When I was at university, one professor of electrical engineering would refuse to answer any student who asked whether their answer to a circuit theory problem was correct.
When asked why he would refuse to answer, he would say: "If you aren't confident that your answer is correct, then I would like to mark you as wrong even though you may be right. You are the expert. You should be telling me that your answer is right, not asking me whether it is right."
He would also say that another acceptable answer occasionally might be "Your question is wrong" (along with an explanation as to why it is wrong).
This professor's attitude bothered me at first when I was on the receiving end of this advice, but I have come to regard it as some of the best advice I have received.
Especially in a professional context, I have found that it pays to convince myself that my recommended solution is a good solution, perhaps by confirming it using a few independent methods, and also by anticipating the responses of detractors, and coming prepared with answers to likely objections that others might offer.
To get over the fear of falling over backwards, you must learn to turn your tree trunk like fall into a collapse to a ball and then a forward roll. If you have a bit of muscle on your back and shoulders rolling even on a hard floor should not be too uncomfortable. (A crash mat is still a good idea though.)
You think it's the balance, but consider that the more strength you have, the less balance you need. For example with more forearm strength you will be able to lean further onto your fingertips. With more shoulder, arm, and abdominal strength, starting from a handstand position you will be able to pivot at your shoulders and bend all the way down to a planche position. So work on your strength, and handstands will become a lot easier.
I developed this F1 statistics site using a low-code database app creation tool that I also developed (flatpackapps.com). Constructive feedback is welcome.
I've created a Formula 1 statistics database using a freely available data set.
To create the F1 online database, I used a tool that I developed called Flatpack Apps (flatpackapps.com) That tool will be the subject of a future 'Show HN' submission.
F1 fans might be particularly interested in the 'teammate battles' section. By using this feature, one can get a very good idea of how a driver has progressed throughout his career relative to his teammates.
For example, with Sebastian Vettel having performed poorly last season, many people discount his four world championships (saying his success was mostly due to a dominant car), and discount even further the rating of his teammate at the time Mark Webber, who struggled in those years relative to Vettel.
However, browsing the teammate battles of Mark Webber over his career [1], it is clear that before he was teamed with Seb Vettel, Mark Webber was a stellar performer. He dominated over each one of his seven other teammates in qualifying, including Nico Rosberg and David Coulthard.
I plan to add charts to the teammate battles feature, and have some ideas on how to algorithmically find the best driver of all time using the teammate battles data (which has already been done very well here [2]), but will always be a fun exercise.
I've done quite a bit of unicycling. The better your balance, the less energy is required for balance. I think for a skilled unicyclist the difference in pace compared to being on a fixie would be slight.
Please consider sharing this email exchange with lettersofnote.com. I am not affiliated in any way with that site, but I have found it to be a great source of inspiration and a reminder that very successful people are still people, and often very approachable and kind people. Reading this sort of thing can restore one's faith in humanity, and provide impetus to change one's own behavior towards kindness and generosity.
This is an exam practise website targeted at high school students. I collaborated with my father in developing it. The tech stack is PHP/MySQL/Javascript. No frameworks, just jquery and google charts. Everything else is custom code.
Any feedback or tips on marketing or desired features will be much appreciated :-)
Here's my command-line minesweeper solver, in c++. It is not optimal, but does a pretty good job of solving expert sized minefields. I never worked out what percentage of minefields it solves, because I planned on doing some more work on end game scenarios. That was about ten years ago. The code is quite readable, so may be of interest to fellow coders, and anyone is welcome to extend it if they wish.
I wrote a tool to help with finding good anagrams of the multi-word sort by a semi-automated process. It is limited to anagrams of 15 letters or less, but useful for finding multi-word anagrams from names.