jwecker

10 ms·

31.
by jwecker 12y ago
Give 240cm or 360cm a name (like STL for "standard-timber-length", 1 stl = 240 cm) and you're effectively doing the exact same thing as the imperial system. Then it's just a popularity contest (which is fine and appropri
32.
by jwecker 12y ago
I would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don&#x2
33.
by jwecker 12y ago
I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for (a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact that
34.
by jwecker 12y ago
Totally. "Science" requires precision because science in many ways is the mechanism by which we learn truths with greater and greater precision. That doesn't mean though that science naturally abhors imprecise "for-scale
35.
by jwecker 12y ago
As you've illustrated, we've come to value precision over intuition. The reason people using metric don't feel like they're missing something without organic units is because people who use the relics of those organic un
36.
by jwecker 12y ago
In my (admittedly limited) experience with peering I've never seen a contract. Lots of ad-hoc verbal agreements, and occasionally emails outlining a mutual understanding, but because it so often is obviously beneficial to both parties
37.
by jwecker 12y ago
In the context of clever startup solutions, this brings to mind the quote from George S Patton: "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week." Even if they didn't approach optimal sol
38.
by jwecker 12y ago
Justin.tv was part of the summer 2007 y-combinator batch (with dropbox and disqus among others). Twitch branched off of justin.tv a few years ago (I think technically part of the same legal entity at the moment but I'm not sure- they w
39.
by jwecker 13y ago
The fact that there's no immediate obvious answer is what makes it by definition clever.
40.
by jwecker 13y ago
In my experience people are usually far less passionate about making a bunch of money than they think they are (there are those who really are passionate about the abstract idea of making money or are truly passionate about some derived ben
41.
by jwecker 13y ago
Giving a perpetual royalty free license to anything you may ever patent for the rest of your life because of a subtle loophole in a license that people aren't generally aware of is, IMO, new and outrageous, irrespective of the utility
42.
by jwecker 13y ago
I don't believe a single stated "No" in the FAQ will be very meaningful, except to point out that even the creators of the license failed to notice the loophole. Edit: Also, the fact that the interpretation can exist and is i
43.
by jwecker 13y ago
Brilliant. From the live office webcams page (where you have the option to taunt specific employees): "Are those traffic lights real? Yes! There is another set of traffic lights, hidden to the left of the camera, too! They keep my staf
44.
by jwecker 14y ago
So by saying 'cannot _always_ work,' and 'very unlikely to work,' you are implicitly conceding the point- that it is possible. The question then becomes, given the size of the OS environment space (and the quality of the randomness in the o
45.
by jwecker 14y ago
Classic compilation. Always check for cpu builtin functions (rtfm gcc) first though when you need this kind of optimization "in real life."
46.
by jwecker 14y ago
To me this is where the real complications come in, especially when trying to do something portable. From comments in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4369485 - Linux behavior vs. OSX (or, differences between terminal emulators): http
47.
by jwecker 14y ago
Indeed. https://github.com/josephwecker/bashrc_dispatch - thanks to gioele for already doing some cleanups and speedups.
48.
by jwecker 14y ago
Good call. Merged into the repo https://github.com/josephwecker/bashrc_dispatch . Thanks!
49.
by jwecker 14y ago
Kind of... That's pretty much what mine had evolved into, a bunch of them sourcing each other and making sure they weren't recursively sourced for when they're used on a different OS/machine, with complex conditionals to re-detect if it was
50.
by jwecker 14y ago
So I admit it's a 10 minute hack done on my way home on the train, but the issue is real even if you understand the man page. Here's roughly the way these work normally. Starting with "login" bash invocation- which means: * On linux, usuall
51.
Show HN: A fix for the .bash_profile .bashrc .profile madness(gist.github.com)
173 points by jwecker 14y ago|42 comments
52.
by jwecker 14y ago
It's more than a common pattern- they are lowercase numerals, even if they don't get used much. Although I see what you meant by random in the sense that lowercase 'g' "randomly" descends while lowercase 'l' randomly ascends.
53.
by jwecker 14y ago
How is it a rebuttal? Pogue's primary complaint was the weakness of the new magnet versus the old 90º magnet. In fact, he specifically says that the last incarnation (which was a T-shaped- just with a stronger magnet) was the ideal balance,
54.
by jwecker 14y ago
kind of. They are obviously vague predictions, which is kind of a cop-out / cheating. But after reading how silly all the specific predictions seemed, even when correct, I got to thinking about things with a strong historical precedence- th
55.
by jwecker 14y ago
2037 Some promising technologies will still be struggling along in 2037. Others have disappeared or been replaced completely. No matter how miraculous and marvelous the advances that have happened though, society will have managed to consid
56.
by jwecker 14y ago
I had a similar experience. I forked ffmpeg on github and fixed a few bugs that I was sure no one would care about but us. I figured I'd polish it up over a couple of weeks and send a patch for possible inclusion upstream. But the next morn
57.
by jwecker 15y ago
They're just warnings. I got the same ones but it still created a perfectly good executable. (you kind of have to assume warnings with obfuscated code :)
58.
by jwecker 15y ago
The key untested question then, I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting. I think it would be pretty easy to show that there exist teams of 5 that outperform teams of 1,000 (certainly teams of 20 outpe
59.
by jwecker 15y ago
"If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers?" The 5, in a heart-beat. If you were painting a mural on the ceiling of a large structure that you
60.
by jwecker 15y ago
Looking through it I don't see it as a replacement for reset except in a few cases. In particular, most of the stuff in there (great documentation, btw) seems to be oriented toward fixing strange browser quirks not covered by reset. For exa

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