology they use. When you convince someone to rely on something you've produced (and, crucially, continue working on), I think you do actually create a duty to be responsive to them. They depend on your work. Are we really so limited in our ethical thinking that we require an exchange of money to create obligation?

I understand that people can be aggressive, rude, and downright hostile. I'm not suggesting that such behavior be rewarded. Nor am I suggesting that every open source project has to do everything any user says. I do, however, object to the notion that there is no obligation whatsoever between the producer of a technology and the users of that technology, regardless of whether money has changed hands.

utborinon Me and ADHD

I empathize 100% with your frustration. I went through the wringer to get my first medical and have watched a lot of students go through this. It sucks, and there’s no good reason for it to.

utborinon Me and ADHD

Most common medical history items fall under something called CACI: Conditions AMEs Can Issue. (Yes, that's an acronym in an acronym. Welcome to the FAA. AME is the doctor you see for your flight physical, which you probably already know, but other readers might not.) The vast majority of folks walk out of their flight physicals with a medical certificate thanks to CACI.

ADHD does not fall under CACI, and will trigger a deferral to the FAA. The FAA will then refer the applicant to a HIMS AME. (Human Intervention Motivation Study.) HIMS is really about substance abuse, not ADHD, but it's doing double-duty now for things like ADHD and the four conditionally approvable SSRIs. ADHD can also trigger expensive neurocognitive tests ("CogScreen"). So ADHD really is in a separate class of conditions when it comes to getting a medical certificate.

Current use of stimulants is a denial no matter what.

As a flight instructor I think this is completely bonkers. The nature of ADHD is such that if it keeps a person from being able to fly safely, that will show up during training as a failure to meet performance standards. It's completely different from something like a heart condition, where a pilot will fly just fine until suddenly their heart stops. I've taught lots of folks with ADHD diagnoses; almost all of them did great, and the few that didn't were very obviously not able to handle the airplane.

utborinon GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

I promise you people have gotten this right. I have a 198? Mac Plus on my desk that I can boot up and do this on and it will work properly. I’m having trouble even imagining the insane event-processing architecture that results in keystrokes being processed out of order.

Edit: Alright, alright, forget the old computer. My new ones get it right too. All of which is a red herring, because the point is this behavior is ridiculous and never should’ve shipped.

utborinon Apple Backtracks After Popular Mac App 'Amphetamine' Threatened with Removal

I’ve been confused about why this app even exists, for this very reason. I use the built-in facilities to keep my Mac awake.