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koja86

229 karma · joined January 11, 2014

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koja86··on Can Germany Fix Facebook?
I really like your analogy but I am concerned that analogies take you only so far. Human presence in digital world is simply unprecedented and deploying existing ideas without adapting them might prove to be difficult and ineffective.
koja86··on AI Analyzes Gravitational Lenses 10M Times Faster
From TFA: "...neural networks – a form of artificial intelligence..."

Have computer scientists switched to marketing or am I missing something?

koja86··on Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy
Isn't it possible that by the time LIDAR is technically and economically ready for general deployment current Tesla models will have enough mileage and Tesla avoids retrofitting completely?
koja86··on Google.ai
Isn't that something we should expect as a result of using statistical methods (ML or otherwise) and focusing on masses?
koja86··on C++ Error Handling: Why Use Eithers in Favor of Exceptions and Error-Codes
I am quite used to C++ exceptions and strongly favor them against error codes mainly because of error handling decoupling and the fact that exception (unlike return code) cannot be passively ignored - if you want to swallow it you need to do it rather explicitly. If you forget to handle exception it crashes loud and that I prefer.

If anything I would be very please if we got advanced exception catchers in C++. Recently I drooled over Ada exception handling capabilities: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Exceptions#Exc...

koja86··on Elite social media
All things accounted I still find HN the best discussion venue. I force myself to avoid reading discussions I suspect might not be interesting and apart from well known controversial topics signal to noise ration is usually high.

Genuinely curious question - do you know about place where these controversial technologies would be discussed in a "better" way?

koja86··on Ada: a C Developer's Perspective
Ada caught my attention recently. I am just curious - how is Ada job market? Any jobs other than military projects?
koja86··on Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014)
Please make your lectures public.
koja86··on Older Workers Challenge Firms’ Aggressive Pursuit of the Young
"After careful review of your background, we have elected to pursue other more properly ignored candidates. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!"
koja86··on Mapping Strings in C++
I agree that YMMV.

Although sometimes "I do not tend to make many of the mistakes that would be caught by the C++ type system" might be related to "how to use C++ type system so it would catch mistakes people tend to make".

koja86··on An In-Depth Look at Google's Tensor Processing Unit Architecture
There are hints that even less than 8 bits per weight might be usable (for certain cases and on custom hw). Not sure if it's practical but it is definitely interesting.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02551.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00324.pdf

I wanted to have some basic idea about hardware so I did some "research" (googling) and ended up giving a short informal talk. My slides with some links are here:

http://ml.kjx.cz/hw4nn2017.pdf

koja86··on Linux kernel coding style
Totally agree.

It's the same for any other mental load that could be offloaded to machine. Coding style? Don't demand people sticking to rules - use some formatter/prettyfier/linter. Well known and frequent bugs? At least try to use static analysis or write tests and run those with some sanitizer. Codebase too big/convoluted/... - use some tools (parsers, indexers, search) to get better insight. Just try use proper tools and machines.

koja86··on Curl is C
Quite recently I happily used libcurl for C++ project rather than any of those C++ wrappers found at github. Granted there is some non-elegance when you adapt C-style error codes to C++ exceptions and non-C++-idiomatic code style right next to any C lib. Yet libcurl is battle tested (AKA proved to be rather bug free) and has nice clean API unlike.

IMHO it might eventually make sense to use other language/tech/whatever but the bar is quite high and it will quite probably take some serious sustained effort.

koja86··on Software Engineering Institute Makes CERT C++ Coding Standard Freely Available
I think it is pretty basic but with nice explanations, examples, it's pretty complete and it is free so you can basically hand it to someone willing to learn these things.

Some recommendations seem little bit like "don't make mistakes" but still I like it.

koja86··on The sad state of test frameworks
For C++ I find both Google Test and Boost Unit Test Framework pretty usable. They both have some quirks but IMHO no show-stoppers. I prefer these to custom solutions because don't want to maintain yet another tool but to focus on my problem domain and it is nice when some fellow developers actually have experience with these tools.
koja86··on Ask HN: What keyboard do you use to code?
The best reasonably priced keyboard I have found. Decided to give it a try 5 year ago when dealing with sport-induced shoulder issue and never looked back. I was briefly thinking about more expensive alternatives (Kinesis Advantage, Maltron) but decided that MS Natural 4000 is optimal for me.
koja86··on Hiring without whiteboards
OMG it's happening!

I was always puzzled by how unrelated metric used for hiring is to actual work at many companies. I don't mind algorithmic brainteasers - on the contrary I would absolutely love to solve such problems at work yet those seem to be scarce. I also don't mind other types of developer work - be it more research or architectural oriented or "just" coding.

But I am not happy learning something different for interviews every few years and then forgetting it over the course of next period of day to day work. Feels like a waste of time and is confusing in regards to what one would actually do in certain job.

koja86··on Ask HN: What're the best-designed things you've ever used?
* grep, sort, uniq ... * Microsoft Natural Keyboard
koja86··on Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples
Might as well traffic signs were intentionally chosen as something human are good in classification of without any regard to machine learning algorithms (nonexistent at that time). Yet there are definitely tasks where specially crafted noise can fool humans. Think optical illusions or this car prototype camouflage: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/02/the-new-mclaren-720s-wi...
koja86··on Stratus: Servers that won’t quit – The 24 year running computer
While hearing about COBOL in banks quite often all my friends actually working there say Java and Oracle and all related job adverts I have seen so far were Java or C++. Could someone please provide some relevant facts?
koja86··on Fravia's web-searching lore (2009)
Sad I know.

Selling advertisement (tied to a "free" service) is mass market. My guess is power users are a) harder to capitalize on b) more demanding. There's plenty of low hanging fruit in general public so why bother?

koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
Thank you in both cases sir/madam/whatever :-)
koja86··on Rust is mostly safety
In case you missed that there's a big disillusioned C++ crowd out there.

Just hear the pain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276351

And some of them are watching you with great interest.

koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
You are comparing apples to oranges here.

I also agree that type system in C++ is not perfect and is rarely used in a sensible manner. Yet I would rather look for inspiration in functional statically-typed languages rather than in specialized "multi-paradigm" dynamically-typed ones.

koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
Why so? Genuinely curious.
koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
Is it to be interpreted that you switched to some other language and ended up being more happy using it? Willing to share any tips?
koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
Well, yes. Unless you happen to work with mammoth size legacy C++ code-base which due to C++ being 30+ years old and prevalent mindset about technical debt I assume is the norm.
koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
There are others who feel like us. Fingers crossed:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html#problems-with-the-cu...

koja86··on C++17 – better than you might think
You might find this project kind of interesting:

https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...

As a day-to-day C++ practitioner I like it.

...Yet I am not fully convinced that the general idea of language evolution implemented as ruleset outside of the language itself is the way to go. Seems more like band-aid to me and made me start to think about concept of programming language's life cycle in context of Darwinian evolution - once either legacy compatibility burden is too big or that particular biotope of specific problems the language solves better than others vanishes/changes the language dies out.

My particular issue with C++ is that it's complexity, longevity and evolution made possible for widespread bad-practices as not every C++ developer evolved as much as the language itself and it's general public understanding. (Some current best-practices were simply not always widely known or accepted.) I would even go as far to say that most of existing C++ code is crap (at least from standpoint of today "modern" C++).

And that's why I am both eagerly looking to "next generation" being shaped up by people who has (hopefully) learnt from past mistakes and used by people who care (itching to give Rust a ride once it stabilizes just a bit more) and also occasionally digging in the history for possible gems that I might not able to see without my current experience (platonic weekends-only relationship with Haskell, Lisp being right there at top of my TODO list).

EDIT: Removed the sir.

koja86··on Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports
Sorry to hear that. It's when it hits the fan when abstract words like "closed", "locked" or "proprietary" suddenly get meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
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