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billrobertson42

222 karma · joined December 5, 2010

5'9" tall
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billrobertson42··on Java Decompiler
I wanted to suggest Fernflower. I have a lot of experience with it, because it's what Jetbrains uses in Intellij. I have only seen it generate sensible code.

I took a quick peek at Vineflower first, and it's a fork of Fernflower. So would recommend that for anyone who might stumble on this in the future who is looking for a decompiler.

billrobertson42··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
I took it as sarcasm.
billrobertson42··on Svelte’s characteristics that likely contribute most to improved performance
What is react doing that appears to make it so much slower? Where does it spend its time?
billrobertson42··on The Bitter Lessons Behind Kimi Researcher's Taste
When you're writing a release, or about some detail of your project, you need to directly give new readers background, or at least provide some navigation to something else that provides background.

A lot of tech and tech-adjacent writing is like that these days. Our cool project X now does Y! With no introduction about what X is, or even a link to something that describes it. So most readers are left to wonder about why should care. At times, I've even tracked down X's github repo only to find that their README has the same problem.

It's an easy trap to fall in when you write. It's easy to feel like you're over-explaining things. You, the author, know what it is, and likely many of the people who follow X know too. The problem comes when some curious person outside of the Xosphere takes a look. Chances are good you'll lose most, if not all, of them.

If you want people to be interested in your X, then make sure they have a way of learning about your X when you introduce improvement Y.

billrobertson42··on Meta's Segment Anything written with C++ / GGML
This is amazing. Thank you!
billrobertson42··on Aeron – Proof of the benefits of open development
zmq is a challenge to get to work for sure. It's super low level.
billrobertson42··on Modern CSV version 2
Good news! It's in rubles.
billrobertson42··on Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner
Awesome!
billrobertson42··on Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner
A simple font selector would be nice. I have some seriously impaired vision w/o correction and monospaced fonts really help when I have to look at a screen that way.

That and ability to zoom in/out or increase/decrease font size.

billrobertson42··on Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
Good for them. Bug, mistake, bad data, or whatever. Glad they fixed it.
billrobertson42··on Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
It doesn't appear to be locked now.
billrobertson42··on Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone
If the expose category and tags then passing through the ability to filter based on that would nice too.
billrobertson42··on Ask HN: Old guys, what do you miss about development in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s?
I started in the 90's and I realized early on that non-tech people in the company viewed us as cogs.
billrobertson42··on What is a coder's worst nightmare?
Realizing that "coder" is largely a pejorative term and most people have no idea and appreciation for what you do.
billrobertson42··on Ask HN: Is anyone familiar with the Asimov estate?
Have you tried seeing if you're connected to anyone there through LinkedIn?
billrobertson42··on Why Aren't There C Conferences?
The reason that there is a conference for X is because somebody makes money running a conference for X. Be it directly or indirectly.
billrobertson42··on Who Killed Prolog? (2010)
core.logic hasn't really seen any updates in such a long time. I don't think it's maintained any more.
billrobertson42··on A Programming Language Underdog
Thanks. That's very interesting. I don't suppose you're going to tell me that it has Clojure's amazing data structures too. :-)
billrobertson42··on A Programming Language Underdog
What about run-time safety? e.g. are the pointers? does it have builtin in array bounds checking? (Heck, does it even have arrays?)
billrobertson42··on 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae
Excel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.
billrobertson42··on Ask HN: Data diff tool for tabular data?
Crazy talk here, but do you have control of the database? Can you get history added to it?
billrobertson42··on Jepsen: Dgraph 1.0.2
Well, that's unfortunate. DGraph seemed like it was pretty cool. I wish them the best of luck.
billrobertson42··on Jepsen: Dgraph 1.0.2
Could that be the nature of Github? Doesn't it give credit to whomever merges pull requests?
billrobertson42··on Jepsen: Dgraph 1.0.2
I assume more testing will occur after the four bugs are addressed. Will that be published on the Jepsen blog?
billrobertson42··on VigNAT: A Formally Verified Performant NAT
> Our proof ... demonstrates the absence of implementation bugs.

It's definitely a strong statement, and thanks for the qualification.

When I saw the words on the page I began to wonder about all the other things that could go wrong. e.g. There could be bug in software that does the code analysis, or the compiler, or underlying libraries or operating system, or (sigh) in the CPU.

Also, there could be unexpected behavior when the machine its running on is under load. It would also be interesting to see it subjected to some of the fuzz-testing software out there.

Overall, I think it's a great approach and worth pursuing. Thank you for releasing the source.

billrobertson42··on Hosting your static site with AWS S3, Route 53, and CloudFront for free
The odds are good that it will "always" exist, not really always of course but long enough that we don't care. However, Amazon may come to the decision that it's not worth keeping this low spending tier of customer and price them out of the service.

Hopefully, it's a good enough of a hook to get you started on AWS that it is worth it to keep it cheap like it is now.

billrobertson42··on My Favorite PostgreSQL Queries and Why They Matter
And would also improve the chances that somebody looking at the sql in 5 or 10 years would quickly understand it as well.
billrobertson42··on What’s Revolutionary about Flutter
Rows are horizontal things.
billrobertson42··on I am a “MasterChef” survivor
I didn't have to go thru it
billrobertson42··on Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
Google's systems do not, "think."
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