spatten's comments

spatten | 1 year ago | on: Find the oldest line in your repo

I ran into that too. Turns out that you need to add in the path you want to search when invoking the command. If it's your current working directory, use `.`

spatten | 2 years ago | on: Just 2 cans of soda per week is too much – even if you exercise

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

(I'm just going on Googling here, not an expert)

From reading that link, I think it works like this:

A hazard ratio of 1.0 means "no hazard, or no difference from the control".

A hazard ratio of 1.21 means "21% more hazardous than the control"

spatten | 3 years ago | on: The lost ways of programming: Commodore 64 BASIC (2020)

In C64 Basic, "$" declares that a variable is a string, like this:

``` A$ = "Hello World ```

So you say this as "A-string equals Hello World"

I still pronounce "$" as string however many years later

spatten | 4 years ago | on: Canada: Hundreds of unmarked graves found at residential school

There are many people still living who were teachers and administrators at these schools.

If we believe that this was genocide (and I think it's pretty obvious that it was), then they should be held accountable for their crimes.

The fact that they haven't been speaks volumes.

spatten | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2019)

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Remote: Yes -- I've been working remotely for > 5 years.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript (Node, React, jQuery, Backbone, Meteor, and a wide range of other Javascript frameworks), Serverless, Erlang, LaTeX, AWS, Ansible.

Resume: https://linkedin.com/in/scott-patten/

Email: [email protected]

I'm one of the founders of Leanpub (https://leanpub.com), and I'm looking for something new (don't worry, Leanpub is just fine). Leanpub is a well-loved, profitable company that has paid over $8 million in royalties to authors, and I was one of the people who built it from scratch.

At Leanpub I was responsible for the book generation engine, our Markdown parser, devops and infrastructure and the main Rails app. I jumped in on the React side of things when needed. I figured out requirements, talked to customers, did support and wrote documentation.

I have more than a decade of experience in software development with a wide variety of technologies. I'm interested in finding a position where I can have an impact on the company, learn constantly and be a part of a great team. I'm looking for a remote-first or extremely remote-friendly company.

spatten | 6 years ago | on: Primitive Technology: Adobe wall (dry stacked) [video]

I had wondered what happened to his videos, as I hadn't seen an update in my RSS feed for a while. Turns out he's just stopped updating his blog!

I've got some videos to catch up on :)

spatten | 7 years ago | on: Battery Power's Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas

I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...

spatten | 7 years ago | on: Are robots better baristas? Berkeley’s Bbox café thinks so

Another, more human, take on this from Barista Hustle:

https://baristahustle.com/blog/the-death-of-the-death-of-the...

TL;DR (I watched this a couple of months ago, so this is an attempt a remembering the thesis. I also don't know if I agree or not that this is a good future, but it is the future presented in the video) -- the robots are coming, which is going to give us push-button coffee. There will still be people there to give you a human experience, and they'll get to focus on that experience instead of being split between making coffee and talking to you.

spatten | 7 years ago | on: Fifty Fizzbuzzes

The Jupyter notebook is here: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/quasiben/fiftyfizzbuzzes/master?f...

The code on GitHub is here: https://github.com/vihart/fiftyfizzbuzzes/blob/master/Fifty%...

spatten | 8 years ago | on: Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace

Telus, the big phone company and ISP in British Columbia, does this in downtown Vancouver[1].

IIRC, I first heard about this in Work Like Nature[2][3]

[1]: http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+dev...

[2]: https://leanpub.com/worklikenature

[3]: I have a double conflict of interest here. The author is my wife, and Leanpub is my startup.

spatten | 8 years ago | on: Getting Started with Headless Chrome

scroll down a bit and look for `--print-to-pdf`.

spatten | 9 years ago | on: Chop Suey Nation: Road trip uncovers the lives behind Chinese-Canadian food

If you'd like to hear more on this, they had a long talk with the author of this piece in episode 7 (titled "The Only One") of Colour Code, a podcast also from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/colour-code-pod...

spatten | 9 years ago | on: Speech Is 3x Faster Than Typing for English and Mandarin on Mobile Devices

From the paper, the IST on the graph stands for "Initial Speech Transcription", and those data points are for the speech-input text before any corrections were made. The other "Speech" data-points include time to make corrections either by using the keyboard or using speech recognition.

spatten | 9 years ago | on: Tasmanian Devils Developing Resistance to Transmissible Cancer

There's a fantastic Radiolab episode about tumors that talks about the discovery of this cancer:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-famous-tumors/

spatten | 9 years ago | on: Async and Await

I agree, it looks great. Funnily enough I didn't even notice until you mentioned it.

However, I have to pedantically point out that the Markdown is not 100% visible. The author made the correct choice and just showed links as links instead of the raw Markdown syntax.

spatten | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's the biggest risk you took in your career that paid off?

I wrote this a while ago answering the exact same question:

http://scottpatten.ca/2012/04/no-excuses.html

spatten | 9 years ago | on: My first DDoS attack for a $200 ransom

You do this by telling iptables to look at the X-Forwarded-For header when deciding what IP that request is coming from.

This blog posts explains the whole thing: https://centos.tips/fail2ban-behind-a-proxyload-balancer/

I have no idea if using .htaccess rules would be better than this solution, I just know that this one works.

spatten | 10 years ago | on: Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.

The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.

Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.

spatten | 10 years ago | on: A 25-Year-Old Turning a Profit Selling Pencils

She was also featured in this Freakonomics podcast about "I Pencil" (worth the listen): http://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-pencil/

spatten | 10 years ago | on: Work for only 3 hours a day, but everyday

I agree with everyone else about the physical hobbies, but I find you need something else to fill the evenings when you don't necessarily want to go outside, or when you just want to spend half an hour doing something that's not coding and not reading.

Music does that for me. If you're at all interested, check out justinguitar.com (no affiliation, just love what the guy does) and try it out. There's something about the meditative aspects of playing music that really works for me.