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Bookstores themselves are a good example. Borders and Barnes & Noble put all the local bookstores out of business. Then Amazon put them out of business. Now most towns don't have a bookstore at all.

This is a good example of something that sounds true but is actually not. Private equity put Borders out of business (famously). Barnes & Noble is now private but by all reports (still) doing fine. There are more independent bookstores today (in more towns) than ever before.

Some of the ones in the Bay Area were quietly acquired by Barnes & Noble in the last 12 months.

I hope that's not a national trend, but I suspect it is.

On top of that, Barnes & Noble is closing their larger locations, and replacing them with tiny ones that simply aren't compelling if you're looking for something specific.


people give books away here in California with "tiny house" library stands. In a major college town, previously full of specialty and trade bookstores, now very empty.

Barnes and Noble put local bookstores out of business by doing a better job at being a bookstore.

No silver bullet. We've known this since at least the 1980s. The fact that the authors of the code might not be human doesn't change this.

Weird. My memories and thoughts are not created by software.

I've never seen a Xeon without a heat sink, I don't believe they are designed to run without one.

Indeed, even the oldest, slowest Xeons shipped in SECC cartridges with integrated heatsinks.

But that was several years after the book cited by the GP was published (1994, shortly after the release of the original Pentium).


The first Xeon looks to be released 1998, so sounds about right

Will be 60 this year, and have felt the same for years already. You get to a point where you look ahead and realize you've got maybe another 10-20 decent years left if you're lucky and for me, more and more, I don't want to spend it running on this treadmill.

Computers do not feature at all in my ideal retirement. Maybe a phone or tablet so I can do the minimal email and bill paying.


I'm not a particular fan of the TSA but when you work with the public at that scale, stuff happens. It gets a bit tiresome to read articles like this that imply it's normal and frequent. It doesn't seem like it's worthy of discussion on HN: it's neither intellectually interesting nor a new phenomenon.

I've never had a single issue with the TSA. I went through a checkpoint when I had a shoulder injury and could not raise my arms above my head for the backscatter machine. I explained this and I was politely escorted through the alternate scan/metal detector.

My experience is one data point, doesn't mean much by itself, nor does the experience of the unfortunate person in this story.


There was a time when medicine put a lot of focus on the smell and consistency of bowel movements. There's probably something to it but we have better diagnostics now. That said, normal bowel movements can have a bit of an odor but it should not be strong or particularly foul-smelling. If it is, consider changing your diet or getting it checked out if that doesn't help. I found that just cutting out fast foods made that particular bodily function nearly odorless.

Doctors have better tools than smell and consistency. However you as a layman don't normally have/use those tools.

Diabetes was originally diagnosed by having sweet urine.

No, poop is meant to smell repulsive. This is evolution's way to discourage you from doing anything unhealthy like touching it or eating it.

You can make poop smell horribly by eating healthy stuff. Broccoli smells bad as vegetables, eat enough and it will smell similarly. Fart smells changes too based on what you eat.

Krauts have a terrible smell and the resulting poop is as terrible...


"Nearly odorless"?

I call bullshit.


Honestly just a fairly mild earthy smell. Nothing terrible. When I was a kid my dad could render the bathroom unapproachable for 15 minutes. But he drank whiskey and smoked.

> outdated posts that still stay up because There's no rush to take it down.

Can also happen when it takes 3 months to get a job posting approved, so once you get one you just leave it up.


> ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard

I can never get over how this became a thing. Was listening to a Brian Cox video on YouTube the other night (something about his voice helps me sleep). He said "I don't memorize formulas, it's easy to look them up."

If you ever need to reverse a b tree (in 30+ years of writing code, I never have) it's easy to look that up. It tells me nothing about your ability as a developer of real software that you spent time memorizing trivia before an interview.


I'd always heard inverting a binary tree thrown around as some kind of absurdly hard problem. I took a look at it and it was trivial. I was able to do it on the first attempt with no preparation. (And the point of these interviews is that you study for them, right?)

It's a contrived scenario, but the whole point is that it measures min(a,b) where `a` is your ability to think, and `b` is your ability to prepare (and memorize answers ahead of time). (I'd personally try to find ways to measure `a` instead of `b`, maybe by asking questions people wouldn't have heard before.)


I am not sure A is more important than B for the majority of jobs.

I had an interview where I was asked to implement a data structure. I transparently told the interviewer I hadn't thought about that particular data structure since university, and that I was looking it up on Wikipedia to see how it worked before I wrote the implementation. I got that job.

Being able to reverse a binary tree isn't something you need to memorize. If you can't do that it tells me that you're not fluent in your chosen programming language.

I think they are overused and thus lose effectiveness. I don't really like them and don't use them myself but I'm not going to fight a battle over them.

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