Viewing profile — jamestnz

> what I came to call “the Law of Conservation of Ugly”. In many software problems, there’s a part that just is never going to feel elegant This may be an instance of the Waterbed …

The article's author seems to be part of the team behind the Mac disk-cloning/backup utility, SuperDuper. https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

I think OP is engaging with a remark (possibly[1]) from the futurist and writer William Gibson: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed". [1] wording and att…

High infant-mortality rates account for it. If there are 10 births, where 9 of the children die in infancy but 1 lives to be 100 years old, their average life expectancy would be a…

Are labour unions generally done one-off like this in the US? I keep reading stories where individual branches/locations make efforts to unionise, which the company fights off whac…

I'm sure this does happen sometimes, but I print plenty and can't find any such files on my Monterey-running M1. Neither is it true on my Catalina-running Intel Mac. Also, I keep s…

>A tax on revenues would kill a lot of high growth businesses And also low-margin businesses. If you tax a business on its total sales rather than profits, a low-margin and high-vo…

> Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's…

I stumbled upon an unusual policy when trying to order from B&H the first time. They are not open for business on Shabbat (NYC local time), and this includes their online checkout!…

You don't accept that different online communities can have sufficiently different cultures that "memes" are more acceptable in one than the other, even if said communities have so…

> Is this your alter ego on HN? Come now, let's not be obtuse. People naturally behave differently in different social contexts, a thing that is totally normal and expected. For in…

HRV describes the steadiness (or not) of the timing between beats, as measured in milliseconds. It sounds like you are describing something else here, like your resting rate and ho…

The Dollop, an American history podcast, also did an interesting episode on The Landlord's Game: https://soundcloud.com/the-dollop/379-the-landlords-game

This reminds me of a fun story about another unusual failure mode involving some supposedly valid (but highly specific) input content: Where listening to a certain podcast in your …

> Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. This is exactly the view of Canadian woman …

I just got through researching this issue for a client. Apparently it is at least somewhat common, and appears to be caused by RF interference/noise radiating from USB 3.0 ports an…

>In my country, one of the electronics stores has this thing where you pay about 35 USD per month, each month for 24 months, to have a MacBook Air in your possession, but which you…

Interesting comment. > I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect. Is this part accurate? In the (admittedly few) countries where I have spen…

Very impressive! I must say, writing an entire accounting/bookkeeping package seems like a lot of work, especially as a side project. Can I ask what domain-specific knowledge you h…

I agree with you - from a theoretical perspective, it seems pretty crazy to be taking pills that alter the brain chemistry when we don't fully understand the effects those changes …

>The root cause of depression is chemical I wonder if you were speaking generally here, or if you were referring specifically to the Chemical Imbalance theory of depression/anxiety…

In addition to echoing all the dev-related stories in this thread, I have very fond memories from my childhood of playing a 1988 HyperCard-based game called The Manhole (on our SE/…

For those interested in more info on this, it's called Temperature Lag. There's also the related phenomenon of Seasonal Lag, which is where the hottest part of the year comes somew…

The spiral arms are not fixed masses. If they were, they would quickly wind themselves up tighter and tighter, as the inner areas are orbiting faster than the outer parts. Within a…