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bduffany

55 karma · joined June 9, 2021

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bduffany··on Grok outage
Someone please do the math on how fast this guy would have to type, and how his typing speed would physically affect the surrounding environment
bduffany··on Tw-fade: pure CSS scroll-driven edge masking
I think you're right. Performance profile shows lots of long spans relating to that element, and deleting that element makes the page scroll much more smoothly.

There are still other issues though. The performance of this page feels pretty bad in general.

bduffany··on Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps
The performance of the "Layout blocks" component is particularly bad. It consumes tons of CPU when scrolling.
bduffany··on Show HN: I made a drag and drop CSS grid generator
I reproduced this too:

1. Click the box in the bottom right corner to create a cell. 2. Click the box just to the left of that one to create another cell. 3. Drag the cell you created in step 2 to the right. The cell on the bottom right gets pushed downwards, below the grid's lower boundary.

(Chrome/Android)

bduffany··on Debian's /tmpest in a teapot
What do you mean by unprivileged namespaces being buried by the big-name distros?
bduffany··on I like gentoo's package deprecation process
There's a pretty popular `python-is-python3` package in Ubuntu which aliases `python` to `python3`. I used to install that in my dev environment setup scripts, but have since stopped using it for the reasons you mentioned. I've found it best to think of Python 2 and 3 as totally separate languages, so I consider it a good thing that the binary name python3 is unambiguous in all contexts.
bduffany··on How to rewrite classes using closures in JavaScript
I wonder if React has had any impact on people's general tendency for reaching for classes vs. closures, particularly after hooks were introduced.
bduffany··on GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?
Yes, and those work well for smaller workloads, but if you just run 1,000,000 commands with `&` in a `for` loop, it will grind your computer to a halt (if the tasks are modestly resource intensive). GNU parallel will let you run those same 1,000,000 tasks but make sure that only (e.g.) 16 of them are running at once. It's not easy to do that in bash.
bduffany··on Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing
The "Problem #2" that they mention also has an easy solution.

If the "intermediate" variable / internal representation is just "the input image but with edges only," then of course you can see internal representations.

When you compute that intermediate variable for the line drawing, it will just happen to behave like the identity function for that particular case. So if you have already filtered out non-edges then the transformation is basically a no-op.

The "types" mismatching as they mention is not a concern because the type is just "image" i.e. a big vector of HSL values or something. Edge detection is just a convolution filter so it's going to have approximately the same type as the input.

bduffany··on Lerp
It's also an example of a PID controller with the integral and derivative terms set to zero: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller
bduffany··on Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust
typesense did their own comparison here:

https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...

bduffany··on Will Bun JavaScript Take Node's Crown
There's an option to output a yarn-compatible lockfile. In practice, I think this means you'd need a branch protection rule to disallow a change to the binary lockfile without updating the yarn lockfile. I'm not sure that complexity is worth the performance gain of the binary format, personally. I think Bun should have an option (maybe in bunrc) to always use the human-readable format, though that detracts from the "batteries included" nature a bit.
bduffany··on Checkbox Olympics
I wonder how much of the time is spent in the onclick handler. Each of those clicks has to wait for the onclick handler before the next one executes, IIUC?
bduffany··on Build or don't build a software feature?
I'd guess that was intended to be captured with "how valuable is the feature to target users, truly?" If target users truly find the feature valuable then I guess that means the feature is adding value to the company.
bduffany··on Gameboy Wordle
The UI is great -- feels very nostalgic!

I think the word list could use some polish -- the first word it gave me was RAMCE which I have never heard, and Google didn't think it was a word either.

bduffany··on [dead]
I don't know for sure, but I imagine that for something like Slack which already has to support multiple browsers on multiple platforms (because it has a browser version as well), not shipping a browser seems like it could be a reasonable choice.
bduffany··on Vim prank: alias vim='vim -y'
Not directly related but I recently learned what exec does and found it has some neat uses.

When I see tutorials that tell me to run `. ~/.bashrc` after adding something to my bashrc, I run `exec bash` instead. Less finger gymnastics, and cleaner.

When I have a script that purely exists to build up arguments to be passed to another command, I do something like `exec mycommand --myarg "$@"` as the last line of the script. No unnecessary bash process lingering around.

bduffany··on Ask HN: How important is it to have a mentor?
I think there is a lot of value in the fact that a mentor is human, which will not be matchable by any information system any time soon.

A good mentor can learn from the types of questions you are asking and proactively identify flaws in your mental model. With Google searching, if you ask a question that has a flawed premise, you may get an answer that does not point out the flaws in your thinking.

bduffany··on Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?
Not the worst (I think `tar` and `unzip` probably take the cake) but `find` is pretty atrocious IMO. The order in which you specify certain flags like `-maxdepth` relative to other option flags matters (not just relative to plain arguments, but relative to other option flags starting with `-`).
bduffany··on 3D Printing Sex Toys
Just to try and help explain why people think you have a negative tone: written words tend to be interpreted negatively by default since you can't hear the person's tone of voice, so you have to use extra words to reinforce your positive intentions, and avoid using phrases that can be construed as positive with the right tone but have negative connotations by default.

For example, "Why do X when you could do Y" assumes they were aware of Y and consciously chose X over Y. It is overly presumptuous especially since you don't know them. It also carries the implication that you think Y is a better "default" choice and comes across as a prompt for them to defend why they chose X instead. It might be better phrased as "Had you considered Y instead of X, and if so, I am curious why you chose X instead?"

Also the phrase "Why would you do X" kind of comes across as "Who in their right mind would do X". A better way to say it is something like "Curious about the use of X? In my experience Y works better, have you had a chance to try that yet?"

bduffany··on Ask HN: How do I get my PM to stop using Excel to track bugs?
At a glance, Visor looks very nice. Does it let you mark an issue as blocked on more than one issue? I love using spreadsheets to track issues but for me that's the biggest pain point.