Hacker News: chrisparsons

New comment by chrisparsons in "Ted Turner has died"

chrisparsons — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:08:09 +0000

The MTV show Remote Control had a round called "Dead or Canadian", which has morphed into pub quizzes as "Dead or Canadian, Both or Neither?", which is shockingly tricky at times.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Robot AI beats world-class curling competitors (2020)"

chrisparsons — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 23:23:47 +0000

There are some shots that you just can't make without sweeping... particularly downweight hits where you're trying to exaggerate the curl by sweeping the outside after you squeak by a guard.

New comment by chrisparsons in "All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page"

chrisparsons — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 18:06:58 +0000

There are multiple aliases. For instance, I use !yt for YouTube (just checked and !youtube also works), and !twitch for Twitch. I'll agree with the parent in that it's very rare that I'm unable to guess the bang that I want.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous"

chrisparsons — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 20:38:17 +0000

In this situation, CPM is likely based on impressions, not clicks.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Chat Bubble Blindness"

chrisparsons — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 17:07:56 +0000

I work in Grocery IT. We generally assume you have to have two self checkouts in order to meet the customer/item throughput of one staffed checkout. And even then, I'd tend to put my money on the staffed checkout.

Some of it is just the limitations of a SCO, in that store staff don't have to wait for each item to be weighed by the lane before moving to the next item, but a lot of is that most people are not nearly as fast as they think they are.

A lot of it depends on how hands-on the staff manning the SCOs are as well. The Costco near me implemented SCOs in the past year, but those might as well be full checkouts with the number of staff that are around them looking to help out.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Is It Time to Kill the Penny?"

chrisparsons — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:34:22 +0000

You'll have all the data to fact check whether or not they're doing this, too. We all do on a receipt.

New comment by chrisparsons in "A bill to allow consumers to control their own devices is pending in Congress"

chrisparsons — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 18:39:40 +0000

There's a very clear person at fault if said nefarious driver drives the tractor into a person/object-of-value. If it's an autopilot, the liability issues are much more murky.

New comment by chrisparsons in "The 'Broomgate' Controversy Rocking the Sport of Curling"

chrisparsons — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 23:01:11 +0000

In addition, we've already had a player tested positive for steroids in curling: http://www.torontosun.com/2013/07/03/canadian-curler-dumonte...

New comment by chrisparsons in "The 'Broomgate' Controversy Rocking the Sport of Curling"

chrisparsons — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 22:34:16 +0000

The ability to apply more force means it's easier to be more accurate in upweight shots. The men's game at the elite level is a hitting game. The women's game is getting closer to that with training and ice conditions, but there are very few teams women's teams in the world that can hang with the hitting of the top men's teams, currently.

Where it's more important is sweeping, up to this point at least. Teams like Jacobs have shown how much of an advantage powerful sweeping is - the range of accuracy is much wider for them compared to me throwing the same hit with two club sweepers. That's the second part of the equation that most people miss in thinking that curling isn't a strength sport.

Of course now, you don't need to be nearly as strong to achieve the drastic changes in rock movement that you did before, and that's one of the concerns.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Relax – A New Generation CMS on Top of React, Redux, and GraphQL"

chrisparsons — Fri, 06 May 2016 16:32:01 +0000

Bricolage in the late noughties was this. Salon ran it for a fair amount of time. The company I work for currently uses it, although I think we're one of the last ones, and since it's not really getting any updates anymore, we'll likely be moving off of it in the near future.

It made some really novel decisions on the Admin UI spectrum, and it's not terrible for content managers as a lot of open source CMS software tends to be, but it never gained traction. My familiarity with Perl isn't what it should be, so it's always painful to try to dig in to debug problems as well.

New comment by chrisparsons in "How to Survive Gentrification of the Drupal Community"

chrisparsons — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:01:47 +0000

I imagine most (like us) are just staying put until a clear alternative is present. There's no rush to get off of Drupal 7. Security updates are still flowing, the module environment is finally starting to mature, and there's no real sign that there's an EOL being set anytime soon.

If I was building a new site that made sense to use a CMS and not build something from scratch, I'd still probably go Drupal 7.

New comment by chrisparsons in "How the Powerball rules were tweaked to make the game an even bigger ripoff"

chrisparsons — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:51:14 +0000

Currently, they're projecting 85% of all combinations will have been purchased for this upcoming drawing.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Amazon Is Capturing Bigger Slice of U.S. Online Holiday Spending"

chrisparsons — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:41:17 +0000

The cost of reshipping + cost of wrapping + cost of time of wrapping is probably getting close to $6 an item.

New comment by chrisparsons in "House Introduces Bill to Repeal the Patriot Act"

chrisparsons — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 16:51:16 +0000

Assuming one person would hit both term limits: 2 6-year terms in the Senate plus 3 2-year terms in the house would be 18.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Ask HN: How do you manage your passwords?"

chrisparsons — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 17:32:23 +0000

I started using Lastpass when I switched jobs and the company I moved to used it. The ability to share logins with people/groups without actually exposing the password is wonderful in the corporate setting, as it makes revoking a group of passwords (think company-level social media accounts) simple and worryfree.

It works well enough to have convinced me to buy Premium on my personal account.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?"

chrisparsons — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:19:22 +0000

Yes, but the problem is you hit that no-mans-land between "I'm going to just format text in a readable way" and "I'm going to try to make this look nice", and missed both.

If you're going to start styling it (and in resumes, once background color enters into the picture, that's styling it), you really need to clean it up and make it look nice. Otherwise, going for a simple resume that's just text is probably going to serve you better.

I'd admittedly probably toss this resume as-is.

(Also, what about a DL for your experience rather than header/list?)

New comment by chrisparsons in "Arthur Chu Is Playing Jeopardy the Right Way"

chrisparsons — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 08:28:47 +0000

In addition to the reasons you've stated, an additional one is that there are fewer questions for your opponents to use to reach over half of your total. Hitting the two daily doubles with most of the board left in play in round two means you'll still likely need to outplay your opponents on the buzzer that round.

New comment by chrisparsons in "Arthur Chu Is Playing Jeopardy the Right Way"

chrisparsons — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 08:26:08 +0000

I think Ken nails the real issue when he mentions this isn't the first "Daily Double hunter" the show has seen. Realistically, excluding Chuck Forrest, who was bouncing around the board to keep his opponents off-balance as opposed to hunting for daily doubles, it's been going on for a few years now from more than a few players. So why is Arthur Chu getting the attention now?

I'd hope it's for the fact that he has a bit of a grating buzzer practice (I'm surprised he isn't anchoring his hand against the lectern to reduce any windup and help with precision) and that he was flippant with some Daily Doubles early on (the $5 sports "I don't know" caught me off-guard), but I have a feeling it's more sinister than that.