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alisey

97 karma · joined June 14, 2010

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alisey··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
And how is that even a fix? The problem is that a seemingly empty textarea has overflow in the first place. Adding `overflow: hidden` just sweeps the issue under the rug.
alisey··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
In my experience, the results from those who claim they can judge skills based on a lunch conversation have not been good. I think people who can do it are the exception, not the norm.
alisey··on How to Center in CSS (2015)
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align-3/#overflow-values
alisey··on How to Center in CSS (2015)
And yet six years later still no widespread support for the 'safe' keyword. Which means the content can overflow the container without a way to scroll to some parts of it: https://jsfiddle.net/r50qseah/
alisey··on Let me give you a list of the top scams coding bootcamps use to steal your money
How do people even read on Twitter? All I can see on their desktop website is a single tweet with a "Show this thread" link that doesn't do anything.
alisey··on Show HN: Made this with my daughter to help kids ages 2 to 4 learn logic
This reminds me of vacuous truth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth).

I was recently writing a function that returns early if all items in a list meet a certain condition. It was interesting to think about what should happen if that list is empty.

alisey··on AirPods Pro Page Performance
Surprisingly, yes, the video is exported as a sequence of JPEGs: https://jsbin.com/wodusuzeja/1/edit?js,output

As for the tool, ffmpeg seems to work well enough.

alisey··on Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
The most important reason is semantics. If "O" and "0" look alike in a certain font, should we use the same character code for both? No, because they have different meaning.

Here are some contexts in which this semantic difference is important: search (compare search results for "cop" and "сор"), alphabetical sorting, text-to-speech, spellchecking, case conversion ("ATOM" -> "atom", but "АТОМ" -> "атом", note the difference between t-т and m-м).

alisey··on Obtaining Wildcard SSL Certificates from Comodo via Dangling Markup Injection
> But it covers many cases, including the one here.

In my experience, it doesn't even cover cases such as this one, but it certainly makes developers confident they don't need to apply contextual escaping.

alisey··on Simple Ways of Reducing the Cognitive Load in Code
Yes, a Method Object pattern http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MethodObject
alisey··on Fourier Visualizations
https://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/
alisey··on Ask HN: What's the most elegant piece of code you've seen?
Keep in mind that this algorithm is not in-place, so it wouldn't be fair to say that it's more 'elegant' than imperative quicksort implementations.
alisey··on What is functional programming?
In part 2 he writes about why it's not the essence of functional programming: http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/which-programming-languages...
alisey··on Work on stuff that matters, first principles (2009)
I think you define passion too narrowly. It's hard to monetize your passion if the only thing you enjoy is drawing pumpkins with charcoal on the walls of 18th century buildings.

But flexibility helps. You could, for example, make a living working on V8 or SpiderMonkey, and work on your programming language as a hobby.

alisey··on Work on stuff that matters, first principles (2009)
> Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!

See, he acknowledges the importance of money. But once your basic needs are met, you can start discovering what matters to you. Music and creating your programming language are just to points in a huge space of things you could potentially enjoy. There are many jobs that, even though they don't sound sexy, allow you to explore this space and gravitate to things you like. The choice is not always between being a slave or dying from starvation.

alisey··on The Science of Pixar's ‘Inside Out’
Every basic emotions researcher comes up with a different list. But most of the lists include some version of fear, anger, disgust, and joy (but not sadness). "Emotional Brain" by Joseph LeDoux, chapter 5 has more info on various lists. From the same book:

James Averill, a major proponent of social constructivism, describes a behavior pattern, called “being a wild pig”, that is quite unusual by Western standards, but is common and even “normal” among the Gururumba, a horticultural people living in the highlands of New Zealand. The behavior gets its name by analogy. There are no undomesticated pigs in this culture, but occasionally, and for unknown reasons, a domesticated one will go through a temporary condition in which it runs wild. But the pig can, with appropriate measures, be redomesticated and returned to the normal pig life among the villagers. And, in a similar vein, Gururumba people can act this way, becoming violent and aggressive and looting and stealing, but seldom causing harm or taking anything of importance, and eventually returning to routine life. In some instances, after several days of living in the forest, during which time the stolen objects are destroyed, the person returns to the village spontaneously with no memory of the experience and is never reminded of the event by the villagers. Others, though, have to be captured and treated like a wild pig - held over a smoking fire until the old self returns […]

Averill uses “being a wild pig” to support his claim that “most standard emotional reactions are socially constructed or institutionalized patterns of response” rather than biologically determined events.

alisey··on Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
I gave this question to a friend and she came up with what I think is a beautiful answer. Remember min and max X and Y coordinates seen so far, and count the number of steps. When this number gets larger than (maxX - minX)*(maxY - minY) we know we're in a cycle.

It's an extension of your idea of counting the total number of visited positions. What I like most about it is that it can work with streamed data.

alisey··on Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
The question starts with: "Consider a finite checkerboard of unknown size", which means you don't know the value of size-squared. Bitmap requires O(n) space, while the Carpenter's solution requires only O(1) space. And both require O(n) time. If an interviewee failed to see the difference, honestly I doubt I would want to pursue it further.
alisey··on Google's XSS game
Because you can't have tags inside of textarea. All data inside of textarea is interpreted as text.
alisey··on Google's XSS game
Do you have a '+' in your string? In URL it's interpreted as a space, use '%2B' instead.
alisey··on Native equivalents of jQuery functions
By using innerHTML you lose event bindings of all elements in the container you're appending data to, and the state of inputs.
alisey··on Spirograph in HTML 5
Here's a similar algorithm that creates patterns slightly resembling radiolarians:

http://alisey.deviantart.com/art/Orbits-316110768

http://explord.com/experiments/orbits/

alisey··on Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
And the more abstract your knowledge and understanding, the harder it becomes to visualize. It's relatively easy to visually explain classical mechanics, but not so for quantum mechanics.
alisey··on How to Learn: More Humility, Less Video
That was an amazing course and my first experience when video lectures didn't suck. I learned Python without even trying, as a by-product of solving interesting problems.
alisey··on WYSIHTML5: A better approach to rich text editing
It's hard, especially if you want to support IE8. You need a 100-line function simply to get cursor position in a cross-browser fashion.
alisey··on Modern Web Development
One thing that I use often: when execution hits breakpoint, you can switch to the Console tab and modify local variables, and run any code in the context of the current function.

Also, files in the Scripts can be edited by double clicking.

alisey··on Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011
His "Art and Illusion" is very good too.
alisey··on Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011
"Picturing the Uncertain World" by Howard Wainer. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691137595

- World record improves linearly for over 50 years, for how long will the trend continue?

- Is it OK not to rescore erroneously high SAT scores?

- Why among examinees who get the same SAT score White examinees do better on easy items, whereas Black examinees do better on hard items?

- How comes that areas with the lowest and the highest kidney cancer death rate are rural areas?

alisey··on Training in 'concrete thinking' can be self-help treatment for depression
This new research looks very much like Martin Seligman's theory of learned helplessness developed 25 years ago.

His book 'Learned Optimism' is good.

alisey··on [Show HN] Handpick: The most caring way to share links
I like the copy on your homepage. Last year I built a prototype of a similar service and used it for a couple of months with friends, but it turned out that not having immediate feedback takes a lot of fun out of sharing. Posting a link to Skype and having a conversation about it in real time feels much more rewarding. It's something psychological, hard to explain.

Having said that, I still want to explore this idea some time in the future and see how it works out.

You might want to check out a similar service created by other HN user: http://www.yourpane.com/

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