This reminds me of the “no hello” proposal for workplace chat messages (e.g. https://nohello.net/). It’s much less of a big deal for personal communication, but I can understand wanting someone to just say what they want to say without a manual SYN/ACK first.
As a developer who occasionally gets pulled in to help with urgent support issues, I dread bare hello messages. It gives me too much time to imagine a down site or some other critical event. Asking the question up front spares me a lot of stress.
You should essentially never do syn/ack IRL. If you don't know precisely what the recipient is doing, you do not know what they are doing, it could be important. Always lead with info to help them prioritize things. Ideally in the first ~5 words, because that's all they may see in the notification.
(this is also IMO why phone calls are terrible. they're the equivalent of "hello" over a channel that has no other message, so everything must be assumed to be maximum urgency or you might miss something truly critical)
The number of times that this has happened, with certain colleagues of mine, over Slack. Ugh.
Dude, if you had just skipped the really-actually-not-required-on-slack pleasantries, I could have already given you the information you needed, 16 hours ago.
I like the "hello" before someone engages in a chat because this way I can confirm that i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe (i.e. I am not displaying in front of 200 people and forgot to switch off IM).
If someone just wants to send me an information, email is great for that.
My personal order of contacts is snail mail → email → IM → phone → in person. Each of the steps is one order of magnitude of urgency greater than the previous one.
And I guarantee that others are annoyed when folks leap in with no lead in. And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.
> i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe
If I’m at work, I’m always going to be available to talk, and anyway, nothing is lost by them sending me what they want to say and me responding when I become available.
I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t ever send messages that are unsafe for 200 of your colleagues to see.
Try: "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now about a database schema change?”
I almost always have time to fight fires — unless busy with a larger conflagration. I may or may not have the time to debate the finer points of table naming conventions however.
Without context I might say yes and then have to take it back once I discover the topic.
You're rebuilding TCP over UDP. Chat apps are connectionless (or RESTful, if you will). What makes them productive, especially in the workplace, is the fact that they can work without all the handshaking that accompanies more structured communication like in-person, spoken human conversations.
Nothing is stopping you from adding back all your binds, listens, SYNs, and ACKs to a protocol that doesn't need them. But it's a conversational code smell if you do.
Dear sowbug - apparently you live in a place where it is fine to send a message and it does not matter if the recipient is ready to receive it or not. Good for you.
The solution here would be for Microsoft to add a "hello will be ignored" option to Teams so I can just check that and have it look like Teams is saying back to them " please write more then just hello "
It does not work that way in my place. You write "hello" and if there is no immediate "hello" back, then you leave this aside until there is. There is no staring at anything.
The phone is the last but one "urgency" level. It means that if someone calls me on the phone it is really urgent. I would interrupt a lot of things, including a presentation, if I get a call.
If this is to say something minor I will block that person, or never pick up their call again.
I see, however, that you're rudely just communicating here without telling people hello first, and waiting for a reply to know they're available to converse.
It's a feeler (IMO way more descriptive than "doorknob") that lets you bail if you don't want to talk. Without it you may feel obligated to listen or have to be slightly rude. With it you have a range of options like "swamped on this project, catch up with you later" or such depending on circumstances to avoid straining a relationship.
In async communication it's unnecessary though, people might do it by inertia.
I don’t mind people saying hello, but also would prefer they then go ahead and state their need. I don’t always respond right away, and often times by the time I get around to answering the need is gone or the person is unavailable. I definitely don’t mind interrupting my work flow, especially to route somebody to the actual correct person who can help them with their problem, but I don’t like the expectation of a synchronous conversation, so a “hello” with nothing else will usually fall to the bottom of my list of actual concrete problems to address for that minute/hour/day.
I had colleague that was 10x developer but 0/10 communicator, if he didn't receive separate first message with "Hi, how is it going?" without me waiting for his answer before requesting something, he wouldn't reply.
It was such a dead end for getting things done (he was productive on his things, but blocker for everybody else.
I once worked with someone who got visibly frustrated when people didn't stop in the hallways to listen to her lengthy response to the phatic "how are you?" expression. She treated it as a genuine question.
Completely agree. I think it's polite to greet others properly but it's rude to wait for a reply before moving the conversation forward. So I just write my greetings and then write what I need to say on the following lines, old school letter style. Works really well in my experience.
The argument might be made, that this is a problem with many (most?) ticket management systems.
How difficult would it be to design a mechanism that facilitates humans being nice to each other, rather than making humans emulate emotionless robots?
Even for other reasons, why should a comment automatically reopen a ticket? Maybe you just found some addtional details you want to record for future reference but which don't need any additional action right now.
Thank you for the nohello.net thing, I am usually pretty awkward when it comes to starting conversations and but I guess I never paid attention to why that was the case. The discussion on this thread clears out the impression I had that it is usually rude to directly jumping to the question/task. I got my queue! :)
This is a mathematical statement, see the end of the Wikipedia section "Algorithmic solution", where it states "Among all possible different stable matchings, it always yields the one that is best for all men among all stable matchings, and worst for all women."
Crucially, the optimal solution depends on the specific constraints. So you can’t just take a solution derived under one set of assumptions and use it in another situation without losing whatever guarantees it made in the original case.
Gasoline and oil are commodities, so the price doesn’t change much from place to place.
Lots of the businesses that sell gas don’t make any profit on it at all. They use gas to draw people in, and sell them other stuff, like overpriced headphones.
The price of gas has more to do with what you’re buying if for than what you’re competitors charge.
The drive around is defensive. If someone says “so and so is dumping gas at below market prices” you can defend yourself by showing competitors prices.
Since the gasoline is a marketing technique, long term below market prices aren’t inconceivable.
Edit:
The real question is “why is the government opposed to low gas prices?”
To be clear there is actually a minimum markup law where I live, so it’s not just anti-dumping.
Lowering prices isn't illegal. There are only certain very limited circumstances where selling below the market rate can potentially be illegal. One is dumping, where foreign companies sell at artificially low prices in an attempt to drive domestic competitors out of business. Another is when a domestic monopoly (or near monopoly) does the same. But if a fuel retailer wants to sell gasoline at $1 / gallon less than the competition then that's totally fine (although local law enforcement might be annoyed if that causes a traffic jam).
Fasting in mice turns on SIRT3 which requires NAD+ and this newly discovered gene SLC25A51 is involved in transporting NAD+ to SIRT3. There's plenty of data that shows mice can live 30% longer when calorie-restricted due to sirtuins being activated..
Anyone who's ever listed to Dr. David Sinclair speak about longevity, he almost always talks about how NAD+ is possibly the most important chemical in the human body, since we'd be "dead in 30 seconds" without it.
Sirtuins are the longevity genes that are activated when organisms are under duress, which can be simulated by fasting. Your body doesn't know when you're going to eat again, so the sirtuins get activated.
I wouldn't be surprised if researchers and labs are looking for ways to activate SLC25A51 chemically to get the NAD+ flowing to SIRT3 without requiring fasting.
"I wouldn't be surprised if researchers and labs are looking for ways to activate SLC25A51 chemically to get the NAD+ flowing to SIRT3 without requiring fasting."
To what end ?
Fasting would be cheaper, easier and less time-consuming and would include all of the related, broad-spectrum effects that we also believe fasting may produce.
I guess if you're a pharma investor or existing, entrenched player it makes sense to go that direction.
As a consumer, however, I wonder why (pills that might convey a subset of the benefits of fasting) would be interesting in any way.
Polymorphisms in SLC25A51 might be linked to chronic fatigue or other mitochondria disorders. So that is pretty important.
Sinclair, IMHO, is all protein and zero enzyme and that is his problem. Without enough zinc NMNAT will not function and will slow the SIRT cycle. And increasing SIRT activity by shoving NAD in the cell with out zinc will end up depleting zinc.
Eventually it may be a contributor to a commercialization, but now it makes it a target for research for others. This isn't patenting anything, it's scientists saying 'this is an important bit when it comes to the effects of fasting so let's focus on this.'
What would be scummy would be some pharmaceutical company discovering this, not releasing the information, and trying to develop (or worse, failing to develop) a drug on their own after internal research that was never released to the world.
We share 97% of our genes with mice. Our organ systems and metabolic pathways are extremely similar. Our homeostatic mechanisms are nearly identical.
Some mouse models don't carry over to us, to be sure. But the reality is that most do. Do we know for a fact that this paper applies to us? No. But it significantly updates our priors. And that's always noteworthy.
9 out 10 results in mice do not transfer to humans.
For example, fasting for several hours in mice and in humans are completely different things (a human would have to fast for days to get similar results).
For many things yes. But humans have been under much more intense selective pressure for longer lifespans so easy interventions along those lines that work in mice have a history of not panning out in humans.
Not confident on diabetes. The biophysical dynamics of insulin are super different in mice - they have two, one of which is missing a highly conserved amino acid across all vertebrates that is at the hinge of the critical structural element of insulin.
> So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Only if you're using resistive heating. Heat pumps run on natural-gas-produced electricity can be at least as efficient as direct natural gas combustion for heating, and they automatically transition to cleaner sources of energy as the grid does.
> you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better
I understand that this is the case for cotton bags, IIRC due to high water use in cotton production, but for other types of reusable bags the threshold is lower.
> people reuse around half of them for garbage bags
This estimate seems like it's significantly too high. I do most of my grocery shopping at places that don't provide free plastic bags, and yet I still end up with far more single-use plastic bags than I could ever use for garbage. I would guess that no more than 10% of single-use bags actually get reused for trash.
Heat pumps work fine for home heat, but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer. Heat pump do not work well for those applications - I considered buying them and checked into it.
Your oven also uses resistive heat. Induction can work well, but is underpowered if you are cooking more than 3 or 4 things at once (especially if you also use the oven). You need around double the electric service most homes run to the range (there is no standardized plug for it).
Induction is only a replacement for causal cooks, people who make full course large meals will not be happy with it.
It sounds like(yet again) another US only problem. My induction hob here in UK is wired to run at 7.2kW and the last thing I would describe it as is "underpowered" - even with all rings turned on at max power, things will burn instantly. It's a vast vast improvement over a gas range, wouldn't be without it.
>>but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer.
I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
>> Heat pump do not work well for those applications
What's wrong with heat pump dryers? They are awesome, as long as you aren't putting them in an unheated space like a garage. They use much less energy than condenser dryers and considerably less than vented ones, while being pretty quick.
Ranges in the US can be wired for 50A * 240v * 80% = 9.6kW, and no, that's not enough. Cheaper homes have 30A for the range which is I guess what you have.
> like(yet again) another US only problem
I don't think Europeans realize how they sound when they say stuff like that. Especially when your stove would be considered low end in the US.
A good stove is around 5 kW, and each burner is 2.5kW = 15kW to run everything at once - basically double the service you have. Unless you want to wire the range and stove separately (which might be an option).
> I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
Obviously it's a thing, otherwise why would I say it? Is this a European thing not to have them?
Gas dryers cost a bit more to buy (15% more maybe), but much much less to operate (half to be exact). If you have gas service in your home and you buy your own appliances you'll almost always pick that.
> What's wrong with heat pump dryers?
They are very expensive, and save about half the electricity - but gas dryers also save about half the energy, so there's no point in going for the heat pump.
Even if you have no gas service, they cost around double a non heat pump, and it would take 10 years to recoup the money. It's not worth it - all you are doing is generating emissions in the dryer factory instead of your house.
Environmentally the gas dryer is better, at least as long as we still burn gas to generate electricity.
And don't forget the heat pump dryer takes much longer to dry clothing - at least for my house the dryer is always the bottleneck for laundry, I would never buy one that takes longer!
Yes, natural gas dryers are semi-common in homes that have natural gas service where I live (Minnesota) due to the fact that it costs about half as much to operate a gas-fired dryer vs an electric one.
Nearly everyone has gas furnaces here in MN since it’s significantly cheaper to heat with natural gas in the US, and it gets very cold here.
As a frustrated environmentalist myself. I would just like to say, burning or not burning natural gas for heating is dependent on a lot of factors. But the GP is generally right in most of the US because the energy is already coming from coal or natural gas. Both of which are back of the envelope about 50% efficient at converting heat from the burnt coal/gas to electricity. Add in the transmission and distribution loss (aka step up/down transformers, increasing distances to the electric plant as they are moved farther outside of cities/etc) and its another ~5-10% loss, and then the final conversion assuming a heat pump has a 50% gain. So its roughly a wash, and the actual gain/loss is dependent on electric mix (nuke+hydro), how cold it is outside (heat pumps for heating get really inefficient as the temps drop until they are basically restive heating, which many switch to after a certain point to avoid just burning up the compressor).
There are similar problems around wind/solar, which tend to just be green washing natural gas peaker plants, many of which aren't even combined cycle. So the easy back of the envelope here is, that if your not getting ~50% of your power from a nuke its likely that burning the gas in your house is more CO2 friendly (the places with lots of hydro also have nukes, so 1rst order approximation).
And the plastic bag thing, is again feel good because those bags both have a very short time to degrade (despite all the environmentalist misleading people into thinking they last decades, which is true when they are buried in a landfill, but that isn't the case they then talk about which is finding them in the open environment where UV destroys them in a few months to a couple years).
The plastic drink bottles though? Those are much more robust, but just about no one banned them in favor of recreating the commercial bottle washing systems we had before and that exist in mexico/etc. But again, one had to be very careful about total system costs, which is how we get back to nukes. We have to shift the energy curve away from CO2 sources, and the only way to really do that is to find a significantly more energy dense mechanism. And we have one, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million times as dense per Kg and instead of arguing about the CO2 being emitted to move or manufacture things, we could basically zero it out with 40 year old technology and likely gain another order of magnitude of efficiency if we built energy systems with modern technology that actually burnt the entire fuel load rather than calling it "waste".
Most environmentalist are just as uninformed as the climate deniers, which is why we are stuck.
PS: once you start to understand much of the above you can also see how premium electric cars can frequently be worse for the climate than econobox gas. The numerical systemwide advantage isn't so overwhelming to wipe out the disadvantages in places that get a lot of power from coal.
Uh, wouldn't spammers just...stop using lots of hashtags? Part of what makes the problem difficult is that spammers are agents who respond to the techniques you use to stop them.
Cutler’s Wikipedia page puts his move to Microsoft in 1988, not 98, which makes the timeline clearer. He was directly involved with the creation of the Windows NT project, which started well before 1998.
I don't think that follows. Since the adjacency matrix contains O(n^2) _bits_ of information, the number of adjacency matrices of graphs is O(2^(n^2)). This makes sense: graphs with vertex labels {1,...,n} are in bijection with symmetric n x n binary matrices with zero diagonal. It's difficult to quantify how much information is lost when we reduce this matrix to its spectrum, since the eigenvalues are real numbers, but there are O(n) degrees of freedom, and in principle plenty of room to distinguish any two graphs.
Of course, as a sibling comment notes, unlabeled graphs are often more interesting, for which one has to look at equivalence classes of adjacency matrices. The spectrum is nice here because it is automatically invariant to vertex permutations and hence a graph isomorphism invariant. The existence of nonisomorphic cospectral graphs is not immediately obvious, although there are simple examples, and that there are infinite families of cospectral pairs is even less obvious. So at the very least, it's interesting that the spectrum is not a complete invariant, and that it does work well for certain classes of graphs.
