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macromaniac

434 karma · joined February 26, 2012

How's this for a diet: Make up all your food, and then eat it in your head!
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macromaniac··on The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub
It doesnt take long to set up iirc, the problem when I used gitlab was it was resource intensive. It somehow takes a 10$mo instance when it should be able to run as a side process on a 2.50$mo server imo. 10$mo was the same pricing as github so it didn't make sense to use.
macromaniac··on The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?
>For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting.

If food is scarce, wouldn't food hoarding be the rational action?

macromaniac··on Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
I use a posh script like this when i dont want the computer to lock.

$ws = New-Object -COM wscript.shell;

while($true){ $ws.SendKeys("j"); Sleep 60;}

Ive used it for demos that way the computer doesnt lock before the demo starts, its pretty short and easy to remember. Also on windows if you spam SendKeys("{Left}") everything you type is backwards and when you hit the windows key it freezes the computer in an interesting way, pretty fun.

macromaniac··on The Nature of Lisp (2006)
It is a true statement, lisp syntax is wierd.

You spend years learning that 2 + 2 = 4, seeing (+ 2 2) for the first time is a bit of a shock.

The point is overused but its a good point and he doesnt dwell on it. Arguments shouldnt be evaluated just by how interesting they are.

macromaniac··on People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate
Okay then it's just semantics. I admit mistakes but I try to be objective about it. If that's considered an apology then I do apologize.
macromaniac··on People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate
Apologies are not always needed. When you really mess up its usually pretty obvious and saying youre sorry doesnt do all that much. "Sorry I introduced a bug that causes the system to crash once a week" doesn't really help anyone, of course you're going to be sorry. I heard this from someone and it stuck with me: "Don't apologize, fix it."

Edit: I made a mistake while writing this, I am trying to say be objective about your mistakes but many people took that to mean don't admit your mistakes. I should have been more specific with my terminology.

macromaniac··on Predicting outcomes for games of skill by redefining what it means to win
I like the way elo is computed. Win/loss is the most fair metric because it by definition doesn't overvalue any particular in game statistic, everything is weighted perfectly. Still good read though.
macromaniac··on Ask HN: How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?
You can use the debugger on low level api calls to get pretty much anywhere in the codebase. If you want to find whats changing a label to "foo" you can hook into every set_Text call and put a conditional breakpoint on all label changes to break on "foo", then just go up the callstack to find the logic. This strategy works on network interfaces and file interfaces as well. I abused this on our 2M+ SLOC legacy codebase and it has saved me many hours.

Also use version control to identify the most commonly edited files in the project. These are usually the files that are doing all the work (80/20 rule) and you likely need to know of them.

git log --pretty=format: --name-only | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | head -10

macromaniac··on Microsoft’s PowerShell Core Offers Cross-Platform Automation
If PowerShell is bad because its too much like a programming language thats fine with me. I like being able to hop onto any windows computer and make things happen. I can scrape websites, consume web apis, host webservers, and more all in beautiful one liners. Also text to speech and wscriptshell are fun for messing with your friends computers.
macromaniac··on Ask HN: Your favourite outstandingly creative/informative YouTube channels?
Applied Science: https://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333 This guy does DIY Scanning Electron Microscopes, CT Scanners, Waterjet Cutters, LCDs, etc. Very good at explaining things.
macromaniac··on Raccoons solve an ancient puzzle, but do they understand it?
Probably used the top of the tube to get mechanical advantage and tipped it towards the narrow part of the rectangular base.
macromaniac··on The iPhone X’s notch is basically a Kinect
Eh I was mostly sick of having to have a device to open the gate, a device to turn on my car, and a device to open my garage. Whats wrong with 300MHz? I'd rather not have to carry around all this crap vs a depth sensor that I might use once as a gimmick to 3d map my bathtub.
macromaniac··on The iPhone X’s notch is basically a Kinect
Depth sensor is cool, but I think a better feature would be increasing the EM spectrum the phone could operate on. It would be nice to open garage doors, detect speed traps, or enable push to start on cars.
macromaniac··on BlazingDB uses GPUs to manipulate huge databases in no time
There was a paper a few months back in deep reinforcement learning that got record setting RL results using only a CPU [0]. Previously, these algorithms would play fewer games and run a gpu over and over on the few games they had played. By using a CPU you can generate more samples that are up to date with your learning algorithm. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but you can't exactly run 60 atari sims on a gpu.

[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783

macromaniac··on Why is printing “B” dramatically slower than printing “#”? (2014)
While stuck at a meeting today I learned you can type faster than notepad can render by making the text really big. (AltSpace X, Alt O, F, S, 600, Enter, spam buttons) The text lags just slow enough so you can use it as a ghetto marquee.
macromaniac··on Web Scraping in 2016
Another trick: You can hover over elements in chrome with F12 and the inspect tool, then right click > copy > copy selector and chrome will generate one for you that way you don't have to actually do any work.

With a selector it's easy to grab data, here's a linux command that gets every user that posted in this thread:

  lynx -base -source 'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345693' | hxnormalize -x | \
    hxselect -c -s '\n' "td > table > tbody > tr > td.default > div:nth-child(1) > span > a.hnuser"
Here are the most frequent commenters:

     27 cookiecaper
     22 franciskim
      6 fake-name
      4 niftich
      4 flukus
      4 elmigranto
      4 downandout
      3 tedunangst
      3 siegecraft
      3 muglug
      3 minimaxir
      3 madamelic
macromaniac··on Vim GIFs
>I think I can edit and navigate through text as fast as Vim users, using the native OS text editing hotkeys.

I had to add 200 textboxes to a wpf form two weeks ago. Took me 60 seconds to generate the boilerplate with vim. If you can do it in under 5 minutes in notepad I'd be impressed, here's something similar to the data I was given: http://pastebin.com/Y7hyi2by

note: a) you can do this in excel with stringconcat, and b) the project could have been better designed to prevent the boilerplate but that was outside of my control

macromaniac··on Ask HN: From programming to AI, how?
After taking Andrew Ngs course I highly recommend you take cs231n afterwards.

Assuming you know a little bit of calculus you'll be able to create and train fully connected networks, convolution networks, recurrent networks, and long short term memory networks using only numpy. You will feel very comfortable with deep learning after taking this class.

http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html

The lecture videos for the course got taken down due to complaints, but you can recover them via google

macromaniac··on Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
I've been putting each fact I learn as a line in a til.yaml file for the last 6 months. I grep through all my til.yaml files any time I need to remember something. It's been useful.
macromaniac··on When everybody’s reading, but nobody’s smarter, what value has the word?
I think it would be cool if, when scrolling through an article, the word size changes based on how far along the article you are.

For instance, at the top of the article the words towards the top of your screen are bigger and easier to read, and at the bottom of the article the words towards the bottom of your screen are bigger and easier to read. This has the effect that your eyes start at the top of the article and slowly go towards the bottom as you read through the article.

This should help combat the "F" shaped reading problem the article was talking about.

macromaniac··on The Moral Bucket List
People generally dont become good from dramatic life events like those described in the article.

Being good is a habit. Constantly ask yourself what a good person would do and do it as much as possible until it becomes second nature.

At any moment in time you should be able to make a compelling argument for why you are a good person, eg: "Im a good person because I helped jump start that ladies car earlier today, and last friday I worked at a soup kitchen".

If you cant make an argument using specific examples then you arent a good person.

macromaniac··on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
All of these HN alternate explanations are listed and explained by Tim Urban here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
macromaniac··on Can life exist on a planet without a star?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio

>For a given shape, SA:V is inversely proportional to size.

When an object grows in size its volume grows faster than its surface area.

macromaniac··on By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
Would I be equally in the wrong for making small talk because I was bored?
macromaniac··on What's New in C# 6.0 [video]
There is an optimal level of complexity per line of code that you should try to keep constant throughout your project. It's like a meal, I'd rather have something light like a salad and some soup over eating a 1 lb bar of chocolate for dinner.

Reading code should be like reading a nice book.

macromaniac··on Why a Dead Alkaline Battery Bounces [video]
It's interesting to me that using the height of the bounce against the ground for estimating the spring constant is worse than using the height of the bounce against the battery.
macromaniac··on InstaNerd
#84 advocates giving loaded questions http://instanerd.me/v/84
macromaniac··on Fake Friends with Real Benefits
I had made a twitter account a long while ago but didn't really use it. A month or two ago I decided I wanted to start using it again but I had somehow started following 2000 people. I couldn't find a 3rd party app for unfollowing that didn't have me sign up for something so I used document.getElementByClassName(unfollowButtonString) to click all the unfollow buttons at once. Regardless of that hassle, finding and using inactive accounts is probably pretty easy for the people selling these follows. I imagine they just try passwords leaked from other services or applications or hire people to make fake accounts.
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