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jmhain

469 karma · joined March 31, 2012

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jmhain··on Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment
GTK is written in C, not JS.
jmhain··on Apple says it’s tracking your calls and emails to ‘prevent fraud’
The android phone app warns about suspected spam callers, and project fi has a spam filtering feature that has worked pretty well for me.
jmhain··on Don't learn Dvorak
I switched to Dvorak years ago and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. It has downsides (awkwardness when typing on others' machines, difficulty typing with one hand while on the phone), but the lack of pain in my hands/wrists is worth it many times over.
jmhain··on You Don't Need Moment.js
A good lightweight alternative is js-joda. I recently switched from moment.js and I've been very happy with it.

https://js-joda.github.io/js-joda/

jmhain··on Intel firmware now unredistributable by OS vendors
POWER9 is looking more and more attractive by the day.
jmhain··on Rust 1.26 released
Is it possible to match the end of a slice with slice patterns? Something like:

    fn foo(s: &[char]) {
        match s {
            ['a', 'b'] => (),
            [.. 'b', 'c'] => (),
            _ => (),
        }
    }
jmhain··on Union Types in Flow and Reason
From the section on TypeScript:

> enums, which are basically like Java’s enums.

They really aren't. Java enums are somewhat unique in that they are full-fledged classes, not just glorified constants. TS enums are much closer to those of C#.

jmhain··on Go: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
> Go has more of a focus on simplicity.

But specifically on simplicity of implementation. Which often means pushing the complexity onto the developer.

This line from the article is a pretty good summary of Go in general:

> It looks to me a like a big flaw in the language design to make its implementation easier.

jmhain··on Ask HN: Does coding give you brain fog?
I experience something very similar. It turned out to be at least in part from eye strain induced headaches ("computer vision syndrome"). I started paying more attention to ocular health, including following the recommendation of a comment here [0] and lowering screen brightness. It does seem to be helping.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12582810

jmhain··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2017)
IdentityMind | Platform Engineer | Palo Alto, CA | FULLTIME | ONSITE

At IdentityMind Global, we are building a unique platform providing Risk Management services to the financial industry: both traditional payments and emerging cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. We are experiencing explosive growth and have just deployed our 2nd generation platform which currently scales to hundreds of transactions per second. We are expanding internationally and are also building Big Data analytics and reporting tools to cope with the financial crime prevention requirements of our clients.

This role will extend the existing anti-fraud and anti-money laundering system, and work closely with our data science team to integrate our machine learning models into our real time transaction analysis.

If you are interested in finding out more and explore a possible relationship, we would love to hear back from you to find out more about you and to tell you more about our platform.

Qualifications

* 5+ years industry experience

* Strong full stack Java

* Experience building real time transactional platforms

* Ability to take abstract user requirements and build a product that addresses the underlying use case

* Strong communication skills, both written and verbal

* Ability to work within a small high achieving team, as well as independently

* Self-driven, highly motivated, innovative

Desirable

* Domain expertise in anti-fraud and/or anti-money laundering

* Productizing machine learning models

* Experience integrating with 3rd party services using REST, JSON, XML and/or SOAP

* Cassandra

* Graph Databases such as Titan or Neo4j

* Light Linux administration

* Python or Perl

Apply here: https://www.identitymindglobal.com/company/careers

Feel free to email us at jobs(at)identitymind(dot)com if you have any questions.

jmhain··on VLC 360° Technical Preview
> We just don't provide Linux binaries, except Ubuntu Snaps, because it is extremely difficult to do.

Have you considered packaging with Flatpak [0] as well? Very similar to Snaps, but it'll work with many distros instead of just Ubuntu.

[0] http://flatpak.org/

jmhain··on Turning off syntax highlighting
I do this, but not mainly to find bugs, though on rare occasions I do. I almost always find something, e.g. stylistic aberrations, overzealous changes from an intellij refactor, debug statements I forgot to remove, part of another change I'd thought I'd stashed but somehow ended up in the commit. It blows my mind that anybody would not read their diffs.
jmhain··on Turning off syntax highlighting
> Who the hell would write prose by making all the verbs blue, the nouns red, and the adverbs green (or something to that effect).

Slightly off topic, but I think doing this could actually be useful for learning languages, especially highly inflected ones (if you extend the color coding to account for gender, case, etc.).

jmhain··on Breast-Feeding the Microbiome
Because gut issues have been implicated in a whole lot of common maladies, but the precise nature of the interactions of gut bacteria and their human hosts has yet to be determined, making it very intellectually intriguing. Especially for those of us with chronic conditions that are finally starting to see treatment success with carefully targeted probiotics or fecal transplants.
jmhain··on Ask HN: What is the best Linux Laptop 2016?
I wouldn't quite call it "top hardware", but I've been very happy running Fedora on my asus zenbook ux305la.
jmhain··on Tcpdump is amazing
Her talks are great too, I particularly enjoyed her strace talk [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/4pEHfGKB-OE

jmhain··on FreeBSD Jails the hard way
> Systemd, on the other hand, disabling their syslog is simply not an option

You can set Storage=none and ForwardToSyslog=yes in /etc/systemd/journald.conf [0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syslog-ng#syslog-ng_and...

jmhain··on WebExtensions in Firefox 45
> I said the good programmers would eventually be pushed out by webdevs who were not as good, and here Mozilla is making the Rust language, which is merely a crutch for people not good enough to use C++.

And C++ is just a crutch for people not good enough to use assembly.

jmhain··on Antidepressants taken during pregnancy increase risk of autism
I made absolutely no claim that my experience provided any sort of scientific evidence for the efficacy of antidepressants. I merely stated that if you're on antidepressants, and are in remission, you probably shouldn't quit because of some FUD you read on the internet as I, quite stupidly, did.
jmhain··on Antidepressants taken during pregnancy increase risk of autism
> I look at it the other way: companies "pushing"[1] antidepressants not just on pregnant women, but on all of us, for years on end, should be putting out a very clear message that you should not take these medicines unless absolutely recommended by your doctor, and other, generally more efficacious methods -- such as talk therapy and lifestyle changes -- have been at least explored, and found to be ineffective (or depending on the severity of your case, not immediately effective).

I'm in complete agreement with you here - the majority of people prescribed SSRIs probably should not have been. I don't even recommend them to other people, despite the fact that they worked incredibly well for me.

> With all due respect to your situation -- and not intended in the least to belittle either your suffering, or the thought you put into the decisions you made -- perhaps the bigger mistake was not going off SSRIs (at which point the die may have been more or less cast for you, in the short- to medium-term) -- but agreeing to go on them in the first place.

It wasn't a mistake. The mental illnesses I suffered started early in childhood, and nearly all my relatives on one side of my family experience some form of it. I resisted medication for a while because I was brought up by parents who considered psych meds to be against the natural order of things, and prohibited me from so much as asking my doctor about them.

In college, the panic attacks had become so severe I was beginning to lose touch with reality. My psychiatrist convinced me to give SSRIs a shot, so I reluctantly agreed, and they turned my life around. Within 6 months, friends and family (both those who knew I was taking a med and those who didn't) remarked that I seemed to be a completely different (and better) person.

Obviously, they don't work this well for most people. But likely the psychiatrist, in the absence of a mature scientific understanding of these disorders, had learned to recognize patterns that predicted a successful response to SSRIs.

My only point was that the discontinuation of an antidepressant should not be taken lightly when you have already had a successful response to it.

jmhain··on Antidepressants taken during pregnancy increase risk of autism
Articles reporting negatively on antidepressants should come with a huge disclaimer to those taking them that they should continue to do so unless their doctor / psychiatrist recommends otherwise.

It seems obvious, but after being mostly depression / anxiety free for four years and reading an influx of articles claiming that they do nothing or very little based on new research, I decided to quit. Huge mistake that very nearly ruined my life.

It turned out that despite all the lifestyle changes I made as well as therapy I received to mitigate depression and anxiety, the pills were almost solely responsible for my recovery. Restarting the SSRI of course did the trick, but they don't work fast and I lost nearly a year of my life. I currently regard this as the worst decision I have ever made.

jmhain··on Google and ASUS Launch the $85 Chromebit, a Chrome OS Desktop on an HDMI Stick
Probably not easily, if at all. Additionally, it's ARM so you'd be limited to what's available in Arch Linux ARM. There's a Linux version of the very similar Intel Compute Stick for about $110 that you may be interested in.
jmhain··on Web Assembly
Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
jmhain··on Google Wants to Make Silicon Valley as Bike-Friendly as Copenhagen
> Have they? Where? I'd love to see some on Evelyn.

Me too. I was actually hit on Evelyn a few months back.

jmhain··on Analysis of Antidepressant Paxil Finds Data on Teen Risk Was Held Back
I appreciate the very well-thought-out comment. It seems to be fashionable to dislike SSRIs but I've been on an SSRI for a severe anxiety / panic disorder for around six years. and it's the _only_ thing that ever eliminated panic attacks by 100%.

> Perhaps the biggest problem with SSRI treatment is the delayed onset of action. Unlike short-term rewarding drugs such as stimulants or opioids that may boost one's mood in the short term but quickly develop tolerance, SSRIs work through long-term adaptive changes.

I see this more as a godsend than a problem. Other meds I've taken, such as mirtazapine, work fast but poop out as soon as I develop a tolerance. Citalopram seems to work indefinitely once those adaptive changes take place.

My psychiatrist a few years back took this into account and prescribed both, and it worked brilliantly. As soon as the mirtazapine's effects were wearing off, the citalopram started kicking in.

jmhain··on [dead]
You might be depressed. At least, that was the case with me when I started sleeping all the time and lost interest in programming. I finally got the courage to explain it to a doctor, was prescribed some meds, and a couple months later was back to normal.
jmhain··on The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons
Interesting. DownThemAll is currently the only reason I still use Firefox occasionally.
jmhain··on What caffeine does to your brain
I suspect that I would experience the same, if I could stop. I've tried at least a half dozen times in the last few years, but the withdrawal symptoms (headache and intense nausea) never seem to go away, even after several weeks without it. Unfortunately, I can't risk the decreased productivity longer than that.
jmhain··on A Startup That Wants to Cure Social Anxiety
And it requires a credit card for a trial. What a load of bullshit.
jmhain··on Driving the San Joaquin Valley
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. I usually called it "the asshole of California", but I suppose "the armpit of California" is an equally apt moniker.
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