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Sad to hear! I noticed that some are available through the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/Hexaflexagons


You often don't know which work was "10x" except in retrospect, so this advice is a little like recommending people only invest in the stocks that are going to go up.


I solved this problem by taking a photograph of my library card. To check out a book, I load the picture and hold it up to the scanner.


I added an image of my barcode to a location based reminder, so it pops up in a notification when I go to my local library.


I used this pro-tip today and it worked great. Thanks for the idea.


That's amazing. Truly. I'm assuming you're on iPhone. Anyone know if there is a way to do this in Android?



If you use Google Keep for the note, it's easy to do


https://support.google.com/keep/answer/3187168

> You can set reminders to go off at a certain time or place


Tasker


How do you do that, on iOS?


Check the official Shortcuts app.


Never knew that existed, or whether I needed it. Looks very interesting, thanks.


This is a brilliant and simple solution. If it's a static barcode, a photo is all that is needed.

There's little advantage to having it in the wallet.

I store all my IDs in a Photo Album on my phone.


As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."

It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case.


I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and this is completely wrong:

> It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out.

It's only that way if you make it take that long. You should know if you have a good programmer 2-3 weeks after the hire. Here a couple things that make making great hires hard:

* Making it difficult to learn and understand your system.

* Having slow and expensive employee onboarding. I've seen companies spend $3-4K (not including the actual laptop) just getting a laptop to a new employee after IT gets done with it. If it's super-expensive to make a hire, the incentive will be to keep people that aren't getting the job done.

* Not looking at work output for extended periods. In short give new people tickets that can be done in a few days at most so you are able to look at work output in six days instead of measuring at six months.

> I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case

There's only so much you can really screen before error in your hiring process exceeds 50%. Every step you add to a screening process has an error rate, and some are very subjective and error prone. The more screening you do, the slower you go, and honestly, the worst candidates you have to pick from. Why? Because a good programmer will be on the job market for 1-14 days (I'm not saying you are bad if it takes you longer to get hired, it's just what we're seeing in our recruiting software right now).


Have you built a successful growing software firm?

Does your software systems scale to Millions?

What about counterfactuals?

Without that data, your 3-decade hiring process means nothing.

I'm sure someone working in IBM, TCS, AT&T, Booz can all claim that they have been hiring people for 3-decades and give an opinion


I've done that.

I have a human conversation, make sure the expectations are clear and ask them if they think they can do it. Then I look at some of their work to verify and that's literally all.

No whiteboard, no takehome, no brainteaser, nothing like that.

Go google "how gates hires" or "how jobs hired" ... it's more or less the same. None of this I watch you implement a sliding window in a shared coding environment bullshit.

Let me put it this way. Say your candidates were all award winning scholars with phds and prestigious organizations to their name, then how would you go about it?

With respect but also, you'd still check to make sure it's the right fit, obviously.

Now here's the crazy go-nuts bananas idea - treat everyone with that level of respect. Totally wacky, I know. But hear me out - you can apparently build better teams with trust allocated to trustworthy people as your building block. That starts the day you interview and extends forever, well beyond your time working together.


Not sure why this is downvoted. Considering the parent led with

>I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and this is completely wrong

in order to argue from a position of authoritative experience, these questions are entirely fair game.


Because it's self-evident that designing a quick-ramp up process and modular system/good docs makes this a lot easier. It's 2022, you should be able to review checkins on gitlab the first week with a couple of basic tickets.

If folks are too green for that then they can be put thru an internship first. If an obscure language, have them do checkins on a tutorial.


> Have you built a successful growing software firm?

Yes, three times.

> Does your software systems scale to Millions?

Is 8m active users per day enough?

> What about counterfactuals?

A broken clock is correct twice a day. Not sure what you are wanting here.

> I'm sure someone working in IBM, TCS, AT&T, Booz can all claim that they have been hiring people for 3-decades and give an opinion

I don't work for them.


That's an awesome saying -- I'm surprised I've never heard it. It remains true after a LOT of mutation.

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a program is doing until it's too late.

The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a program is doing until it's too late.


The trouble with aphorisms is that you can never tell what an aphorism is saying until it's too late.


I hear it's worse in those languages where the subject comes last.


"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."

the meta-halting problem


But I don't think there is research showing that those strange hiring processes actually do work.


I've seen many variants of the recruiting process from the cute product feature disguised as a take-home to 6 stage interviews with two engineering(!!) interviewers per round that cost the company a few thousand per (un)successful candidate in man-hours.

Which is hilarious in an industry that is pretty binary ("you can build it") || ("you can't build it"). Doubly so when the majority of dev jobs are in web which is easily explored in the candidate's language of choice with basic CRUD / RESTful concepts.


Of course there is. You can generate studies that show roughly anything.

It may not be the majority, but if the research is all done in-house by various firms, there's no way for anyone to know that.


By research I mean of course properly done research.


I know a company that hired a contractor, who (probably) sat on his ass for months, then went AWOL with nothing delivered, and said company had to start over from scratch. Probably a little too much trust there.


I know a contractor who started a gig and it was over a month before he was given a logon, let alone a computer.

That started the contractor looking elsewhere...


Re: the age of "That's what she said":

I thumbed through The Frogs (Aristophanes) at a used book store once. This play was written circa 400 BC. In the prologue, one character is offering to entertain the audience with a few jokes, and another character says, "Yes, but not 'That's what she said.'" The joke was too over-used.

I was astounded to think that the joke was that old! But it's actually not. The old jokes of ancient Athenians were a little too obscure, I guess, so the translator picked a modern example. Still, that translation of The Frogs is from the 1950s, so the joke was old at least that far back. (Here is the translation: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.65406/2015.6540...)


I looked up some other translations...

1908 - "Not "Oh, my poor blisters!" - https://archive.org/details/frogstranslatedi00arisuoft/page/...

1995 - "Anything but “What a strain!”" https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Original greek - "πλήν γ᾽ ‘ὡς θλίβομαι.’" - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text...

This appears to translate as "except 'as I grieve.'" according to Google Translate - https://translate.google.com/?sl=el&tl=en&text=πλήν%20γ᾽%20‘...


> This appears to translate as "except 'as I grieve.'" according to Google Translate

That Perseus link will give you dictionary entries for the words. Relevant glosses of ὡς appear to be "as; how; so; thus". θλίβομαι is the passive form of a verb meaning "press; squeeze" and metaphorically "oppress; afflict"; examples in the Great Scott (LSJ) show it being used to describe a shoe pinching a foot, a shoulder rubbing against a narrow doorway, lips pressing against each other in a kiss, and the circumstances of poverty making things difficult for a poor person.

So it's easy to imagine that it might feature in the punchline of a pun. But even without constructing a pun, it would be easy to translate that as something like "see how I suffer?", which could be the punchline to any number of jokes. It sounds like a good translation of the modern punchline "first world problems", for example.


"What a strain" feels like quite a good translation, then. One can easily imagine a joke along the lines of...

I've been having stomach pains all week but finally managed a bowel movement this morning. What a strain!


I studied Aristophanes in school and read some of his plays. It's astonishing how 2000 years later, some things can still be funny.


that one looks more like a very liberal translation to match the present audience (see shagie comment)


Well, that's what dkurth said.


Exactly. We pre-rinse the dishes, get the water running hot before starting the machine, and choose the heavy cycle. Even so, the dishwasher barely cleans our dishes. And it's a Bosch, well reviewed by Consumer Reports when we got it!

People in this thread are talking about the SpeedQueen washing machine. Is there something similar for dishwashers? I would pay good money for a dishwasher that actually cleaned my dishes. I don't even care if it's loud!


Are you using pre-wash detergent? My parents struggled with pampering their washer for 20 years, turns out a spoonful of detergent in the body of the washer gets the same performance as all the pre-rinse etc etc.

Video on the subject: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04


Thank you! Another comment recommends the same video, so I will certainly check it out.


Are you perhaps using tabs? Dishwashers need detergent in the rinse cycle, otherwise they don't rinse well, and tabs don't let you do that. I've had friends who have always pre-rinsed because of wrong dishwasher use. Once they switched to powder and put some in the rinse cycle their dishes don't need pre-rinsing.

See https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04


Thank you, I will definitely watch this. We have tried pre-wash detergent, tabs, liquid soap, powder detergents, in various combinations.

There may be something unusual wrong with our dishwasher. Although we clean its filter regularly, sometimes a kind of brown slime forms along the walls and around the filter, and I have to give it a deeper cleaning. Bosch had no idea what this was! I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something like that.


That almost sounds like your washer isnt using hot water. It would explain the poor cleaning performance and the weird growth in the filter.


whoa. sounds like your drainage might be at fault. i have never heard of anything like this. I'm not a plumber, or anything related, but dishwashers should not have slime and should not need cleaning. yikes.


> get the water running hot before starting the machine

Interesting if this is a US difference - but here (in the UK) at least dishwashers (usually? I suppose I don't want to claim to speak for 100%) only have a cold water inlet; they do their own heating.


We have a Bosch 800 that is capable of heating its own water, but it's still plumbed for hot just because the gas-heated water is cheaper, and the only cold supply under the kitchen sink is unsoftened.

Overall I've been quite happy with my premium-dishwasher experience, though there are a few little things that I don't love, like the fact that the rollers on the middle rack are no longer independently-replaceable. Seems like a huge step backward to have to replace the entire rack for like $200 just because one of those fails.


This depends on the manufacturer. Some manufacturers make dishwashers that can utilize both hot and cold water and others only work with cold or hot water.

As an example Frigidaire, GE, KitchenAid, Whirlpool will only work with hot water; Samsung, Ikea, Beko will only work with cold water; and Bosch, Miele, Electrolux, LG will work with either.


Interesting, I don't think it does here other than extreme minority of cases - because it's just not standard plumbing. You typically have a washing machine & dishwasher hookup & waste under the sink; it's pretty standardised and it's on cold.

> As an example Frigidaire, GE, KitchenAid, Whirlpool will only work with hot water

Yeah, afaik without actually looking into it, of those only Whirlpool is distributed here (KitchenAid stuff yes for sure, but not I think dishwashers) and as above I'm pretty sure they must be different models, just like LH/RH driver cars.

Of course you can import whatever you want, but then you should probably expect to deal with some such plumbing (and potentially electrical, at very least changing the plug) oddities.


How do you handle softened water in the UK?

In the US, it's common to have a water softener on the hot water line, intended to soften the inputs for appliances and showers. The cold water line is not softened, to avoid drinking sodium-laced water.


I wouldn't like to estimate an installation percentage, but it's probably not quite 'standard' to have at all. In the systems I've known, I believe it's been on the cold-water line pre-boiler; in the scullery with the sink there pre-softener so you get one (cold) tap without.

I don't claim authority on the matter though.


They usually are the same in the US too based on my own anecdata of having ~10 different ones over past twenty years.


Ours is a US model, has a pre-heat water cycle. I think it does have a hot water inlet, but we do not use it.


I admit that I'm not actually sure. We got this advice from a local appliance shop.


I'm constantly confused by these threads; the only time I've seen these sorts of problems with dishwashers of any vintage is where people aren't cleaning the filters. You're cleaning the filters, right?


We are now, but there's a little more to it. When we first got this dishwasher, we never cleaned the filters. Our previous washer didn't need that, and we didn't know better.

So it got pretty bad before we realized we needed to do that. We cleaned it very thoroughly at that point and now clean the filters at least weekly, but we still have these problems.


> A digital book requires the same minus actor

The digital book also requires formatting work. Depending on the type of book and the publisher's workflow, this can be simple (an export from InDesign) or very complex (a custom process for converting a non-technical author's Word documents for a cookbook with an inconsistent layout into an EPUB that renders nicely across devices).


A while back, Gmail began blocking .js file attachments, but I didn't realize until today that this means my old JavaScript file attachments would be retroactively blocked. I tracked down an email from two years ago with a JavaScript file attached that I needed, but I couldn't download it!

I was eventually able to get it by doing "Show Original" in Gmail and copy/pasting the base64-encoded attachment data and decoding it. But it made me nervous about using Gmail as a way to hang on to files, since things I attach now might not be available later.


I had this same issue. Google also blocked .jar and .zip if I remember. I had lost some old school projects that I tried to recover, which we're turned in via email. I couldn't download the attachments for this, despite the fact I sent them in the first place! Much less, why couldn't I allow someone to send me a .js file I wanted it? It's a weird restriction to not even be given a choice.


There's a musician named Andrew Huang who sometimes makes music based on song challenges from his fans. Years ago, I asked him to write a rap song in which none of the lyrics contain the letter "e." Like the person in the article, I had read "A Void" by Georges Perec, so that's where the idea came from.

And about a day later, he posted this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-WtH4ujps


Wow, that musician has amazing skills! Thank you for sharing this.


According to that boundless.com link, "The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, so carbon dating is only relevant for dating fossils less than 60,000 years old."


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