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0n34n7

61 karma · joined January 9, 2016

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0n34n7··on [dead]
The light ones are those dreamt up by overzealous marketers, the darker ones by middle managers.
0n34n7··on Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?
I try to develop primitives for data structures and/or algorithms - starting with e.g a doubly linked list node / binary tree node… moving on to e.g. breadth first search implementation, etc.

Being older, for me this has the benefit of refreshing some compsci fundamentals while exploring the new language.

0n34n7··on I hate Java. Can I use Kotlin without touching it whatsoever?
>Can I use Kotlin today without knowing/caring about Java?

Yes, if you don't have to use Java dependencies, otherwise, a little.

0n34n7··on CEO test-drives Mojo Vision's smart augmented reality contact lens
Unless the one across the room is a laser, it does matter.
0n34n7··on Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?
> Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior?

Ever think it’s simply because they are amazing machines instead of being some conspiracy or mass brainwashing?

0n34n7··on Ask HN: How do you read technical books in order to achieve maximum retention?
I have a largish white board (thanks home office) on which I summarize a (sub)section of a book / online course in my own handwriting / symbols / diagrams after reading / watching it first and doing the summarizing on a second run (after which I take a photo and save it to a doc on the topic).

This method has helped me commit quite a lot of conceptual information into long term memory - but - it is time consuming.

If I ever need to refresh my memory on a topic, I pull up the photo and redraw it - sometimes adding or changing things a bit - then take photo again. Rinse and repeat.

0n34n7··on Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
Amps kill, not volts. Hence high voltage low amp Tesla coil spark shows.
0n34n7··on Did eating meat make us human?
You are assuming edible plants to have been readily available at high enough concentrations at the hunter gatherer stage of human evolution.

It is energetically more expensive to roam a large area to gather x calories than finding and killing an animal (herbivore) that did that for you - never mind the ability of the herbivore to release calories contained in leaves and grass (something humans cannot do)

Then in winter this ratio increases even more.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the African savannah, but early human evolution here was definitely not driven by the abundance of edible vegetation.

0n34n7··on Landscape of API Traffic
Interesting to see the relatively small percentage of PUT requests.

A (generously opinionated) observation of the technical debt / re-invented wheels in the wild?

For example a gateway / proxy can much more efficiently route a PUT payload to the required upstream (with “INSERT” permission and tuning) than deciding by analysing the payload, or even worse, not having to because the entire stack just uses POST as some franken analogue to “UPSERT”

0n34n7··on It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code
Goes a bit deeper. Can you replace a source of data with another in a few lines (besides the new implementation) and not break a whole chain of dependencies and associates unit tests? (apart from "does someone knows what's going on") - i.e. code at scale.
0n34n7··on Operations is not Developer IT
Agreed. Good application code often contains edge case handling, build time checks, unit tests and defensive flows that handle the unexpected so that users don't wake you up at night. Why can Ops not do the same? Why can Dockerfiles / Orchestrators / CI / playbooks not also implement sanity checks on deployments?

"Ooops... deployment failed. While deploying your artifact we found the following:

- Nothing is listening on the nominated port

- Your deployment is utilizing 100% CPU while idling

- We detected an abnormal volume of write operations to the mount

Please fix these issues and re-trigger the pipeline at your earliest convenience.

Regards, Ops."

0n34n7··on Six hundred and forty pages in fifteen months
TIL that books can have build systems. What a time to be alive.
0n34n7··on Cars, funerals and home improvements: EU to crack down on large cash payments
Considering global wealth distribution and the "1%", how often do 95% of people make a EUR10k purchase and of those, how many prefer the safety and guarantees offered by conducting the transaction through a financial institution?
0n34n7··on Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers
Frankly... Fck Facebook and their alien overlord.
0n34n7··on Discovery of a druggable pocket in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein
Does this mean a diet rich in linoleic acid could lessen the symptoms?
0n34n7··on This Cat Does Not Exist
But why?
0n34n7··on The Gloriuos Hour of Brexit
This article is biased, opinionated and littered with unsubstantiated facts, which I guess makes it an opinion piece.

The facts are that the UK has almost no manufacturing base, lags behind even smaller EU countries in various modern intellectual property endeavors, and greatly benefits from the free flow of goods and services from the continent.

The author is correct in pointing out that Brexit won't be the disaster everyone makes it out to be, but it will cause a systemic and gradual decline in the GDP and living standards of the British people - and cosying up the US will come with its own set of problems.

0n34n7··on In the future writing actual code will be like using a pro DSLR camera
The author assumes that software (or "code" as the article puts it) is a "problem" that has been - or is close to being - solved, and so can reliably be abstracted into an easy to use and understand UX.

However, software, the algorithms they encode, and the applications with relation to the hardware they run on is constantly evolving. By the time you have a reliable drag and drop interface for a use case, things have moved on.

Thus, these "no code" approaches will always lag considerably behind what is required to remain competitive, resulting in the requirement for the "DSLR" crowd.

0n34n7··on The wisdom of never leaving your hotel room
Im sitting here in a hotel room in Leipzig for the past week and can totally relate.
0n34n7··on Life is fractal, but markets are square
And now we are using these top-down developed computers to try and simulate bottom-up phenomena (like pattern recognition) and call it AI (well Neural Networks to be specific)
0n34n7··on Beijing's US Treasury holdings dip
Your argument assumes China could find more than ~$675M of physical gold on the market in April.
0n34n7··on CodeNameIze – Generate Human-Readables Hashes
How similar is this to auto allocated Docker container names?

Could it serve as a better alternative as you can hash some useful state attribute(s) for easy identification?

0n34n7··on Deposit of rare-earth minerals off Japan could supply world for centuries (2018)
The nice thing about this specific resource is that it is under water, negating many of the problems you mention.
0n34n7··on If the number of children is not growing, why is the population still increasing
No. The reproductive bracket has remained fairly constant in the last 100 years - i.e whether people get to 70 or 100, reproduction stops at ~50.

The interesting point here is the concept of “population momentum” which acts like a capacitor that buffers decreasing fertility rates in the short term - yet - “peak child” has been reached.

I think the takeaway here is people who extrapolate global population in 2100 at 15+ Billion have it wrong.

0n34n7··on Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
Same here... I feel like I am in some sort of nostalgic jQuery mobile museum.
0n34n7··on In Defense of Fahrenheit
Celsius is much more useful than stipulated here. For example, it takes 1J (Joule) to heat 1g (which is also 1ml) of pure water 1 degree Celsius.

The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day use.

0n34n7··on Starlink – SpaceX’s broadband internet system
There is no GPS in orbit. You need a point of reference and stars are pretty (99.99x10^zillion)% reliable, and yes, the SRS used the same idea.
0n34n7··on Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars
Let’s throw in our toasters, fridges and washing machines as well. Then some data scientist can correlate the best before dates of foods in my fridge by the number of panties in the washer in order to target me with ads for tummy meds.
0n34n7··on Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists?
And to a certain extent: cost.
0n34n7··on Building a front end with no JavaScript
Nice! It's all about use case - for example, creating an invoice on a mobile device with spotty connectivity will not work.

However, the approach of starting like you have, and adding JS only if explicitly required is great.

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