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jtbarrett

Re:Star Trek Starship Enterprise Studio Model on Sunday April 21, 2024 @11:38PM (#40111232)
Interesting that the port side is unfinished; I didn’t realize that we never saw it!
Re:Show HN: Qwertle, yet another daily word game on Monday January 29, 2024 @08:31PM (#39185293)
Hmm maybe not, this is still happening for me.
Re:Show HN: Qwertle, yet another daily word game on Thursday January 25, 2024 @08:53PM (#39138039)
Neat! Bug report: on my iPhone when I quickly double-tap the backspace button it zooms on that element, which is pretty distracting.
That place was casual but not cheap; ~$30 for a lobster roll. It’s out of business now.
Re:Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI on Saturday November 11, 2023 @01:43PM (#38233179)
I spent some time with my kid trying to get ChatGPT 4 to write bedtime stories. We found that it kept devolving into the pattern of a generic but acceptable setup followed by something like "and then the heroes solved a variety of challenges, learning together and having fun all the way" that completely skips the meat of the story. We also noticed that it was difficult to goad the AI into adding any quotations; the characters rarely _say_ anything.

We only tried StoryBee once but unfortunately got a very similar result; judge for yourself: https://storybee.app/story/the-purple-mystery-654fbfe43da40f....

We did have fun with ChatGPT getting ideas for specific plot turns and generating illustrations (e.g. https://photos.app.goo.gl/coonT1bT7BLRqXeu8).

Re:The Last Day of Constantinople on Monday June 26, 2023 @08:14PM (#36487540)
> Now only if I could find the name of this historian.

Is it Hieronymus Wolf?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Wolf

Thank you! This version is much better than that Instagram edit.
Re:E-Paper Wall Paper on Sunday March 19, 2023 @01:45AM (#35216376)
The displays can show black, white and red. He picked a good image for that palette. Still, the dithering was surprisingly effective.
Re:Asynchronous Programming in C# on Friday September 24, 2021 @11:43AM (#28643946)
If this really needs to happen then I like .GetAwaiter().GetResult() instead of .Result to get the same exception behavior as await rather than the wrapped AggregateException that .Result throws. This is especially helpful if DoSomethingAsync sometimes throws synchronously rather than returning a task.
Re:Show HN: Zfs.rent on Thursday November 19, 2020 @06:45PM (#25155790)
I’m not the parent but I built something similar in the Fractal Node 304 which supports six 2.5” drives. Mine’s been going strong for 7 years now.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304

Re:DoorDash S-1 on Friday November 13, 2020 @12:05PM (#25084414)
One thing that frustrates me is that as far as I'm aware none of the delivery apps provide an option for me to tip the restaurant. Especially in these times I want to give some extra support to the workers preparing my meal. The lack of that option is one of the main reasons I usually pick up myself; if any of the delivery apps added the feature I would immediately switch to it!
Re:Apple Sucks Now, Here’s a ThinkPad Buyer’s Guide on Friday October 28, 2016 @05:04PM (#12820693)
You could also consider the Precision 5510 [1] if a Quadro GPU works for you. Essentially an XPS 15 but it includes Intel wifi. Recently got one from work and I've been pretty happy with it.

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

Re:How does the calculator percent key work? (2008) on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @08:22PM (#9455888)
If you're tying to follow along in calc.exe but the percent key is disabled, switch to Standard mode. It's not on in the other modes.
Re:Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups on Thursday December 06, 2012 @08:02PM (#4884887)
I have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain for my small (free) App Engine site: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain

It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.

Re:MySpace, Skype announce partnership (2007) on Wednesday July 06, 2011 @06:53PM (#2736326)
Just FYI, Skype proper (but not on facebook) does support group video chats as a paid extra feature now: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/group-v...
Re:Ask HN: Recommend me a Podcast on Sunday August 01, 2010 @07:35PM (#1566368)
I enthusiastically second this recommendation; Quirks & Quarks has definitely been my favorite podcast recently and is the only one I listen to that holds my attention and interest every single program. It covers a delightfully broad range of scientific topics and while nothing is explored in too much detail, Bob asks interesting and substantiative questions of the serious researchers he has as guests and gives them plenty of time to formulate a complete answer.
Re:Manufactoria - a game about Turing machines on Sunday May 23, 2010 @11:36PM (#1373701)
A tape that ends with three blues still ends with two blues. But fair enough, if there were a test case then there wouldn't be this ambiguity. Anyway, fun little game. I wonder how non-programmers receive it.
Re:My Nightmare Interviews With Google on Friday November 13, 2009 @08:29PM (#941221)
With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidently posted something similar online:

"Our interviews are more to do with practical problem solving, not with puzzles and tricks. Our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance: we are doing quite well at hiring the right people, we believe, and we work hard at analyzing the process. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process." http://www.mv-voice.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=16...

Re:Google UK town that only exists online on Monday November 02, 2009 @05:16PM (#918087)
Oh, that's a pretty small area then. When I saw the map in the article I thought that the suggestion was that all those roads were non-existant. If it's just a blank area of map with a stray label then it's a lot less interesting, but makes a whole lot more sense of course. Thanks for the info.
Re:Google UK town that only exists online on Monday November 02, 2009 @03:20PM (#917790)
No street view, but the satellite images match the allegedly non-existant streets shown in the article's screenshot. Curious.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

Re:Ask HN: What do you think makes a good teacher? on Friday August 14, 2009 @02:06PM (#763510)
Definitely agree, but I've had lecturers who take this too far. My intro. quantum physics professor was a brilliant and accomplished researcher at the bleeding edge of this field whose most basic concepts were deeply mysterious to us students. We appreciated the passion and keep knowledge that informed each of his tangents, but they were pretty impenetrable and very frequently distracted from the material at hand. I left the class thinking he was a brilliant man but fairly poor teacher. Then I had had him the next semester in thermodynamics and he turned out to be great! Certainly he had plenty of knowledge of the field, but he kept the class somewhere within the scope of the syllabus and relayed the foundations to us much more carefully. He focused on teaching, not the material itself.

The GEB lectures you linked are an interesting example in themselves. The early tangents that the teachers launch into on their own are certainly helpful, especially in such a free-form class. But student questions and tangents soon dominate that class too, to the point that I found it quite unbearable. When there is interesting material to be discussed they continually relapse into tired speculations of the "well maybe the universe is just a giant computer simulation" sort. The last lecture in particular is completely dominated, and in my opinion ruined, by questions from the most persistent student. A teacher needs to take charge and keep the class on track. Perhaps in a real class Justin would have.

Re:Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google on Saturday May 09, 2009 @06:40PM (#601525)
I didn't see any examples of a case where design was "held back by a tyranny of data" in the article. Maybe a data-centric view is cumbersome, but Google clearly feels strongly that it's worth the price.

Designers should be free to create something innovative, but I see no problem with judging the results with real metrics.

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but it sounds like he's suggesting using AdWords to do some quick A|B tests to solidify a position and confirm assumptions. Sure, the low-QS page will perform poorly in absolute terms, and it will be difficult to extract meaningful raw information; but it could still be helpful to compare the relative performance of a few nearly identical ads that point to the same content.