AstroDogCatcher · HackerTrans

AstroDogCatcher

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AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Yes. First experienced TMJ pain as a teenager and almost overdosed on painkillers while trying to get rid of it at 3AM. Still recurrs about 2-3 times per year, but I've now learned to feel it coming on much earlier and start loading up on codiene in advance.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Thanks - fascinating stuff. I'm now even more convinced I want to give it a try, but I think I'll play around with public data and tutorials before leaping into home sequencing.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Interested outsider here; I work with a lot of HCLS research customers but don't have a biology-related background. Can you explain the problems with the Nanopore sequencer accuracy in more detail? Basically, I was wondering if I could get one for myself and sequence my own genome, then user the data to learn about life-sciences computing techniques. If I were to buy one of the USB-attachable devices and run it, is the data simply not viable for use in a genomics pipeline, or is it just that the results would be questionable? Also, if accuracy is an issue, what about just running the same sample N times and doing some error correction?

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Exactly the same situation in the UK - snow is common but rarely persistent enough to justify the infrastructure investment to deal with it. Also, having an excuse to combine moaning about the weather with moaning about our inept government is basically enough to trigger a collective national orgasm.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

As a recent Mac adopter after spending 10 years as a Linux user, Homebrew is exactly what I need it to be.

Linux OS package managers are, almost by necessity, full of outdated packages which are not the versions I want to use for day-to-day CLI applications. Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages all have their own downsides due to half-baked isolation goals and the associated usability compromises. Language-specific package managers are a mixed bag, but too narrow in scope when thinking about usage of tools rather than development based on libraries. Maybe Nix or the Arch AUR are a better option, but they come with a learning curve and/or stability compromise. I don't care how the packages are arranged on my Mac; the system is too locked down for me to really have the level of control I'd like anyway, so better to just accept the usability advantages and get on withy life.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

In a cloud setting, I guess having user /home dirs on separate volumes from the root disk and having them relocatable is a reasonable analogue. The real issue is that much like the pen drive thing, absolutely no-one actually does this.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

The key difference is that one of these things has the backing and approval of recognized governments who also control law enforcement, while the other is just some guys on the internet. I'm not so sure "finding a pre-existing bitcoin wallet I can claim, and doing so" is really any different than "generating hashes until the blockchain hands me a prize".

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Suggesting the explanation provided is insufficiently clear, no?

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Julia has some nice ideas but it is time for a do-over as a fully open language (ie without the commercial backer actively upselling in their mailing list), and with the "time to first plot" and package management problems addressed.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

The latter - the results are astoundingly bad. You should remove that demo ASAP.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

I just tried the demo sketch thing on the Gradio site and it wasn't able to correctly interpret a single digit I tried, even after 6 or 7 attempts with different values. Serious question - is this a spoof site? I find it hard to believe character recognition can be that bad, in a marketing demo no less.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

At this point I think if you desperately need MS Office, MacOS is the way to go. I will never buy a Windows machine again, and being forced to use it in a work setting would be a deal-breaker. Fortunately at this point even MS isn't stupid enough to make that a requirement as far as I'm aware.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Perhaps we should put computers inside each businesses location, to minimize the blast radius of any specific outage and make people take responsibility for their own stack.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

I am mildly opposed to technology advocacy actually, but that is besides the point. Dev advocates are paid to market software and tools, and everyone knows their inherent bias and can factor it in when assessing their claims. When someone is pro-bitcoin, it is impossible to know whether they have a genuine interest in the technology (divorced from use-cases), a desire to see a new financial system come into being (regardless of the technical mechanism), some mixture of both, or if they have the literal definition of a vested interest like the dev advocate and just want to see their coin values increase for monetary gain. Most importantly, that final group get away with lying and other questionable behaviour because unlike with the paid advocate, there is no-one (ie an employer) to hold them accountable for their bullshitting.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

I understood you perfectly; I simply don't agree. Your model for decision-making bears no resemblance to reality at Amazon or anywhere else.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

This is nothing to do with one-way/two-way door decisions, you are conflating that concept with an understanding of "unintended consequences" in order to take a cheap shot at Amazon. Ordinarily I'd enjoy that as much as the next person, but this case is too ham-fisted to leave unchallenged.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

I am mostly indifferent to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, but strongly opposed to people shilling for them. I see no evidence thus far for bitcoin being anything other than a vehicle for speculation; just one more form of gambling with the froth on top of our financial system, distracting people and diverting resources from actual useful activity.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

Bitcoin being legal tender in certain places seems like more of a negative indicator on those countries, rather than a positive indicator for bitcoin.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

I'm a regular employee but at a professional services org - you basically described how I generate my timesheets.

The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.

To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.

The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.

AstroDogCatcher

5년 전discuss

For some customers, I imagine this will start off as an emotionally-driven request...until they see the price.