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macavity23

667 karma · joined February 20, 2011

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macavity23··on Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads
Vi folks used to make fun of Emacs as ‘Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping’!
macavity23··on Elon Musk hires 2 Newfoundland interns who solved problems at Tesla factory
Amen. Turn up when you say you will, deliver what you promised, on time, and generally give a minimal damn, and you’re already ahead of 95% of your co-workers. I don’t think it will ever stop amazing me.
macavity23··on Ask HN: What's it like to live in San Francisco?
Any age, as long as your skills are current. The demand here is savage enough to overcome most prejudice. There are many times more older engineers in the bay area than anywhere else I’ve worked.
macavity23··on A small town that kept Walmart out now faces Amazon
Not to disagree with anything else you wrote, but anyone who says butchery is an unskilled job has definitely never tried it. What other C21st job has a legitimate need for chain mail?
macavity23··on Visual Studio App Center
This IS 'Azure Mobile Center' - mobile.azure.com redirects to this. ZERO communication about this change. MS might have changed but their legendarily-confusing branding is still the same.

I have a React Native app in App Center and it works great.

macavity23··on The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
One of my favorite things about Shadowrun was rolling a 1/2 pound of D6s at once!
macavity23··on Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd edition
Not only can you, everyone who uses it does :)
macavity23··on WeChat confirms it makes all private user data available to Chinese government
At this point I think one has to assume there are more advanced machine-learning-based crawlers out there too. ML is very good at picking up 'anomalies'.
macavity23··on Ask HN: Are you concerned about AI?
I actually am, but not about AI becoming smarter than us, or the 'singularity', for good reasons others have already stated.

I'm concerned what happens when human-sized combat robots become capable of defeating a trained and motivated human opponent. Such a thing is certainly a way off, but requires no fundamental advances in our understanding (very much unlike skynet/singularity-style general AI) so I see it as a certainty sooner or later, and the way everything is going probably sooner.

Throughout human history, the inherent power the rich have over the poor has had an equally-inherent counterpower: there are many more poor people, and if the rich make things too miserable for them, if they all rise up together, they will win. To my knowledge this is a universal in human history (please prove me wrong!), and in general tyrants and elites everywhere have to devote SOME of their resources at least to maintaining the 'general welfare', which is really a nice way of saying 'giving the poor enough to stop them rising up and taking our stuff'.

If robots become capable of beating serious human opponents one-on-one, then I think this age-old balance changes, because once you can build one such robot, you can build a hundred thousand, and what are the poor people going to do about that?

macavity23··on Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year
One of my favorite things about the Apple Watch is that it keeps uncannily good time. Put two next to each other and you'll see what I mean.

I always found it disappointing that even the best mechanical watches drift by around a second a day. I guess growing up with software has given me unrealistic mechanical expectations :)

macavity23··on Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year
Acking PagerDuty alerts from your wrist during a show feels like a superpower.
macavity23··on Show HN: Gnod – Global Network of Discovery
I like it. The initial UI is confusing, but also intriguing. The author reco it gave (David Liss) was good.

If you have 3 people working on this, presumably you have an actual product on the way, care to share more?

macavity23··on Elite social media
You don't actually need that good a credit score, since it's a charge card, not credit. You mainly just need the >$500/yr membership fee.
macavity23··on Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
It's fairly straightforward but you need to write some Obj-C, I don't think you can do it entirely in Swift yet. It's pretty painless in iOS, YMMV on Android. See here for details: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-modules-...
macavity23··on Ask HN: Should I invest time on mastering the command line or the Jetbrains IDE?
Learning Bash is both incredibly useful and will also make you richly appreciate more modern languages :)
macavity23··on Show HN: Tomato – Pomodoro Timer
I find http://moosti.com to be the best of the web tomato timers
macavity23··on Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?
Written by Carl Szabo from 'Net Choice', a Trade Association whose members include Google, AOL, Facebook, Ebay. This is a straight-up corporate press release.
macavity23··on Inside Menwith Hill: The NSA’s British Base at the Heart of US Targeted Killing
I grew up near Menwith Hill in the 80s. They did tours of the facility - not inside the golf balls or the other secret bits, but they had a bowling alley, all kinds of fun things for bored servicemen.

Everyone living nearby knew what the base was and what it was for. When I asked my dad about it, he said "We use it to watch Mr. Gorbachev eating his cornflakes". Now 'we' use it to watch Mr. Al-Baghdadi eating his cornflakes instead.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the majority of the British public disapproves of NSA/GCHQ's capabilities and actions. They're more likely to be proud of them.

macavity23··on Apple Said to Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Years
Typing with my splinted-for-carpal-tunnel hands: for the love of God, if you're using vim all day, then map Esc to CapsLock or something else near your home row, or one day you will be wearing these things too.
macavity23··on Kinesis Advantage 2
They're certainly expensive ($350), but no-one who finds it helps with their Carpal Tunnel (like me) would say it's overpriced. Think of its price in the context of medical devices :)
macavity23··on React Native ART and D3
This is excellent. Thanks for posting.
macavity23··on China’s tyranny of characters
Also through vocabulary. 'Le weekend' (vs 'la fin de semaine') is the classic example, both of what l'academie does and how utterly (though heroically) doomed its efforts are.
macavity23··on Show HN: Node Package for Apple Push Notification Service via HTTP/2
Looks great! I think this is the first open implementation of the new http2 api (?)

Looking forward to trying it out.

macavity23··on How Netflix Reinvented HR (2014)
My understanding of 'fire fast' is different; it's rather that if you make a mistake and hired someone who isn't a good fit, then you should cut your losses and fire them ASAP. Really just a specific case of Failing Fast.
macavity23··on Stephen King – How did a misfit high school girl change the author's life?
It is a great book. It also explains why the ending to The Stand sucks so hard, which always bothered me :)
macavity23··on How George Lucas Lost His Integrity…and Why It’s So Important
An important person missing from the article is Marcia Lucas, George's first wife. She was hugely influential in the development of the background for eps IV & V, and many people think her departure was where the mythos lost its integrity. E.G.: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/the-secret-wea...
macavity23··on Introducing the HP Jet Fusion 3D Printing Solution
Agreed - and I think it will stay that way. Right now most people find it too much expense and trouble to keep a photo-quality color (2D) inkjet at home, and would rather pay per-photo at Kinkos/Walgreens. I don't see any signs of this changing.

I think 3D printers will go the same way. How many little plastic parts does the average consumer ever want to print? Probably not enough, and not rapidly enough, to justify a big purchase, when they can pay per-item at a (physical or online) Kinkos equivalent and get a higher-quality part printed on a machine like this.

macavity23··on Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_return :)
macavity23··on One Minute of All-Out Exercise May Have Benefits of 45 Minutes of Moderate
To anyone trying this: make sure you warm up first and stretch afterwards. One minute of instant-on full-intensity exercise of any kind is just begging for an injury.

Especially if you're not eighteen any more like me.

macavity23··on Kite – Programming Copilot
I raised this point with my lawyer recently. His view is that this is essentially impossible - any rules in the company articles can be rewritten or dropped at the whim of the acquirer.

Some technical solutions might be possible, in terms of allowing users provably to withdraw their data, but it would be messy and probably not bulletproof.

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