exchemist · HackerTrans

3개월 전discuss

I have never driven a tractor, but clearly remember our headmaster giving us this exact lecture when I was about 8. This in a town of 20,000 people where I expect not even 2% of the kids would even visit a farm outside of an organised trip, but clearly an important enough message to be worth broadcasting.

exchemist

4개월 전discuss

Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?

More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).

There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.

Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)

exchemist

작년discuss

This is cool, though the notes in your example look pretty random? Are they actually randomly or is it just too modern for me to hear it without playing it?

I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative) strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music is doing something different or interesting and making sure you hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or expound on it).

I think what really helped my reading was having lots of cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)

exchemist

2년 전discuss

To my enormous relief, the Samsung stove that came with our house gets this right - even covered in water the controls still work. I was previously dead-against induction just because I couldn't find a good quality stove-top with physical buttons, to the point where I'd already budgeted replacing it with gas when we bought the house. I don't know how they've done it, but it's the only one I've ever used that manages. (For comparison, the high-end Miele and cheap-and-cheerful non-branded ones I've used in various rental houses over the last 20 years have all had exactly the problem you describe above).

exchemist

2년 전discuss

When I'm making a throwaway interface like this, I write the GET handler to return a super-minimal page with an unstyled form having method=POST and the couple of inputs required. The POST handler actions the request and redirects to itself to GET the form again - browsers are so forgiving of incomplete/incorrect markup and the base browser style-sheet screams "this is a prototype, don't judge it!" to anybody you show it to.

To be clear I'm just talking about the web interface, not implying the whole project is throwaway - on the contrary it looks like a lot of work (and a lot of fun :) ) kudos!

exchemist

2년 전discuss

I think this "lisp as a python one-liner" has come up before:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pcorbett/yvfc.html

The author was a labmate, and the person who introduced me to python. Taking over one of his codebases was rather a formative part of my career. (That particular code was considerably more normal than the one linked above).

exchemist

2년 전discuss

Also for me, both on Firefox and Edge - I'm wondering if it's to do with being behind a corporate proxy that MITMs everything and might be buffering rather than passing through partial respones, or has a much higher threshold before streaming?

If that is the reason, it'll provide an (even more than usually) poor experience for those behind such a proxy

exchemist

3년 전discuss

I was quite annoyed when I dropped my 13yo one and broke the handle. Then I discovered they sell replacement handles! 5 minutes with a hammer and punch later and it should be good for another 13 years (or till I next drop it)

exchemist

3년 전discuss

This is often said, but I don't think it should paint too rosy a picture, it's still a massively debilitating disease. My father (diagnosed just after 50) lived nearly 30 years with it (died 78 - I guess that's normal life expectancy, but the last decade of his life he had a pretty bad quality of life). He is unusual in that his death cert just says Parkinson's Disease as cause of death, and I wondered at the time whether the consultant was making a point that PD can be the thing that kills you after all. He really didn't have much else wrong with him except that, once the drugs stopped working he couldn't swallow, talk or walk - he lost a ton of weight and the dementia side of it (which is far less discussed) meant any kind of communication was basically impossible. Not sure what my point is - but "you don't die of it" is a bit of an oversimplification.

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