281–290 of 334 posts
Suppose you've gotten used to doing this and have the pointing and speaking sequence and associated actions such as reading gauges thoroughly memorized. If at that point you replaced actually pointing and speaking with just visualizing and audiolizing [1] that you are pointing and speaking, respectively, would you retain the performance improvements? [1] There does not seem to be a widely accepted word for the audio…
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"I'm locking the door", "I locked the door", "I'm trying the door now to see if I can open it".
The third part is more important than some people think. They might believe you have some sort of OCD episode. But teachers often have more understanding about this, after all the tape that ends up covering the lock-bolt hole so it doesn't lock the door properly... :-)
After thinking about it for a moment, I put my shoulder into the (locked) door and confirmed my suspicion as to why this had been done: the additional space between the magnets weakens the field just enough that you can ram the door and pop it open, but it doesn't weaken it enough that anyone would ever notice otherwise. Pretty clever!
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Does that say 75 feet? How on earth do you survive that?
By landing correctly; mostly not on your head, and not at a bad angle for the spine. Soft ground beneath also helps.
I noticed the problem on myself on several occasions and kind of invented the same solution. For example, sometimes I would take a medicament mechanically while doing something else and just a few minutes later, forget if I took it or not. Solution: say loud to myself "I'm taking a pill". Another: sometimes I'd lend some amount money to a colleague, and a few weeks later I'd have a hard time figuring whether they gav…
Ah, yes. The old upside-down-tomato-sauce-can-next-to-the-door-to-remember-my-umbrella trick. That's always been a classic. The first couple of times I tried it, it didn't work very well. I was trying to leave in the morning, and I tripped over the can, and I was all, "Who the fuck put a can of tomatoes in front of the door?" And I kicked it out of the way and left without my umbrella. Then I realized I wasn't going…
I want to clarify that this is utter bullshit, and that I don't actually do this. Well, most of this. I have easier ways of working from home. Like, I put an event on my boss's calendar that says I'm working from home.
And I hate umbrellas. I fucking hate them. If you live in New York City and you use an umbrella, I want you to go home and die right now.
You have no idea of the space that you are taking up with those things. You have no respect for your fellow humans. I hate you. And I don't want to live in this world with you.
Get a little wet. Don't stab me in the eyeball with your stupid, incompetent umbrella that you aren't paying attention to.
I have a little note next to my door that says: don't take the umbrella--It's a jackass thing to do.
Guess what happens. I never take the umbrella. The tomatoes thing was a joke, for those of you who missed it.
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Writing detailed commit notes can be useful in the same way. I have backed out of a commit during the write up more times than I would like to admit because I realized that I hadn't covered some edge case or I completely forgot about something (like the effect of the change on a report or other sub-system). Writing things out in a way that someone else can understand forces you to re-think through the task in differe…
I've read that adding the "BUGS" section to man pages in the early days of UNIX had a similar impact. The developers got so embarrassed by the content that they decided to fix the bugs instead.
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This technique is also useful for software development, and is referred to as rubber duck debugging ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging ). Verbalizing your problem lends you another point of view to your thinking and often allows you to discover the problem yourself.
Writing detailed commit notes can be useful in the same way. I have backed out of a commit during the write up more times than I would like to admit because I realized that I hadn't covered some edge case or I completely forgot about something (like the effect of the change on a report or other sub-system). Writing things out in a way that someone else can understand forces you to re-think through the task in differe…
But I have another checkpoint. I always diff the code and review it as if I had to show it to a reviewer. If I need to explain something, it should be made better.
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And yet it's a real word, just an uncommon one, so it's not really a correction, but a recommendation to speak differently presented as a correction. That can be fairly easy to take negatively. Personally, if I felt compelled to point out that it was uncommon, I would have said "At first I though medicament was a misspelling or autocorrect mistake, but when I looked it up, I found out it's a real word in English, if…
Yikes, this is the kind of "feedback" that ends in divorce. I would never understand your version was intended as a correction. To me, this comes across as "thanks for teaching me a new word", and I would think "you're welcome".
I suspect readings of it in a negative light are because of the context of the current conversation. Otherwise, I'm not sure how something that is essentially "at first I was confused and thought you were wrong, but then I found out I was the one that was wrong" is supposed to be taken negatively.
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This technique is also useful for software development, and is referred to as rubber duck debugging ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging ). Verbalizing your problem lends you another point of view to your thinking and often allows you to discover the problem yourself.
I take notes when I deal with a hard bug or write a email I never send.
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Ah, yes. The old upside-down-tomato-sauce-can-next-to-the-door-to-remember-my-umbrella trick. That's always been a classic. The first couple of times I tried it, it didn't work very well. I was trying to leave in the morning, and I tripped over the can, and I was all, "Who the fuck put a can of tomatoes in front of the door?" And I kicked it out of the way and left without my umbrella. Then I realized I wasn't going…
Wow. This is by far my most highly rated post on hacker news. I want to clarify that this is utter bullshit, and that I don't actually do this. Well, most of this. I have easier ways of working from home. Like, I put an event on my boss's calendar that says I'm working from home. And I hate umbrellas. I fucking hate them. If you live in New York City and you use an umbrella, I want you to go home and die right now. Y…
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Wow. This is by far my most highly rated post on hacker news. I want to clarify that this is utter bullshit, and that I don't actually do this. Well, most of this. I have easier ways of working from home. Like, I put an event on my boss's calendar that says I'm working from home. And I hate umbrellas. I fucking hate them. If you live in New York City and you use an umbrella, I want you to go home and die right now. Y…
Wow. An umbrella fundamentalist. Is there a law of the internet that for every trivial thing you can find someone with absurdly strong opinions leaving comments about it?
There has to be, it's one of the few constants of the internet.
That said: you merely have to experience umbrellas in a high-density environment a couple times before those opinions are the only rational response. Umbrellas are hostile to everyone within reach. (corollary: whenever that number remains at zero, they're perfectly fine)