Getting indoors from a cold rain is an obvious choice. I can't really decide to stop shivering, but changing my clothes and grabbing a hot chocolate helps. It still takes a while to warm back up, meanwhile I can actively choose not to open windows or go right back in the rain.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898338

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.

- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway

- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult

- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message

- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle

We can't just guess the recipe's teaspoon standard and blindly convert everything to mL.

Why not just offer a monthly subscription "service"?

Logging transactions on the go demands the interface to be rapidly accessible. Touch screen typing is error-prone and slow. I'd prefer a dedicated interface where I could just tap one of the available categories and enter the sum with a large number pad.

It'd make sense to primarily synchronize data from their online bank account and then ask the user to clarify/categorize unknown events. Obviously an online sync is hard to implement for all banks, so a TSV import would be a bare necessity. My bank has integrated financial tracking nicely in their mobile application.

Qalculate handles physical units seamlessly, which makes everyday calculations an absolute breeze. It definitely has an overkill amount of features, but they're not a distraction.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44885847

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

I have a strong dislike against setting the language of my OS, or most applications, to Finnish. Application translations are extremely inconsistent, sometimes even nonsensical. The absolute worst case is seeing only translated error messages without error codes. It's nearly impossible to search help or follow step-by-step guides.

I definitely should improve my knowledge of "proper" Finnish IT terms. Some of them have very intuitive meanings:

- hashing -> hajautus: (chaotically) splitting, scattering things away from each other

I prefer your idea of treating the question as a proper puzzle with a 1-submission limit. The "calculator" UI took a whole 2 minutes to understand initially, but I really liked seeing the chain instead of having to mush all the factors in my head.

It's really nice to see the correct answer broken down to get a feel about the real numbers!

The current question's answer seems to contain big errors in magnitude in its factors:

"How many kilograms of skin does a human shed in their lifetime?"

    Skin cells shed per day: 5e8 / day
    Mass of one skin cell: 3e-6 g
    Years in a lifetime: 80 yr
    Grams to kilograms conversion: 1 kg / 1000 g

The first two factors correspond to shedding 1.5 kg/day, which is definitely unrealistic!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657261

Points: 12

# Comments: 3

I think the problem is that this compression culture is lossy and fragmented.

Summaries serve a purpose similar to thumbnails in an image gallery UI - the full picture is always available behind a click.

Imagine if you could only see them as 128x128 JPEGs at 50% quality - after they've been reposted with "deep fried meme" filters a few times. No links to the source, and the next bite-sized truncation pushed right after. Later someone reposts them upscaled to 8K.

This is exactly what I feel is happening with the written word.

A powerful trick in all forms and contexts of communication.

I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.

Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.

HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.

This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.