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hellofunk

9,428 karma · joined July 10, 2015

John Bellick, Mexico City
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hellofunk··on I no longer build software
Not all desk jobs, well certainly not all jobs where you are always sitting down, cause the same long-term strain on the eyes, however. A bus driver is at least focusing on the distance for most of the day, which is much more natural than staring at a computer monitor and its artificial light and small text for hours on end.
hellofunk··on Facebook fears ruling may force it to pull social media platforms from EU
I sure hope so; the demise of Facebook (and any related business present or future) would be a positive effect on society in so many ways.
hellofunk··on Trump offered to pardon Assange if he provided source for DNC emails – lawyer
It’s not a point of information, though. It is one man’s claim from a very biased site on this topic. That’s why you are getting downvoted.
hellofunk··on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac
Ironically I can't even tell who you think the bully here is. It sure seems to me that Epic was the bully in this situation.
hellofunk··on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac
> They could allow Epic to give the option to buy through apple or buy for cheaper skipping apple.

How do you propose that Apple could give this option to Epic?

If they allowed Epic to skirt their rules, they'd have to do the same for everyone, so it is a fight that Epic picked and Apple is choosing not to continue that fight, that's all. You make it sound like it would have been just fine if Apple let Epic do what they were doing.

We can debate that Apple should change its rules for everyone, but it sounds like you think they should have just let Epic continue violating their policies.

hellofunk··on How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
Setting up the B.V. might not cost that much but keeping it compliant with the reporting requirements every year is very expensive in Holland.
hellofunk··on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac
> I guess they want to pick a fight

Are you referring to Apple or Epic? It seems that Epic are the ones who wanted to pick a fight, for better or worse.

edit: it is amusing to see this post get so many upvotes and so many downvotes. Obviously this is a very polarized community w.r.t. Apple.

hellofunk··on How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
Are you talking about a B.V.?
hellofunk··on How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
> If you spent $1,000 on servers and your website made $10,000, then you’ll only pay taxes on the $9,000 in profit.

I wonder if this is correct. Many places require you to deprecate assets such as computers over many years, so the deductions are not all taken out of your profit the year you buy them.

Sounds like this article is conflating the legalities of setting up a business with the accounting of operating one, two different things.

hellofunk··on Apple announces updated eighth-generation 10.2-inch entry-level iPad
Looks like the Pro is still 8-cores vs this new Air's 6-cores, so that is not a trivial difference, even if the cores are a little slower.
hellofunk··on Apple announces updated eighth-generation 10.2-inch entry-level iPad
I'm curious about the new iPad Air they announced, with an A14. This thing is more powerful than the iPad Pro 11-inch now, priced a little lower. I wonder what the advantage is of the current Pro over this one?

For that matter, this new entry level has the same A12 as the 11-inch Pro as well, so seems like the Pro, which is in the mid of its cycle is already outdated? Or is there more to the Pro?

hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
You can't predict the future of any country of course, but you can certainly use its past to inform such a distinction. The moves by China and Russia, for example, to lengthen the reign of their leaders, while in the U.S., no matter what has happened to its leadership for the entirety of its history, no one has ever exceeded the time they were allowed before another election risked that tenure.
hellofunk··on C++20 has been approved
All of the work on compile time programming in the last few versions is definitely for performance-oriented domains (certainly others may choose to take advantage of it as well). If you don’t need that kind of performance or don’t need to have complicated logic run at compile time to save on those runtime costs, those features may not be so necessary for you.

And there are definitely things that these features provide that are impossible in C.

hellofunk··on C++20 has been approved
> it has become obvious that learning and using all of C++ is beyond impractical.

Doesn’t really make sense why you’d want to anyway. Why would you want to use all of any language? C++ offers so many features because of its extraordinary flexibility and application to a wide range of domains. Unless you’re writing an app that is a game that also trades high frequency transactions on the financial exchange, while performing physics simulation and 2-D vector rendering, all while serving up a Web server, it would not make sense why you need to use all of the language. It’s perfectly fine to find those parts of a language that you are personally interested in.

hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
> With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected.

I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean. Because while lots of countries have elections, when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow, then I would agree with you. But those are the countries that I consider falling under the category of “masquerading as a democracy“.

hellofunk··on The problem with C
Of course you could also just write assembly if you wanted the exact most optimized machine code.

It’s also hard to generalize these things in the form of those kinds of macros. Whereas with something like Eigen, just write your code like normal, you don’t have to worry about the special cases, and the compiler rewrites it for you. That’s one of the nice benefits, one of many, of metaprogramming.

hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections. But in a dictatorship, or even something that masquerades as a democracy but is not, those choices may go unchecked for decades.
hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
This is somewhat of a naive view -- the risks of any kind of dictatorship far outweigh any slight chance of good.
hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
Yes, even to the degree that its leaders have become quite wealthy through the infrastructure of the government.
hellofunk··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore
My one disappointment with Singapore is the lack of genuine free speech, and the lack of freedom of the press. This simple void causes many things that are invisible to the eye, and it creates veins that run deep. Live there for any non-trivial amount of time and compare that experience and your conversations with peers to that of living in many places in the West, and the effect is striking, the way this gap can so gently weigh on an entire people and change individual personalities.
hellofunk··on Picasso, Schoenberg, Moss: how humans unlock social capital and spark progress
> One of the things which always surprises me is the various permutations of the burger that exist.

Yep. And, one of the things which always surprised me is how all these American permutations remain popular and pretty expensive, yet are generally quite lower quality than the burgers throughout Europe, which are often half the price.

hellofunk··on The problem with C
> I did not say "generics".

FYI if you’re talking about compile-time programming and you use the word “generic“ (as you did, in the context of a generic sort, which actually does have a meaning related to generics, as the routine works on containers of any type), note that this is a well-established term, which could be confusing if you actually are referring to something else.

hellofunk··on What I Learned Going Through YC as a 17 Year Old
> Experience is only loosely correlated with age

It’s very important to remember that just as youth is not necessarily a disadvantage, so too is being older than the average anything to worry about.

hellofunk··on The problem with C
> It wasn't me who said "templates" first.

But you were talking about generics, which implied you were incorrectly conflating that with template meta-programming, since generics are done with templates.

> I don't think of them as a practical way to do compile time computation

Templates are however the most flexible, advance technique for C++ compile-time programming, though the C++ standard is evolving to bring more and more of those features into the language without using templates, i.e. "constexpr if".

My recommendation would be to avoid speculating on what the benefits are of a language or its features if you clearly don't have serious experience using them. It's fine if C++ is not for you.

hellofunk··on Hypothesis: Bipolar disorder is an Epstein–Barr virus‐driven disease
I doubt it. Is it common that everyone eventually catches that virus?
hellofunk··on Hypothesis: Bipolar disorder is an Epstein–Barr virus‐driven disease
Seems unlikely that virus is so prevalent to infect multiple family members that do not cohabitate but nonetheless show genetic link for BD.
hellofunk··on The problem with C
Indeed Eigen is a popular library for its expression templates that make many math operations much faster.
hellofunk··on The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19
Correlation is not causation.
hellofunk··on The problem with C
Hm, I’m not sure where to start with your assessment here. Your comments on sorting don’t really seem relevant, I don’t think you’re referring to the same kind of compile time programming we’ve been discussing. There’s a difference between generic code, and code that runs at compile time, even though both might actually use the C++ feature of templates. C++ templates are way to write code that supports generics, but they are also a way to do a style of programming referred to as “meta-programming“, these are really not the same thing at all.

While you can certainly do without generics in the language, as proven by the success of many many languages, perhaps at the inconvenience of some developers, compile time meta programming is an entirely different area that only few languages really support. The high frequency trading firms and the game studios I have partnered with are typically using C++ specifically for those compile time programming features. They make dramatic performance differences in a wide range of highly specialized algorithms.

hellofunk··on The problem with C
You can cast void pointers in C++ as well, and it is very easy. The difference is that usually you would use a specific kind of cast that makes this clear to the reader.
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