Viewing profile — kqr

I find the recommendation in favour of discrete categories over numeric probability for confidence level intriguing, because it goes against the grain of all advice I've read for h…

This was RyanAir's CEO. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/28/ryanair-sta...

> On one particular Friday afternoon, he stated a conjecture that he hoped was true, and invited us to try to help him prove or disprove it. This kind of professor/researcher/teach…

I agree. I didn't mean to imply the article should have stated that. I just wanted to add to the article with additional context that's hopefully helpful to some HN readers.

The article doesn't really state why one would do this, so here's my reason: I'm the sort of person who likes to challenge myself to geometrical problems, but I'm not good enough a…

I was thinking of the British Empire. Their naval technology was superior enough to overpower the distance term. I was under the impression the Dutch didn't really wage interstate …

It's not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Because they are fighting on the other side of the world. I feel like the article glosses over this way too quickly. It's not surprising the…

On a similar note, people are way too precious about their dead-tree books. Feel free to chuck them in bags, make notes in the margins, fold pages, underline, and strike through te…

Not a single 24-hour analogue face? That unexpectedly turned into one of the best reasons I keep carrying my smartwatch.

Because for it to be effective it must have reasonable cost compared to the benefit. The cost for such a sweeping lifestyle adjustment seems quite high, and the authors have not sh…

The article never says anything about causation. It says sleep regularity is a predictor of mortality. That means if you find someone who already has poor sleep regularity they're …

Self-stopping is called autonomation (or jidoka) in lean/Toyota terms. It's born out of the realisation that automation is capable of producing mistakes at a very high rate, so any…

Vaguely related realisation I had a couple of years ago: if you don't need a complicated mobile app, but just something simple for your own use, you can write and run Perl scripts …

Not only must there be trust, but there must also be a resolve to make deeper fixes to problems surfaced through the andon system. It's a typical mistake to forget that part. If th…

That one probably comes from maths, where surfaces show up all the time in geometric interpretations of things. I've been involved in more mathsy parts of engineering and I've hear…

I see why you're confused. Some of these tags carry nutritional information, so it's easy to assume they all do. The healthy tag is about marketing. It's a product positioning stat…

Fun fact: this procedure word is meant to be sent as a single symbol with no inter-letter spacing.

Depends on how it is used! Recording speech nearly verbatim is bad for retention; summarising in own words along the way is good for retention. Longhand forces summarisation, but i…

For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but ther…

I used to read a lot when I was small but then fell out of the habit. Rekindled it with my first child. With them I spent a lot of time walking around at all hours of the day to ge…