The Seattle Public Library has 769 holds on the ebook of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, with 146 copies! One copy is ridiculous. This is almost three times the number of holds on physical books (376 physical books total, I'm 286 on the waitlist for it).
All I remember about that room was that it was nearly impossible to find a seat during finals (about 12 years ago!). We used to drive to a 24 hour coffee shop in Dixon instead. Nice to get a few miles away from Davis during finals, but even that place was jam packed with students.
I used to play a lot of all day Magic: the Gathering tournaments where the only option was overpriced convention junk food. 12 hours of stressful competition was enough to keep off hunger and I lost weight from this.
I use JetBrains IDEs a lot, and on my full size keyboard (kinesis freestyle pro), the key combinations are an uncomfortable for my small hands. Haven't done anything about it yet (and I'm not sure what I'll change), but I could really benefit from shortening how far I have to reach.
Is this specific to engineers? I noticed this in college classes across disciplines. A lot of the time that someone raised their hand, it was to share an anecdote and not a question.
I find it honestly surprising that I see it so much on HN. You have a group of people who largely identify themselves as being rational, objective, intelligent people - datascientists, engineers, etc. - who stereotypically I would think to be naturally sceptical and want to examine evidence closely.
But it's absolutely true, the minute some scientific study is posted there are 50 people writing comments that they believe it because yesterday something similar happened to their aunt etc. It's something I've never quite figured out.
It's because HN users aren't really that intelligent; they just give off that impression instead. We're all mostly normal people here, and act like normal people. This isn't some special club of 1000x geniuses.
Case studies can be very enlightening but there are also problems. Stories may be made up or misremembered. There is also a selection bias in which stories get told and which don't.
The big benefit I think is that people are... well people. If you do the same thing to an atom it will respond in the same way, while people may respond differently depending on any number of factors.
Appetite is known to be heavily entangled with psychology. People eat to celebrate. They eat to celebrate or because they are sad, because they are tired, because they are stressed out, because they are bored or maybe because they passed a bakery.
Case studies can help us understand how all these things interrelate and how to design studies that avoid pitfalls.
My favourite version of this is when a scientific study comes out and you get lots of posts from people saying, effectively, I disagree with science based on my feelings. The difference between anti-vaxxers or creationists and the average HN poster isn't as big as many pretend it is, I think.
Excel is everywhere where I work. it frustrates me to see how it's used and how much it's used, and it's totally unfair. I could rant about how it's unmaintainble, error-prone, time consuming, and cause costly mistakes, but I wonder if the company would be as large as it was without Excel.
I dislike a lot about Excel, but it's so easy to be immediately productive with it.
There are some really cool custom Thinkpads shoving new guts into the classic T60 body. I guess it's not really feasible for MacBooks? I looked for a 2012 or 2013 body with new hardware but nothing.
My 2013 is still working, but the screen hinge is loose and it's probably wearing on the display cable. Nothing new there, though. The display cable was the first thing to fail on my white iBook around 2005.
Wish I still had the Macintosh Portable with the built in carrying handle and roller ball I found at a garage sale! Now that would be a neat mod. Talk about a good keyboard.
I don't have kids, but my sister's kids are watching Youtube, not Netflix. They're basically watching the same thing I am: product reviews, just different channels.
