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amk_

860 karma · joined August 9, 2014

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amk_··on Four Million Commutes Reveal New U.S. 'Megaregions'
It's designed to identify economic regions. The way they do that is to graph all the connections between cities and cut the least-connected ones until 50 clusters emerge.

It doesn't, as you say, mean that someone on the edge of a graph commutes all the way to center---after all the drive time for some of these routes is more than 8 hours.

You could argue that choosing 50 clusters is arbitrary and it would make more sense to severe connections below some threshold "quality" and see how many clusters meet that criteria.

amk_··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2016)
Progressly | Software Engineer | SF Bay Area; Redwood City, CA | https://progressly.com

Progressly is the new standard for how teams find and execute business processes. Progressly provides a standard format for mission-critical information along with real-time insights that have the power to streamline operations.

Our stack is React + Rails + Node on AWS. Whether you are a great backend engineer, a top-notch frontend developer, or a jack of all trades, we’d love to talk to you.

Bonus if you:

* Have built mission critical systems and services at scale

* Contribute to relevant open source projects

Apply: https://angel.co/progressly/jobs/84701-3-software-engineer

amk_··on Show HN: Learn to Code for Free
For everyday problem solving have you considering starting with an environment like Mathematica, Jupyter, Octave/Matlab, or even Excel?
amk_··on How we made our React-Rails app 5x faster
That looks useful, thanks
amk_··on How we made our React-Rails app 5x faster
Pretty much! Caching makes a big difference, especially for first-time visitors. For logged-in users, one particular big gain was getting rid of a join from users to events to show the notifications count, and replacing that with a counter cache (denormalization).
amk_··on GNU Octave
A year or two ago the TeXmacs package worked pretty well.

There is also an actual Octave kernel for Jupyter, similar to the Julia one: https://github.com/Calysto/octave_kernel

amk_··on Turning off syntax highlighting
More advanced tokenizers are able to emit different tokens for those scopes, but not all syntax highlighters differentiate between them. The online Textmate theme editor is a good place to examine what's availabe because many text editors are able to import .tmThemes or use them directly (Sublime, VS Code).

You can see here that the Monokai theme supports about 20 tokens and doesn't differentiate much between scopes: https://tmtheme-editor.herokuapp.com/#!/editor/theme/Monokai

Personally, I prefer highlighters that do something to highlight variables differently, like this variant of Monokai (ie around line 45 for the JS example): https://tmtheme-editor.herokuapp.com/#!/editor/theme/Monokai...

amk_··on REST Anti-patterns
What about DELETE?
amk_··on REST Anti-patterns
What if 'status' isn't a column in the account database? What if closed_accounts is a join table or something else? Then wouldn't adding a /close route be hiding idiosyncrasies in your data model, not the other way around?

It seems like we spend a lot of time designing object relations that map a domain, but maybe not so much mapping domain-specific actions.

Or would you consider all of the above bad practice?

amk_··on Visual Studio Code 1.5
It seems a little strange but you can import the propTypes of the wrapped component (argument to the HOC) into the wrapper and incorporate them into your type checking there.
amk_··on Arduboy – Open Source Card-Sized Gaming Board
Several (well, at least one) YC hardware companies have gone through HAX. They also do a demo day of sorts at SF Maker Faire, Arduboy was there last year.
amk_··on The Correct Way to Validate Email Addresses
TL;DR the odds that the user entered an incorrect-but-valid address are way higher than that they entered one which will not actually be able to receive mail. Send a validation email.
amk_··on Announcing Quill 1.0
If it is copied as HTML containing the image, yes. Usually works if copying (via highlight) from a page. Otherwise: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/pull/821
amk_··on Nano to remain in GNU
The worst is when someone who's never used Vi before gets thrown in there after running, eg, 'git commit'. Can't Google how to quit because they don't even know the name of the program!
amk_··on Nano to remain in GNU
Good to hear. Nano's up-front display of the core key combinations has been a source of relief for people getting dropped into a terminal editor for ages. Wish more distributions would set nano as the default $EDITOR instead of vim.
amk_··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=freebsd

They are able to distribute GPL v3 code because they way it is packaged complies with the terms of the license.

amk_··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
Mostly not, due to licensing. The GNU utils that transitioned to GPL v3 (eg Bash) are kind of stuck there in 2007.
amk_··on This is not a place of honor
Holy shit. Dieter Ast was my landlord in college. This explains so much about my basement.

To those who haven't read the article yet, the real title is Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Prof Ast was the material scientist on one of the multidisciplinary teams tasked to design warning symbols for 10,000 year nuclear waste storage sites. He used to go around collecting old lab computers that were going to be thrown out and resurrect them with Windows 2000 or Puppy Linux installs.

amk_··on JavaScript Is Not Expressive
Great point! I'd heard of symbols being added to Javascript but never made the connection to the widely-used :symbol syntax for naming constants in Ruby.

(I didn't write the article, just posted it)

amk_··on Startups Can’t Manufacture Like Apple Does (2014)
Parts you can sell for much more than they cost to produce
amk_··on Spectre.css – a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework
Nice. It's a small thing but I really like that you can add loading indicators on the buttons with just a class.
amk_··on Spectre.css – a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework
Because fieldsets are often used as accessibility features and may not be semantic in all the places you would want the look of a fieldset
amk_··on Git Reflow
> because it doesn't store that information

Is there something about the Hg architecture that makes it easier to plug in something like Evolve than with Git? Evolve isn't enabled out of the box on Mercurial either.

amk_··on Git Reflow
git reflog

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog

amk_··on Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization
I like the Songza (rolled into Google Play Music) themed playlists, eg "It's Tuesday Morning , play something for focusing/working out/spring cleaning". Usually there is something within one of the suggested categories I'll listen to.
amk_··on LED Light Pollution: Can We Save Energy and Save the Night? (2015)
It's not that far off. You can see the Milky Way from the Adirondacks, about 200 miles from the first picture.
amk_··on Software Update Destroys $286M Japanese Satellite
Every hardware platform has unique abilities and constraints. The code that provides the "business logic" part of the device is often one-off and domain- or application-specific. Even if you're running on some general purpose platform, that part of the code is going to be about as battle-tested as anything running on some new architecture - not much.

Edit:

Someone alse pointed this out but it's worth reiterating - hardware systems are simulated extensively and analyzed in various ways for performance, cost, reliability and other factors. Software less so, and test cases, if they exist, might not necessarily capture all the power loss/inconsistent state problems that can occur in the real world. Maybe in the future embedded applications could be analysed with a fuzzer or something to help weed out that kind of once-in-the-field-never-in-the-lab bug.

amk_··on Rails 5.0.0.rc1
Authentication
amk_··on Andrei Tarkovsky – Poetic Harmony [video]
Was Zona really even about the film? Or more about the author's experience of it at different stages of his life?

That said, Roadside Picnic is a very atmospheric and captivating story on its own right. It really fleshes out the backstory - if you like the movie, read it.

amk_··on O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader
Same. It's the only reader that has intuitive keyboard shortcuts to navigate the selection between the feed, article list, and the actual article. And it looks nice. Well worth $3/mo.
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