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codeplea

144 karma · joined December 16, 2016

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codeplea··on Information has been permanently deleted, for small values of permanently
It's probably in the Privacy Policy they just emailed about.
codeplea··on Information has been permanently deleted, for small values of permanently
>I received a confirmation that said, “Your personal information and items associated with your account have now been deleted. This action is permanent and cannot be reversed.”

By the same logic, wasn't this first email self-contradicting? If your data is gone, how are they emailing you to tell you that your data is gone?

But really, aren't companies legally required to retain a lot of information anyway? Such as invoices needed for tax purposes?

codeplea··on How to live on $432 a month in America
This is addressed directly in the article:

>And for those who might be quick to point out that there could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say “there are no jobs” in a given area, they generally mean that there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg isn’t entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours. In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.

codeplea··on Show HN: A simple echo server for testing HTTP clients
Very cool. I can definitely see this being useful for me in the future.

I made a similar tool which simply outputs the exact HTTP request as received by the server. It's useful to test how the client is mangling URLs or packing request body data. It was actually not so easy to implement, as basically every production web-server mangles the request before making it available. So I wrote it from scratch in C.

It's at http://httpparrot.com/

codeplea··on Musicians algorithmically generate melodies, release them to public domain
For there to be infringement, someone needs to prove that copying took place. Because of the algorithm these musicians used to generate this, they can prove mathematically that copying did not take place.
codeplea··on Safari Will Stop Accepting HTTPS Certificates That Last Longer Than 13 Months
Couldn't one also argue that more frequent renewal exposes a larger attack surface?
codeplea··on Ask HN: How Is to Write for Packt?
I wrote for Packt, but I didn't have that problem. It wouldn't have been allowed by the contract.

Can you tell us what happened?

codeplea··on Show HN: My Book, Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang
I wrote for them too. My book was published last May.

I made a similar workflow to you. I wrote using vim and markdown, then used pandoc to convert to HTML. I then wrote some scripts to mangle the HTML to something more compatible with Packt's system (adds some class names and the like).

Regarding sales, they send me royalty statements for each quarter about 3 months after the quarter's end. For example, my book was released in May. I didn't get my first statement until the end of September. My last statement is dated Dec 31st, and it covers July-September 2019.

You can also setup an Amazon author account and get Amazon sales numbers much more quickly. Just go to https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ and create an account. You'll then have to verify that you're the author of your book, but it's pretty straight forward.

codeplea··on The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790
>what's the moral justification for making this illegal?

The robocalls I receive are all using fake caller IDs. At that point, it's fraud, isn't it?

I wouldn't mind robocallers if they used a real caller ID. If that were the case, I could just block them and be done with it.

codeplea··on The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790
I've been a Twilio customer for a long time. They don't allow you to spoof caller ID. You can only set outgoing caller ID to a real number that you own or have access to.
codeplea··on Do people still use Mention tools?
Lots of people use mention tools. I built a tool with a much narrower scope than yours, and it has a few thousand users now.
codeplea··on Day Trading for a Living?
5k to 5.3k is a 6% increase. It seems like day trading should be just about the riskiest/hardest way to get 6% a year.

The S&P 500 returns about 10%/year since its inception. (7% if you adjust for inflation.)

codeplea··on Day Trading for a Living?
5k into 5.3k is 6%. You can get much more than that in the long run by just putting it in an index fund.

Why bother day trading?

codeplea··on Stellarium: A free open-source planetarium for your computer
Does anyone know if this, or anything like it, is available in VR?
codeplea··on Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News
Of course. It's not a secret.
codeplea··on Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News
How do you know it's reliable? In my experience, Google Alerts misses a lot of mentions on HN and Reddit.

I would challenge you to try an alternative (like https://f5bot.com/) for a week. You may be surprised at how many more hits it gets over Google Alerts.

codeplea··on Tinyexpr: parser, compiler, and evaluation engine in C for math expressions
It's apples and oranges really. I would say that it's easier to use recursive descent to parse a full programming language though.

Shunting yard works very well if you want to parse math expressions into postfix notation. It is then really easy to run postfix notation into bytecode on a stack-based virtual machine.

For comparison, here is a shunting yard based math expression evaluator in Javascript that I wrote before writing TinyExpr: https://github.com/codeplea/rimath

codeplea··on Tinyexpr: parser, compiler, and evaluation engine in C for math expressions
I wrote this. I'm glad to see it posted. Happy to answer any questions.
codeplea··on Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool
That doesn't seem plausible. It works too fast and the results are too good.
codeplea··on Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool
Care to explain more about how it works?

Your about page says "sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate them from the background" but that's pretty vague.

What kind of AI?

codeplea··on Robinhood Gets Almost Half Its Revenue from Bargain with High-Speed Traders
I think Robinhood implements market orders as limit %5 above/below market. You should be able to enter a limit order at your own max price, and it would've executed.
codeplea··on F5Bot: Email Keyword Alerts from Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters
Google Alerts seems to miss most of Reddit these days. It's really broken.
codeplea··on F5Bot: Email Keyword Alerts from Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters
Hi, F5Bot author here. I'm working on a premium version, and a couple features are already available through Patreon. It has just been a low priority. If you have ideas for any premium features you would like to see, please feel free to drop me an email sometime (just hit reply on any alert you get).
codeplea··on Prosecuting homeless for sleeping outside may violate U.S. Constitution: ruling
I agree that it seems some amendments are ignored, but also there is no one "right" interpretation of any amendment. I found this article, The Myth of the Rule of Law [1], to be very enlightening.

[1] http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

codeplea··on MinUnit – A minimal unit testing framework for C (2002)
Why stick to three lines? With only a couple more you could reduce the boiler-plate needed to use it.

I wrote a minimal C test framework too: https://github.com/codeplea/minctest It's got some real-world usage. Still only just one header file, but it'll time each test and if an equal assertion fails it'll print the variable values.

codeplea··on How F5Bot Slurps All of Reddit
Is your solution broken for the cases where keywords are prefixes or suffixes of each other? This situation is very common in my use-case. Also, does your solution work if a keyword appears multiple times?

I get what you're saying, but it's not quite as easy as you imply.

Pulling in an entire programming language is a much bigger dependency and maintenance cost than spending a couple hours writing an algorithm. It would make more sense to just use a C extension.

I did try PHP's regex. It was much, much slower.

codeplea··on How F5Bot Slurps All of Reddit
Thanks! I'm glad it's working well for you.
codeplea··on How F5Bot Slurps All of Reddit
Thanks for the explanation. The APIs make a lot more sense in light of it. It seems odd they didn't just use Postgres indexing though. Do you know if they benchmarked it at any point?
codeplea··on How F5Bot Slurps All of Reddit
Each request still returns 100 posts. It's just that you have to specify the 100 post IDs individually.

Their default listing mode works very poorly. It would certainly be more requests to use a hybrid system like you're talking about.

codeplea··on US military draws up 'do not buy' list for software
They should really just have an open-source mandate by now.
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