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kojiromike

67 karma · joined January 14, 2018

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kojiromike··on Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
"And how do you spell your name, sir?"

"It's lowercase-italics 'r', lowercase-italics 'e', lowercase-italics 'd', lowercase-italics 'a', lowercase-italics 'c', lowercase-italics 't', lowercase-italics 'e', lowercase-italics 'd'"

"Ha, ha, your name is 'redacted'?"

"No"

kojiromike··on The Collapse of the EV SPACs: Another One Goes Bankrupt, Others on the Verge
You can quibble whether or not Tesla will continue to win at the scale it has, but it definitely doesn't seem likely to go bankrupt at the speed of a $6/share SPAC-boosted EV startup. It just doesn't really bear comparison to the other EV companies out there. It is not a startup, and has been publicly traded plenty long enough. Neither does it make sense to compare it to the old-guard ICE companies, which don't yet have their sea legs.

Any company can fail (for a fairly broad definition of "fail"), given time, but there's no practical likelihood of Tesla suddenly going bankrupt in the near future.

kojiromike··on Cognitive AI for ADHD
While I empathize that companies have to choose a release pathway that limits cost, I will not be a customer of a product whose release pathway is just a Chrome plugin. From where I'm sitting, that's less cost limiting and more customer limiting.
kojiromike··on Paperlike Color: Color E-Ink Monitor
I have a Dasung e-ink monitor (by the power of grayscale). I find a lot of interesting reading on my work computer, but getting those links onto e-ink devices like my Boox has been irksome. Reading on the e-ink monitor was _almost_ worth the price. Ultimately, however, I retired it because the desktop real-estate, macOS's limited multi-monitor capabilities, and if I'm going to buckle down and read something long form I need to get away from my desk anyway.
kojiromike··on Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience (2021)
This is the most expensive way to say, "Familiarity breeds contempt," that I've ever heard.
kojiromike··on Some companies think customers will accidentally cancel if it's too easy
Many of the comments I've seen here so far seem to focus on whether or not there's a warning, and making folks type exactly the name of what they intend to delete.

"THIS IS IRREVERSIBLE! Please type 'owner/account' to proceed."

But https://httpie.io/blog/stardust seems to suggest that it would be an improvement to let people know just what they're going to lose. That might be a challenge, but it does sound like good UX to me. If a company knows what its users actually (might) value about a system, they could present it that way.

"Understand that deleting your account is irreversible. If you are sure, type 'Lose 10000 followers' to proceed."

kojiromike··on Rejected GitHub profile achievements
There are quite a lot of patient skeletons out there. What does it even take to get AWS to review a botocore PR?
kojiromike··on More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck
The steam deck is great, but I still think it's lacking in support for peripherals. For example, racing wheels, yokes and rudder pedals are inconsistent. My Saitek yoke works, but the rudder pedals cannot be detected. I wouldn't be that bothered if neither one worked, but the inconsistency makes it a lot worse. A "no maintenance" sign on a dirt road is far superior to a well-paved road leading to a sheer cliff.
kojiromike··on Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications
It's pretty common in healthcare data, or at least the kind that deals with breadth of patient data. When trying to build knowledge about a disease by looking at a lot of patients, it's rare to get much useful info from a single source. Re-associating that multi-source data lends itself to a graph. If the company has been around for a little while, even if the customer-facing products don't use a graph database, at some point somebody has certainly tried it. (And once somebody has tried it, it lives forever in some part of the organization.)
kojiromike··on Spacetop, a radical laptop with no screen
It makes sense, kinda. Basically Nreal-style glasses with a headless computer.

But why stop there? If you further separate the keyboard/mouse from the computer, then you not only allow people to choose their own HCI (trackball? tapwithus keyboard?) but they can bring their own input, too.

Imagine all the benefits of the modularity of a desktop, with equal (if not better) portability of a laptop.

kojiromike··on Mach-9 12-passenger jet will fly from New York to Tokyo in one hour
I'd be pretty interesting in their predictions for the operating cost/cost per hour of flying this machine. My uninformed guess (informed only by knowing how expensive and thirsty normal jet engines are) is that it's two orders of magnitude more per hour than a conventional jet, and that these companies are still hoping they can somehow engineer their way to making it worthwhile. I think first they have to bring a product to market to prove feasibility in some dimensions (physical, marketable), which will ironically prove that it's not economically feasible.
kojiromike··on Ask HN: What are the worst names given to employees of specific companies?
Missed opportunity to call themselves "metahumans" and get the DC Comics lawyers after 'em.
kojiromike··on Factorio Is the Best Technical Interview We Have (2021)
I love factorio, but it would be a lot harder if it didn't have magic backpressure for everything. Can you imagine all the piles of green chips everywhere if the assembler just kept dumping them until it clogged?

I'm not even saying that it'd be better for interviews if you could turn off that backpressure. You gotta limit these things. I'm just saying, if someone asked me how factorio was different from systems in the real world, that'd be my first example.

kojiromike··on Ask HN: Why Poetry did not become a mainstream package manager for Python?
I do think we're at a cusp where the poetry adoption rate may increase.

I avoided poetry for years because it doesn't have an option to skip the lockfile. We build images, so our dependencies are frozen anyway. (Now that we use dependabot, I'm willing to have a lockfile that's automated.)

I track Python packaging changes carefully, updating from procedural setup.py, declarative setup.cfg, versioning through setuptools-scm and now PEP517 and pyproject.toml.

But even now, Python ships with setuptools, pip and venv, and a system like poetry is not really a necessity.

But if you want convenient virtualenv management, editable installs _and_ PEP517, then you probably need poetry. I haven't found another system that can do all three.

kojiromike··on Ask HN: Are you still using Keybase?
Yes, I still use it for some chat and I have some personal configuration stored in encrypted git repos. Does anyone else offer encrypted git repos with as little overhead?
kojiromike··on The Myth of Code Coverage
First he says "ideal project", then "1/3 of the code every software project is irrelevant, buggy, overly complicated, or simply sucks".

Doesn't seem ideal to me.

kojiromike··on Controversial Programming Opinions (2012)
> Unit testing won’t help you write good code.

This is factual and irrelevant. Writing good software is more than just writing "good code". Unit tests help reproducibility. They help orient contributors, too, as failing tests give clues and passing tests give comfort. Plus, if you have automation like Dependabot updating your libs, you want a basic sense of whether the fully automatic updates are sane from looking at the test results.

kojiromike··on Using a Yubikey for GPG and SSH
Using a sc like yubikey is great for security, but has performance implications for parallel tasks like salt-ssh across a bunch of hosts. Yubikey can only handle a single thing at a time, and is a touch slow, so if you are using salt-ssh to run a command on multiple servers, and if that salt-ssh happens to use GPG to decrypt pillars, then you're going to be waiting hundreds of times longer than you would using the vanilla, parallelizable ssh agent and scdaemon-free gpg-agent.