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EvanKelly

Re:Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:21PM (#41767604)
I've struggled through 2 or 3 Marquez books in Spanish (I'm far from fluent), and have read all of them in English. Gregory Rabassa was an excellent translator and ,from my unexpert point of view, captured the essence of Marquez' work.

Translated literature is interesting and I've recently read a few differing views on the "best" translations of Homer.

I've resigned myself that I simply must trust the masses in some places and I won't be learning Russian to read Tolstoy authentically.

What is your preferred method of searching the internet? (not asking with snark, but genuine interest in what people find delivers better results)
Re:Exploratory Data Analysis Using Awk on Friday October 06, 2023 @03:50PM (#37795407)
I'm at this point 15 years removed, but Prof Kernighan was one of the most accessible professors and taught the most popular CS survey course (333).

I have at least a half a dozen times where I was pointed his direction from another professor and Kernighan spent an hour with me looking into how to scrape a dynamic website for my auction theory project. When he was stumped he introduced me to a professor at another school who he knew had looked into the topic.

Re:Through a Glass Darkly on Monday June 26, 2023 @07:10PM (#36487065)
What would it mean for an AI to beat the best humans in a 5K race? Obviously robots can do that, is there some definition of "humanoid AI robot" which exists for such a task?
Re:Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @04:36PM (#35158091)
That's a new term for me, but after researching it, it makes sense. What are your preferred sources of comprehensible input. After a few months on Duolingo I still find TV shows to mostly not be comprehensible, so not productive.
Re:Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @04:33PM (#35158035)
Interesting, I am a Super Duolingo subscriber but I don't think that's one of the features. Anywhere I'm inputting a sentence I think I get the keyboard option, maybe I'm misremembering, but I do a lot of typing on my Japanese keyboard when I study.
Not only Amazon, but the rise of ebooks in general. While there are still a lot of holdouts, I think every voracious reader in my family has switched at least some of their reading to ebooks. The ease of acquiring ebooks from the library through Overdrive/Libby means I treat the trip to the bookstore as an exploratory treat rather than an errand to buy the next book in the series
Re:The 1857 Utah War on Monday August 08, 2022 @06:10PM (#32391741)
Beer info is out of date as well. Beer up to 5% can be sold at grocery stores with no day/time restrictions - which covers quite a lot of beer. High gravity beer (>5%) can be purchased at liquor stores or at the brewery (no time/day restrictions on brewery sales).

It's onerous sometimes, and often weird, but it's no more difficult to purchase liquor in Utah than in a state like Virginia.

Re:The 1857 Utah War on Monday August 08, 2022 @03:40PM (#32390070)
They do have a strong hold, but they absolutely do not hold every seat. Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County districts are great examples.
Re:Gas Pump Golf on Friday January 07, 2022 @04:46PM (#29845274)
To be fair, there are many fewer deaths by wild dog/bear attack while pumping gas in NJ: https://www.cc.com/video/fz0xoa/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...
Re:Understanding Awk on Thursday September 30, 2021 @01:28PM (#28708832)
Lots of great AWK tutorials in here that are more in depth, but I'll share another. I always go back to Brian Kernighan's personal help file:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring19/cos333...

Brian Kernighan has a knack for explaining languages very precisely and elegantly.

I've always wanted to understand how a game like this actually runs, but always struggled with navigating through a project. I'm adept at reading and understanding code, but struggle to understand aa big project like this.

Where does one start when looking at a github like this - where's the "game loop" actually live?

Re:Complex game worlds, simple text interfaces (2015) on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @05:11PM (#27765775)
Maybe not quite what you're talking about, but https://www.nationstates.net/ is almost like Model UN the game. Played a bit with friends back in the day, but missing some of the mechanics of Civ
Re:Complex game worlds, simple text interfaces (2015) on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @02:13PM (#27764116)
Perhaps it was just the time in my life that I played it, but the most immersive experience I had playing a game was a text based MUD called Achaea. I've tried to recapture that experience unsuccessfully.

The lack of focus on graphics meant that complexity of description and systems didn't need to have visual work to go along with it, which allowed for much more complex systems than I'd seen in any game at the time.

Why is that weird? Attorneys in this are working on behalf of the US Government. If they feel like settling gets the best deal for the government, then they do that.
I've eaten/drank parts of co-workers lunches unwittingly thinking they were part of the community food/beverage selection.

I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.

I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.

Re:10,000 steps a day: Might there be something better? on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @07:57AM (#16273460)
Anecdotally it's a bit of an interesting statistic for me where after a particularly active day (or a day as a tourist) it's interesting to see how many steps were registered. I'm not doing it for fitness. It's no burden since it comes for free with just wearing my watch. I probably wouldn't do it if I didn't have a smart watch for other reasons.

On the other hand, my mother is a bit compulsive about her fitbit, though I see some real benefit. On days where she sees she's below her target, she opts to walk when she otherwise wouldn't or goes outside for a walk to make sure she meets the target. It's definitely causing her to be healthier than she otherwise would be.

Re:Interview with Susan Fowler on Sunday October 22, 2017 @07:07AM (#15526190)
I'm glad the website you linked credited that "myth" correctly. I was surprised when I moved to the Netherlands that no one had ever heard of this child with his finger in the dyke to save the town.
Re:Binary Puzzle on Friday June 23, 2017 @10:46AM (#14619535)
Ha, oops, my wording was bad...I meant I had it on my phone...not my app and I just searched the app store. I'll change my link.

EDIT: No way to edit old posts, but the link I posted is obviously a rip-off of the Q42 app linked elsewhere.

Re:Binary Puzzle on Friday June 23, 2017 @08:33AM (#14618663)
Oh Hi (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.presto.ohh...) is an app I have that has these puzzles.

Simple rules and can get surprisingly difficult.

Re:Late sleepers are tired of being discriminated against on Thursday March 31, 2016 @12:00PM (#11398125)
That's exactly what happens to me. When I was living in Honolulu and traveling to the East Coast a lot, I would be a night owl on the east coast and then would have the wonderful experience of being a morning person for about a 2 week period before I reverted back to being definitively not a morning person.
Re:Meeting People Is Easy, but Hard on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @08:00PM (#11349437)
I once received advice on smalltalk that's been interestingly useful.

The advice was to ask questions could be answered with a number. Like "How long have you lived in New York?" or "How many siblings do you have?"

On the surface those don't seem great at stimulating conversation, but people seem to automatically expand on the number they give since they feel it deserves explanation.

I've used it several times when I've been set adrift at a cocktail party without a conversational thread to pull on.

Re:The Madness of Airline Élite Status on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @11:43AM (#11160138)
I've occasionally gotten to a lounge access tier, but I've never used it. What's the benefit? I typically don't want to get to the airport earlier than I have to, and once you're at that level, security and boarding are a breeze.

I don't fly internationally much, so most of my flights are direct. Is it mostly for layovers?

I think they're suggesting that someone snooping the encrypted traffic coming from the ASA couldn't leverage this vulnerability for easier decryption. (i.e. this is an active, not passive vulnerability).

That's probably clear when they say it allows RCE, but who knows.

Re:What It Feels Like to Freeze on National Television on Thursday February 11, 2016 @05:35PM (#11083869)
Performers with stage fright have been using beta blockers for year as an off-label treatment for performance anxiety.

A doctor friend of mine passed along a recent NY Times article about how beta blockers may actually be able to cure the autonomous nervous system response and re-train the brain to not panic in otherwise panic inducing situations.

It's very exciting research and it's great to see non-psychoactive drugs used to combat mental issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-c...

Re:MH370 search team finds second shipwreck on Thursday January 14, 2016 @11:03AM (#10902161)
Surely we have the technology to record the full flight? I do understand pilot privacy, but couldn't we only listen to it in case of an incident?

Anyone in the air travel industry understand why it is limited to 30 minutes?

I think they were trying to have it parse as close to "A Tale of Two Cities" as possible. I agree it didn't work very well.
Re:Owner of Peet's to buy Keurig for almost $14B on Monday December 07, 2015 @03:50PM (#10692590)
K-Cups are a really interesting product to me as someone who loves coffee.

We have almost every different way of making coffee at our office (normal machine, chemex, french press, aeropress, big machine that grinds beans fresh and makes cup in ~40 sec) and people still use the K-cup machine.

I know that most of those methods are a bit more time intensive and daunting, but we have a big machine that makes a cup from fresh beans with one button push. I've talked to my co-workers and a lot of them simply like the K-cup coffee better. To me, it's almost objectively worse coffee, but people still love it.

I'm not sure whether it's branding or just what they're used to, but if you give people the option of coffee from a pot or from a k-cup, it seems they'll almost invariably choose the k-cup.

Re:The Donut Hustle on Monday October 19, 2015 @05:03PM (#10415725)
"Honestly, I think that philosophy is why I was able to make it to UCLA and have a long NBA career. A lot of dudes have a good jump shot. A lot of dudes can play ball. But how many guys are willing to put in the extra work that it takes? At this level, you have to be almost addicted to the work."

I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.

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