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Meegul

510 karma · joined June 12, 2016

https://michaelbilstein.com
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Meegul··on Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
Interesting. Seems to be more of an enthusiast data-focused product rather than something aimed towards traditional car-folk then. Might be interesting to play around with even if you don't want to contribute the data back to comma.ai
Meegul··on Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda
You can find similar products that work over bluetooth for under $10 on Amazon. I use an old smartphone on a mount to show all of the same information using a third-party app - no need for an $88 proprietary dongle.

There doesn't seem to be anything new about this product other than marketing and a high price tag. I'd love for that to not be the case, however. Maybe I'm missing some features of it.

Meegul··on The internet as existential threat
Similarly, if it worked so well, why did we all make the switch?
Meegul··on 21% of Windows users plan to switch to Mac, says survey, vs. 2% Mac to Windows
I've always had the issue of WSL taking a long time to start up (5+ seconds) and had assumed that it was WSL taking up that time. Doesn't seem to be the case, as after switching to conemu, everything is much more speedy and tolerable. Thanks for the suggestion.
Meegul··on Comey's opening remarks [pdf]
Agreed that it's not as powerful as some had hoped. That said, his repeated requests for loyalty, followed by asking him to halt or hinder an investigation, and then the subsequent 'firing' can be fairly easily related. It's not acceptable to ask the FBI director to stop an investigation and then fire him when he doesn't.
Meegul··on Comey's opening remarks [pdf]
This doesn't sound damning enough to you? 'He described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country' 'He asked what we could do to “lift the cloud.”'

Additionally, his insistence on "loyalty" is terrifying to me. As soon as the FBI isn't independent, parties will be involved in the judicial process.

Meegul··on Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
This is certainly true within the CS department at Purdue. There are some really passionate professors (Gustavo for my fellow boilermakers), however they're typically only involved in the upper level courses. It'd be easy to look at the first two classes in the program and assume that was the norm, but things really change as the degree continues to specialize through your 4 years.
Meegul··on Trump to announce U.S. will exit Paris climate deal
I think he's referring to the polarization of America's parties, where there's now a sizable group on both sides who'd rather see the other side upset than their own side happy.
Meegul··on ReactOS 0.4.5 Released
They seem to be targeting NT 5.2, which is indeed Windows XP, so it makes sense to also target that graphical experience in a sense.
Meegul··on Solar Roof
That's actually exactly the data they're getting from Google's project Sunroof. I'm not sure how correct that data is, but I haven't seen many complaints.
Meegul··on 'Civilization' Creator Sid Meier: “I Didn't Really Expect to Be a Game Designer”
I can attest to your recommendation. Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, and Victoria are their primary grand strategy series these days. Each one of them specializes on a different time period, either in the past or future. They all have a considerable amount of depth, but after a few hours of playing around and accepting a few losses, they're a great step up for people with experience with strategy games.
Meegul··on Show HN: Isblankup – a fast and minimal website to check whether a website is up
With this site, my goal was to make it as fast as a free Heroku dyno can get. I'm not incredibly experienced in development, as I'm still studying for my undergrad, so any feedback is appreciated.

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/Meegul/isup

Meegul··on New research says starting university classes at 11am would improve learning
I'm experiencing this right now. My first 3 semesters or so, classes before 10am were both difficult to go to and difficult to get anything out of. Yet without changing any of my habits, getting up earlier is far easier. I'd lean towards this being due to maturing, but it's naturally quite difficult to say when my sample size is myself.
Meegul··on Udp.c in Linux kernel pre-4.5 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code
Does anyone have an explanation for how this exploit works?
Meegul··on New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary
Knowing a candidate's compensation history can save an employer a significant amount of money which they otherwise might've spent on the same candidate. This gives them an unfair advantage, and the way I see it, it's unavoidable to remove this advantage. By restricting employers from asking about previous compensation, we're just shifting this advantage to the employees, for better or worse.
Meegul··on The Rusty Web: Targeting the Web with Rust
As someone interested in language design, what design decisions, in your opinion, make JS so terrible? The extremely weak type system?
Meegul··on The Rusty Web: Targeting the Web with Rust
Perhaps it is. PHP is also typically ragged on for being "one of the worst", yet it runs the majority of the web. The common theme between JavaScript and PHP is that it's possible to write some pretty awful code, but that doesn't make it impossible to write _good_ code in either of them. Do we measure languages by the worst we can create with them, or the best we can create with them?

It's also easy to be "one of the worst" when there are only a handful of languages that see widespread use. You only need to be in the bottom 5 of 15 or so languages, but my point is that that may not imply that it's a bad language.

Meegul··on The Rusty Web: Targeting the Web with Rust
I disagree. JavaScript is far, far from a perfect language, but if you think it's the worst one out there, you must've not payed attention to it in the past few years. I - as well as most non-self loathing JS hackers - use the ECMAScript 2015 (or later) standard, where the language is relatively feature complete. This allows JS to become a relatively complete OO language should you desire, and it also allows it to act (mostly) functionally. `const` and `let` alone fix many of the ambiguous gripes that people had with JS, and if you truly believe it's still the worst language out there, I encourage you to look at these new developments.
Meegul··on Selfie: tiny self-compiling C compiler, MIPS emulator and MIPS hypervisor
That's mind-boggling to me. My lisp interpreter is hardly shorter than that, granted it was designed with extensibility as a goal. Still, incredible.
Meegul··on White House Indicates Potential Crackdown on Recreational Marijuana
I'd imagine that's exactly what OP was referring to.
Meegul··on Electromagnetic Levitation Quadcopter [video]
What an excellent presentation. I don't have much of a physics background, but this was immediately understandable.
Meegul··on Nim core developer wanted
Not OP or aware of Nim's specific implementation, but in some cases, yes. However in a fps-sensitive situation like a game, it just takes ~16ms of GC before you've missed at least one refresh. By limiting the time to something lower, we can distribute this time such that the user doesn't notice any stuttering, provided the GC events were spaced out enough.
Meegul··on Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]
Professor Leonard is really great if you need some extra help learning something. He moves slowly enough with the material that it's difficult to get left behind, however that might be too slow for most HNers.
Meegul··on I Only Work Remotely
This has been my experience as well. It's not a good time for writing maintainable code, but it IS a good time to abstract some complex solutions and think of possible problems that could arise from each possible architecture.
Meegul··on The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator
Just had this happen to me at the 3rd office! Pretty frustrating because I was having a great time!
Meegul··on Freenom World – A fast and anonymous Public DNS resolver
I have no way of doing this currently, the point is just that without some form of verification, I can't be sure that this is any better than what I'm using now.
Meegul··on Freenom World – A fast and anonymous Public DNS resolver
How can we be sure that their claims are true?
Meegul··on The Number of Older Student Loan Borrowers Is Rising
I believe that's the entire idea of it. That and then the college could selectively decide how many majors of a certain type they need, financially speaking. A college will then be punished financially for pushing out tons of gender studies grads rather than engineers.
Meegul··on The Number of Older Student Loan Borrowers Is Rising
Here's some more reading on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/business/dealbook/getting...

Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue, has been pushing for this as a sort of solution to student loans, but it just ends up with the higher-income students subsidizing the education of the lower-income students, where 'income' refers to post-graduation job income.

Meegul··on The Number of Older Student Loan Borrowers Is Rising
My school, Purdue University, has been making a big push towards IBR. The biggest issue with it I can see, is that, as far as I can tell, there's no cap on the money collected. That is to say, if they take 15% of your income, and you end up making lots of money, they will continue collecting their share past the actual cost of college. It honestly makes me feel like they see me as an indentured servant, not a student.
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