btrettel

54 ms·

511.
by btrettel 7y ago
> > Who builds a pipe gun out of a plastic pipe? It would just blow up in your hands. > Someone who's aware that when a metal pipe bursts, you get shrapnel. > The potato guns I've seen tend to be made from plastic pipe
512.
by btrettel 7y ago
What are the available solutions to the problem of locating other copies of webpages or documents online? (Let's assume that the page of interest is not on the Internet Archive.) This article mentions a few: > I was able to find the
513.
by btrettel 7y ago
> It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics. I think experimental evidence helps, but if you look at the physical sciences mor
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by btrettel 7y ago
By "for scientists" they seem to mean "for biomedical scientists".
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by btrettel 7y ago
As a cyclist, I try to avoid many professional drivers because I understand them to be under time pressure that often makes them drive dangerously, as this article discusses. I hadn't realized that deferred maintenance could make them
516.
by btrettel 7y ago
> the only things I pay attention anymore are methodology and data. > This tells me: is the data relevant to my work? And was the data collected "properly" (I swear, half the time the researchers half-ass methodology that th
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by btrettel 7y ago
While I can't speak to the accuracy of the book criticized, science in general is riddled with similar problems. Follow the citation trail and you'll often find that a cited article doesn't say what was claimed or says someth
518.
by btrettel 7y ago
From what I've read taller height is negatively correlated with many health outcomes: https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/height-and-longevity-th...
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by btrettel 7y ago
How can a culture of checking for errors be developed where none exists?
520.
by btrettel 7y ago
What are the jobs you have in mind? Software testers? Academic peer review rarely catches these sorts of errors and those peer reviewers aren't paid.
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by btrettel 7y ago
Unfortunately most commercial engineering software is probably too general to know to check whether the sub floats or not automatically. That would require reading the engineer's mind. That check would need to be at least turned on by
522.
by btrettel 7y ago
> Maybe people in your experience don't do that for math or code, but it's a clear bright line standard, either you do it, because the task is important to get right or you don't, because it doesn't really matter. &gt
523.
by btrettel 7y ago
Any good tricks for catching these sorts of errors? I'm a theoretical fluid dynamicist. When doing math I'll typically check the dimensions, order of magnitude, bounds, functional dependencies (anything missing or something there
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by btrettel 7y ago
These types of chairs are basically everywhere in Austin, TX. I actually sat on one earlier today at a cafe. (Probably was a knockoff as it had 4 vertical struts.)
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by btrettel 7y ago
Fair point. I wouldn't have done it that way, but sounds like you're on track. Good luck.
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by btrettel 7y ago
GitHub itself works fine for science. I see no particularly compelling reason to use an science-oriented service given that people are more likely to be familiar with GitHub. Here's an example (or shameless plug): I use GitHub to share
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by btrettel 7y ago
> Unconventional replies cause escalation Not in my experience with FOIA requests. They likely have a process. Your request will be fulfilled either if they can't find a reason to deny it or if fulfilling it is easy for them. Since
528.
by btrettel 7y ago
Wikipedia seems to be an okay reference on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis Google mostly returned SEO garbage on this for me.
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by btrettel 7y ago
Any advice for working with people who insist that I should "know something already" that's not obvious and/or was never communicated?
530.
by btrettel 7y ago
It's not clear. He was preparing to make a left turn anyway, so he would have to move left at some point. I think he moved left prematurely, without checking for oncoming traffic. Maybe he was also trying to avoid the other cyclist, I
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by btrettel 7y ago
> Cops have already a lot of work and probably didn't care about your case. In the video you clearly turned around and followed the guy hundreds of yards. Almost hit me or whatever...not suggesting that he should have threatened you
532.
by btrettel 7y ago
I didn't. The police did with a subpoena.
533.
by btrettel 7y ago
I'm not sure video ever went as far as many people think it does in terms of criminal prosecution. My experience suggests that video alone is often not enough for a conviction. I'm one of the increasing number of helmet camera cyc
534.
by btrettel 7y ago
While I agree that checking source code and running software is relatively easier than running experiments, there's more to science than experiments. Many wrong things in science are even easier to identify than the "easy" ca
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by btrettel 7y ago
There's a blog specifically dedicated to highlighting examples of plain text storage of passwords too: https://plaintextoffenders.com/
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by btrettel 7y ago
Thanks for mentioning UnicodeMath. That does seems like a better fallback solution than raw MathML. It appears there's a newer version of the document you linked to that was posted on HN, by the way: https://news.ycombinator
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by btrettel 7y ago
I agree with you entirely on the abandoning of conventions with HTML. I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does n
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by btrettel 7y ago
I appreciate your reply. Seems Markdown is more complex than I recognized and this just makes me want to avoid it more. If you do find the rant you mentioned, let me know. > HTML has ... proved less robustly stable over the 25+ years I&#
539.
by btrettel 7y ago
This is one reason why the static site generator I use for my personal website uses HTML rather than something like Markdown. I don't think Markdown is going anyway, incidentally, or that it would be hard to process on my own if I need
540.
by btrettel 7y ago
As I recall the Library of Congress also has some digital subscriptions on-site, though not Elsevier. One subscription the Library of Congress has that Libgen and Scihub don't have is ProQuest, so you can download theses and dissertati

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