Hacker News: jamses

New comment by jamses in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

jamses — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:55:19 +0000

I tried and failed to learn to juggle three balls many times, I've just got terrible coordination. But one day I stood over a bed and just threw them in the air and listened to the rhythm of the "thuds" as the missed balls hit the mattress. As soon as I'd got that down it was like a switch clicked and my hands knew "when" to be ready for the catch, rather than trying to follow the balls to catch them. I never managed four, so mileage may vary with this technique, but it was a very surprising lightbulb moment.

New comment by jamses in "Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass"

jamses — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:47:16 +0000

This was great fun. The race to Rome says it's to the colosseum, but it's actually pointing to a roundabout near Termini station :)

How on earth are people managing in 5 hours though? I had £95 left after a bus, ferry, train, and bus, taking me to 2.5 days; the ferry alone took nearly a day.

New comment by jamses in "Array languages vs. the curse of the spreadsheet"

jamses — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:27:45 +0000

Ctrl+` will show the underlying formula, or you could use conditional formatting to apply whatever style you want to static values =NOT(ISNUMBER(FIND("=",FORMULATEXT(A1)))), or you could write a VBA macro to do that and more (e.g. find all the formula that have been zeroised, etc).

New comment by jamses in "Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News?"

jamses — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:12:33 +0000

For a summary of news I look at https://emm.newsbrief.eu

New comment by jamses in "Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone"

jamses — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:00:01 +0000

I've never seen that particular claim about the museum - it was set up to hold Sloane's collection alongside the Cottonian and Harleian libraries. Where is it from? Is this a misremembering of the tale about the discovery of the flood tablet?

New comment by jamses in "Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64"

jamses — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 17:33:12 +0000

I'd guess war is usually excluded from insurance policies.

I wonder if the 1 in 200 year example wasn't communicated very well; it could be the actuaries view a long-lasting 10% increase to be the 1 in 200 year event; it does sound low for a single year stress.

New comment by jamses in "Covid: Children's extremely low risk confirmed by study"

jamses — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 15:21:43 +0000

Article lead: The overall risk of children becoming severely ill or dying from Covid is extremely low, a new analysis of Covid infection data confirms.

As far as I can tell the linked report mentions nothing about severity of illness, only mortality.

Edit: Second study is linked to further down the page which addresses the severe illnesses, as ricardobeat points out.

New comment by jamses in "Iberian Citadel of Calafell, Iron Age Village"

jamses — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 21:16:28 +0000

Not quickly by land, but you could travel far enough by sea.

New comment by jamses in "Excel Never Dies"

jamses — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 22:45:54 +0000

This should work on windows - I'm not sure about Macs: you press and hold the ALT key, then right-click the Excel icon in the Windows taskbar and click the Excel icon above the taskbar, but keep holding ALT down. It should pop up a window saying "do you want to start a new instance of Excel". You can then open your (same named) file in the new instance.

New comment by jamses in "Excel Never Dies"

jamses — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 22:14:40 +0000

You can open separate Excel instances by holding ALT when starting it up (second time onwards). Not quite the same thing as you want, but think the undo behaviour you describe makes sense if you're working in two sheets that are linked in some way.

New comment by jamses in "The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook"

jamses — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 14:58:27 +0000

I suspect your example is only for context, but just in case it saves you time in future, if you can sort the data first then you can use something like: if(vlookup(value,range,1,TRUE)=value, vlookup(value,range,column,TRUE), error_marker). The TRUE returns next nearest match, the IF ensures you have an exact match, and it takes a few seconds to lookup over hundreds of thousands of rows.

New comment by jamses in "Most of the time, you don’t really need another MOOC"

jamses — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 20:10:29 +0000

I found early-on that MOOCs were terrible for learning because of the barriers they put up. Locked-in time schedules, a trend towards very short "bitty" and simplistic videos that don't tend to offer any direction when they're done.

Youtube lectures on the other hand have been immensely valuable, especially if you can find a relevant (university) reading list and/or problem sets if they're applicable. All you really need as a self-learner is someone to say "head in this direction". After that I agree with op that finding something fun to do is the best way to learn.

On an aside, as a text highlighter (I highlight the text I'm reading), the javascript "tweet this" pop-up on this site is horrific.

New comment by jamses in "The Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel"

jamses — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:17:40 +0000

I wouldn't worry that it's your failure, you're just not into it.

I loved Windup Bird Chronicle. I struggled with 1Q84. I find the same thing in every creative field (art, film, lit, games); a favourite author/artist/director/company will release something I think is a real stinker while everyone else praises it, and vice versa.

Of course it can help to build up a vocab/grammar/approach to appreciate particular works or what something is referencing, but there are too many fish you'll never even see to be worrying about one author. Just hunt down the stuff you like and don't be afraid to give up halfway through if you're not enjoying it. It sounds like you've already figured that part out.

New comment by jamses in "The Berkshire Hathaway Site is a master class in human-centered design"

jamses — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 17:42:16 +0000

I think the high-bar that you desire is less user friendly and more designer-job-friendly.

- Here the information you're probably after is right at the top: letters from the CEO, and annual statements. If you're visiting the site you probably know what you're after.

- Websites optimised for mobile usually wrap text and remove zooming because the designer is perfect at deciding at what size the text looks prettiest, and doesn't want the user to spoil this. This is the worst thing that's happened to web design, probably ever. It's worse than IE6 at it's ugliest.

- I am not visually impaired, so can't comment on this.

- Links are underlined consistently making it clear what is a link.

- I can middle click, or open in new tab. I don't want new tabs popping up just because the designer wants me to stay on their site.

- Does branding ever help this? They have the .com, why would a pretty logo make things safer? They're quite easy to screenshot.

I agree that a link back to the homepage would be useful.

Overall a return to information dense websites like this one would be a wonderful thing.

New comment by jamses in "Coronavirus: the second-weirdest solution?"

jamses — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 14:34:03 +0000

Mortality-wise it looks to be around 20x worse than flu, and easy to spread before outward symptoms manifest. There's no vaccine, so the usual partial herd immunity isn't present, and no confirmed treatments yet beyond trying to help your own immune system. As you say, it will probably be mild for most people who catch it (but who wants to risk "probably"), but certainly worse if you're not in good shape.

Panic buying is just like a rush on the bank; if everyone buys more than usual there will be a temporary shortage of stock, and no-one wants to be caught short on the loo. People are anticipating needing to self-quarantine for 2+ weeks (probably more if you need to isolate your whole family), but without knowing which two weeks the timer starts. And people are probably vaguely aware that there will be a supply crunch in a few months because China's manufacturing lines have been slowed and the knock on effects haven't fed through yet.