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QML

784 karma · joined February 19, 2017

A student interested in the intersection of technology and everything else.

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QML··on Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes
I've never heard of meat substitutes being "marketed ideologically as something that will help reduce economic inequality"—that's such an odd argument to make.

What I have heard before is: - more resource-efficient and green since livestock farming requires a lot of feed and has a higher carbon footprint than all vehicles combined, and - that it's less cruel than raising animals to be slaughtered.

In terms of economics, a cheaper meat substitute would just mean a cheaper source of protein for people, comparable to eating vegetables.

As a side note, does anyone know why Paul Graham has been talking about economic inequality recently? Is it just politics season and that this is a debate issue?

QML··on Sam Altman: Bay Area is no longer the obvious place for startups
That’s weird: what disincentives offset the cheaper cost of commercial space?
QML··on A Fairly Fast Fibonacci Function
The fastest way to compute a Fibonacci number is to simply look in up on the Internet -- not kidding. There was a coding challenge that I did a couple months back which required the cumulative sum of powers of two and the fibonacci sequence, and I just did that. We can talk about faster, general algorithms but most of the time, we are bounded by resources. For example, for the nth Fibonacci number, n will be bounded by some constant. So why not look it up? It's good for playing with theory though.

Edit: Fibonacci may be a specific example, but I wondered how much wasted computation has been spent on calculating the same problem on the same input.

QML··on Y Combinator Resources for Developers
Most likely Google's public launch of .dev domains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178757.
QML··on Why Google needed to build a graph serving system
I'm a bit late to the thread, but what happened to Cerebro and the concept of a Knowledge Engine? You wrote that it was launched as "Knowledge Strip" but wasn't as impactful as you had intended Cerebro to be.
QML··on Intern at a YC Company
When I was referring to CommonApp, I didn’t mean to also include along it’s heavy fee per application.

Beyond the medical field and lawyers, what other fields do you believe that qualifications is a solved problem? Mind that a certification itself can also be cost prohibitive — that’s ok if it can be amortized over many apps though.

QML··on Intern at a YC Company
There should honestly be a Common App for internships: one application, a standardized coding challenge, and then interviews. TripleByte seems to be trying to do something similar for full-time, but they don't cover internships.
QML··on Intern at a YC Company
Can we just push deadlines back to December? That's around the same time as most college apps are due, and they're basically the same process.
QML··on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus
Those billions aren’t uniformly taxed: that’s what they were pointing out.
QML··on The Man Who Invented Information Theory (2017)
Shannon may be well known in the HN community, but definitely not outside of here.
QML··on From “Hello World” to VP of Engineering at Reddit (2017)
Like it or not, the main cost of university is not from education or from helping graduates find jobs. It's true that anyone with an internet connection can access course material from top universities and from top professors. But only a university can get you a community, a network, a signal: you may call that prestige; society doesn't care.

I would also like to mention that the UC system is one of the more open, impactful universities when compared to the privates.

QML··on ProseMirror – A toolkit for building rich-text editors on the web
Yeah, Typora is still in beta last time I checked so minor issues like that are expected. Just open up an issue on their Github issue page.

Hm, for me Pandoc has worked pretty well for converting .md to .html. Is it the specific flavor of Markdown that you are using (I use Github flavored Markdown)?

QML··on ProseMirror – A toolkit for building rich-text editors on the web
Anyone know if it's possible to give Markdown and LaTeX first-class support in ProseMirror? Having only regex-based shortcuts does not achieve that.

What I mean is if you typed bold, let it turn into a bolded word, and then decide to edit the word itself, it should be surrounded by bold again instead of defaulting to ctrl-b due to content-editable. The same goes for LaTeX with $$ decorators.

I find this more natural when writing with Markdown and LaTeX than having to click the menu bar and inserting a math formula or whatnot. I think the best editor I found so far that does this is Typora, but that library is not open-source. There is an open-source library very close to it called Marktext, but that has a few annoying bugs and only has 1-2 developers.

So I'm wondering if ProseMirror is the mature library for me?

Edit: Ok, HackerNews only renders italtics which makes writing a bit annoying. The bold was initially surrounded by two * on both sides.

QML··on Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin
Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
QML··on Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin
Someone correct me, but can’t ad blockers just be installed through the OS and not be dependent on the browser?

I recall this is what I had to do for Safari since there wasn’t a supported extension for the new browser yet.

This would lessen our dependency on a browser for ad blocking in this ongoing browser war.

QML··on Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet
Is moderation on Facebook that large of a problem? I wonder if it’s possible to use the walled garden approach that Apple News does and apply that to Facebook: only distribute globally posts which have been moderated with a person. Moderation for local distribution shouldn’t be needed as people can self moderate at that level. It’ll be a two tier system.

Edit: Is it also possible to have better moderation by having an upvote downvote system? That seems to be how communities like Reddit and Hackernews scale.

QML··on Design flaw behind MacBook Pro’s “stage light” effect
I don’t think Apple will ever release a 2-in-1. Why? It’ll cannibalize their own product lines, the MacBook Pro and iPad Pro. Microsoft doesn’t really have that issue, and hence can make that product.

Honestly, there’s an opportunity here for some companies like Microsoft and Google to catch up in terms of innovation by designing products that Apple would never.

QML··on Design flaw behind MacBook Pro’s “stage light” effect
There’s more usage to the touchbar than replicating the media controls of the fn keys. For example if you wanted to smoothly scrub through a video, a continuous Touch Bar would make more sense than two discrete keys.
QML··on Binder – Turn a Git repo into a collection of interactive notebooks
Does anyone know where Binder gets its funding from? Or how much it costs to run an operation like this?

I’m wondering if it’s economically feasible to make online textbooks and references interact-able through a Jupyter backend. I know it’s already technically possible via nb-interact, but I haven’t seen it used besides a classroom size.

QML··on Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America
This. It’s conflicting to see that people who use water for basic needs have a higher water bill than farmers who use it for commercial purposes, and due to the lack of market pricing for bulk water are not incentivized to conserve water even in drought conditions.
QML··on To Cover China, There’s No Substitute for WeChat
There was a recent If Then episode that commented on how China’s declining demand of iPhones may be in part to how people there are agnostic to the hardware and more dependent on the software apps ran on the device (WeChat, Alipay, etc.).
QML··on Future of TypeScript on ESLint
Is this still dependent on browser adoption? I recently had to transpile a Typescript library via Babel to JavaScript since Chrome didn’t like the original import statements.
QML··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
No offense, but that’s because you lack perspective — and maybe that’s because of the bubble that entrapped HN and SV alike. There are tons of people who would take a six-figure job at FB, people who make less and people who others wouldn’t take chances on.
QML··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
Sadly that’s the trade off when you want a common benchmark to measure students, but then students optimize for that benchmark instead of something else — basically Goodhart’s law.

As a current student studying CS, I find all of this “leetcoding” disheartening since it unnecessarily takes away time and deprives some people of passion.

QML··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
Every time the interview story of the guy behind Homebrew gets brought up, there’s the reminder that he interviewed for a software engineering position while he would’ve been better suited for a product manager position — he also mentions this as such.
QML··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
As someone who is interviewing for internships, I view all of these algorithms interviews as a necessary evil. While they may not reflect the day to day job demands of programming, they are certainly easier to measure and serve as a benchmark for candidates.

Not all of them are bad though; I had an interview that had me implement a basic data structure in accordance to the specifications given. It didn’t require memorization, practice, or any “Leetcode grinding” — only fundamentals in communication and programming. The time I had was about an hour so this is definitely a plausible substitute.

QML··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
Does this method still bypass the algorithms interview? It seems like it only gets your foot in the door, which is probably the harder part for most.
QML··on John C. Bogle Has Died
Can't mention this without posting an article by Matt Levine on this topic [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-in...

QML··on New logo
While both the Library of Congress and American Airline logos are iconic, they look fairly outdated and aren't as flexible.

Look at the new Library of Congress logo [1], and think if that could've been done with the older one.

[1] https://www.pentagram.com/work/library-of-congress#23433

QML··on New logo
In hindsight, it's a shame that Google didn't put more resources into their productivity ecosystem and create a single, tightly-integrated app.
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