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Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

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Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#331

Post by myself248 »

giantDinosaur wrote: post #288
myself248 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since hearing about point-and-call, I've started using it in the kitchen when turning on the stove. I used to destroy one or two pans a year by turning on the wrong burner, but it's now been about a year and a half and I haven't screwed it up yet. The knobs are labeled with a terrible little glyph meant to indicate which is which, and I've supplemented this with plain-english Brady labels "front left", "front ri…

I'm curious how exactly you managed to destroy pans. I've never destroyed a pan in my life, and take no particular precautions - is this a common thing? Is this more common with non-stick stuff or something?

The non-stick ones especially, but even plain metal pans will warp if they get hot enough. And then they don't sit flat on the burner, which might not matter on a gas stove, but contact with an electric burner is pretty important.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#332

Post by m463 »

csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

> forcing a cache miss in the brain

That is an interesting way of looking at it.

I think a router analogy might be more precise - more like fast path / slow path - where when most packets come in they hit the fast path in hardware, and slow path exception packets get handled by the cpu.

:)

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#333

Post by tatersolid »

mjevans wrote: post #273
tatersolid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the rare but critical manual SQL mod our common safety measure is to wrap every DELETE or UPDATE in BEGIN TRAN...ROLLBACK TRAN first. Run on test systems or snapshots multiple times, checking the result inside the transaction. Finally, change ROLLBACK to COMMIT only when you are positive all is well.

IIRC (without checking the manuals) data-definition commands might not be covered by such transactions: such as altering, dropping tables and possibly truncates.

DDL is transactional in Microsoft SQL Server as well.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#334

Post by Aeolun »

chrisseaton wrote: post #293
Aeolun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing A cannot be the right thing to do if you think doing B is still impossible. If you cannot kill your friend to kill a few hundreds of thousands more, how can it possibly be justified? I just struggle to come up with a scenario where that is the case. Of course I’m of the school that thinks firing nuclear weapons is never a good idea.

But ‘know you should’ is not the same as ‘can physically bring yourself to do it’.

If you cannot bring yourself to cut one person open (for the good of all) you have zero business launching nuclear weapons (for the good of all).

I kind of feel like we’re going in circles though, so maybe better to just stop here :)

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#335

Post by jpcooper »

tialaramex wrote: post #217
greenyoda wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video doesn't really explain why conductors point at the signs - it just says "to prove they're paying attention". Paying attention to what? The answer is that they are verifying that the train is correctly positioned in the station so that all of the doors will open on the platform. Explained here: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-conductors-point-st...

This comes up every few weeks on HN but nobody has ever offered any statistics that would suggest this is as good let alone better than just having the trains handle alignment automatically. It's a task humans are bad at and machines are good at, so just giving it to machines makes more sense, modulo unions. London Underground hasn't had guards for decades at this point, and the Docklands Light Railway hasn't even ha…

Actually what exactly is the member of staff doing on the DLR that is necessary, other than answering tourists' questions and putting a triangular key into a receptacle at every stop and then turning it? I have not been able to figure this out.

In the Netherlands, the NS has two types of trains that go between towns. Intercity and Sprinter. Sprinters have someone who will walk onto the platform at every stop, or failing that, lean out of the carriage, verify that no one is getting in, and then step into the train again to put the key into the receptacle and then turn it. Following that, the doors close. In contrast, there is no such person on Intercity trains; they do fine without. There may be a conductor who checks tickets. In comparison to the DLR, both Sprinter and Intercity trains have drivers.

Is there some requirement or function that I am missing that requires a dedicated member of staff to perform this key-turning ritual at every stop on the DLR and Sprinter, or is this simply to appease the unions?

It could be that Sprinters are meant to be more lenient towards people running to get on than Intercities, which might have a stricter schedule.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#336

Post by tialaramex »

jpcooper wrote: post #335
tialaramex wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up every few weeks on HN but nobody has ever offered any statistics that would suggest this is as good let alone better than just having the trains handle alignment automatically. It's a task humans are bad at and machines are good at, so just giving it to machines makes more sense, modulo unions. London Underground hasn't had guards for decades at this point, and the Docklands Light Railway hasn't even ha…

Actually what exactly is the member of staff doing on the DLR that is necessary, other than answering tourists' questions and putting a triangular key into a receptacle at every stop and then turning it? I have not been able to figure this out. In the Netherlands, the NS has two types of trains that go between towns. Intercity and Sprinter. Sprinters have someone who will walk onto the platform at every stop, or fail…

It's a GoA 3 system, so it isn't designed to be safe without a human staff member on every train. There are GoA 4 systems which do not need a human but the DLR isn't one, so while it would seem to operate normally if you just let passengers operate the doors - when anything goes wrong those passengers are in trouble because the system design assumes a trained member of staff is there to fix it and now there isn't.

That triangular key opens a panel by the front left seats of the train, which reveals a complete set of controls for manually driving the train which that member of staff is trained to use. If the GoA 3 system has given up when the train is just out somewhere random then "just get out" while technically possible since there's a walking route along the side at all times - is clearly not ideal even for able-bodied passengers, so in fact the member of staff will drive the train manually to a station unless obviously that's impossible somehow (e.g. terrorists blew up sections of track either side like a Hollywood movie).

Because humans are bad at driving trains, they aren't allowed to move at full speed, they can either let the GoA 3 automation oversee everything (e.g. it won't let them go anywhere it wouldn't be willing to go) at a reduced speed or when that's not useful they can switch off all automation and move at a crawl with no oversight.

Every morning the first train of the day on each route is driven in the first of those two modes, because overnight human maintenance teams sometimes manage to leave tools and equipment on the line and the automation doesn't know not to drive the train into a welding kit left on the track by some idiot who just discovered his wife is leaving him or whatever. So the human staff member's job is to drive the train (with the AI preventing them smashing it into other trains) while looking out the front window for problems.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#337

Post by 542354234235 »

rpeden wrote: post #326
pantalaimon wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think non-stick pans are a fad. A well greased iron or steel pan works much better and is impossible to destroy.

Can non-stick pans even be a fad when Teflon coated cookware has been popular for 60+ years?

Totally a fad. I bet they won't be popular for more than a century or two.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#338

Post by shezi »

dheera wrote: post #40
csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

> I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. The concept makes sense, though I don't quite fully get how to translate it to other contexts besides train driving where unexpected and unpredictable events come up all the time. Let's say you're driving a car and the traffic light turns red. D…

I teach my children to point in the direction of where cars can come from before crossing the road. He used to just swing his head around before, now he has to search directions and point there to direct his attention and it works excellently.

As others have pointed out, this is for repetitive tasks that your brain wants to automate away, but you really want to keep in attention.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#339

Post by shezi »

txutxu wrote: post #122
throwaway894345 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a company where someone deleted the production database by accident and the snapshot mechanism hadn't been working AND the alerting for the snapshot mechanism was also broken. Fortunately someone had taken a snapshot manually some weeks prior and they were able to restore from that and lose relatively little data (it was a startup, so one database was a big deal, but weeks worth of data was not such a big…

I worked at a company were someone deleted the production RDS and all the snapshots. Typing the confimation and requesting to delete the snapshots. He had two brosers open, one for development (of cloudformation, etc)... but someone did ask him to change a thing in prod. Both browsers were identical. Only the account in the top right corner did change. Both cloudformation stacks were identical (instance names, etc).…

When I worked in production environments, I used to set up little Firefox userscripts that would add a banner or anything visual to the production site. It's entirely client side and easy to customize.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#340

Post by jpcooper »

tialaramex wrote: post #336
jpcooper wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually what exactly is the member of staff doing on the DLR that is necessary, other than answering tourists' questions and putting a triangular key into a receptacle at every stop and then turning it? I have not been able to figure this out. In the Netherlands, the NS has two types of trains that go between towns. Intercity and Sprinter. Sprinters have someone who will walk onto the platform at every stop, or fail…

It's a GoA 3 system, so it isn't designed to be safe without a human staff member on every train. There are GoA 4 systems which do not need a human but the DLR isn't one, so while it would seem to operate normally if you just let passengers operate the doors - when anything goes wrong those passengers are in trouble because the system design assumes a trained member of staff is there to fix it and now there isn't. Th…

That clarifies things. Thanks for the in-depth explanation.
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