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marshmellman

101 karma · joined July 22, 2019

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marshmellman··on Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Logic Pro has Hermode tuning, which does this per chord: https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/hermode-tuning-lgcp...
marshmellman··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Well, now if DoD moves to another AI provider, we’ll know what was compromised.
marshmellman··on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
I wouldn’t describe central district as crowded with options…
marshmellman··on Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)
How does one do this without appearing incompetent?
marshmellman··on 1400 Years Old Digital Checksum for Humans to Consider
As someone ignorant to the Quran, can you explain how this functions as a checksum? Are you theorizing that scholars knew this fact and used it to, say, aid memorization?

I’ve heard of similar mnemonic devices in oral traditions, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re referring to.

marshmellman··on Didn't realize it was this bad
I recently tried the freelancing thing for a couple years, and I’m not sure about this as general advice for experienced engineers. I found it difficult to find gigs paying similar to what I had been making as a FTE, and I found it stressful to frequently negotiate contracts and sell/market myself.
marshmellman··on One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)
This comment reminded me of "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, which explores this. To Hawkins, the brain's relatively fast evolution implies there's a general-purpose "compute" unit that, once it evolved once, could proliferate without novel evolutionary design. He claims this unit is the brain's cortical column, and provides a lot of interesting evidence and claims that I no longer remember :)
marshmellman··on Should you ditch Spark for DuckDB or Polars?
About spilling to disk, in DuckDB’s docs I see:

> Both persistent and in-memory databases use spilling to disk to facilitate larger-than-memory workloads (i.e., out-of-core-processing).

I don’t have personal experience with it though.

https://duckdb.org/docs/connect/overview.html

marshmellman··on Streaming joins are hard
Interesting, how can I learn more about this?
marshmellman··on JavaScript dates are about to be fixed
setTimeout takes a duration in ms, not a timestamp. If it did take a timestamp, I think you would need to pass it a timezone to disambiguate.

Maybe a better argument is, “when you’re setting a phone alarm, you don’t tell it a timezone.” Maybe the distinction is whether the timezone is established at write time or read time.

marshmellman··on WA man set up fake free WiFi at airports and on flights, police allege
Wow, that seems like a huge security risk for Google that people can create phishing sites on their auth domain. I don’t think Google Forms allows login forms, but I’m surprised Google Sites would offer hosting on the primary Google domain.
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Drumset form-factor for alternative keyboard?
You might look into MIDI devices, since there are programs to convert MIDI events to keystrokes.

For hardware, this seems kind of like what you’re looking for: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/SamplePadPro--alesis.... There’s plenty of MIDI foot pedals as well. I don’t know about using the foot pedals as “modifiers” but I assume it’s possible.

marshmellman··on Ask HN: Not a personal assistant, but a manager to get things done?
Reminds me of https://bossasaservice.com/, which I believe I first saw on HN.
marshmellman··on Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable
But isn’t a “cell” composed of infinitely many cells on infinitely many levels? So changing a “cell” should change all cells on all lower levels, not just the visible level.
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Habits to avoid small mistakes in PRs
I always read through my entire diff in the PR preview (on GitHub, say) before submitting, and I find I catch many things this way (typos, small todos, small factoring improvements).

I get feedback that my PRs are very polished, and I think this habit has helped.

marshmellman··on Ask HN: Markdown command line utilities similar to Jq and Grep
Not really what you asked, but there are lots of tools for markdown to HTML, and lots of HTML parsers.
marshmellman··on Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in a future release
20 years ago, I got into programming by writing little VBScript extensions for my StarCraft clan’s bot on battle.net. It was primitive, but such a fun and social way to get into programming!
marshmellman··on Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
My imposter syndrome basically disappeared when I started onboarding newer coworkers.

It exposed me to _other_ people’s knowledge gaps, and made me realize how many things I actually knew and understood.

marshmellman··on Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?
I work 3 days/week, which comes out to $130k annually at my current rate. 9 years of experience.

I was working full-time making $325k, and I decided I wanted to trade comp for flexibility and free time. I’m now a self-employed contractor lucky enough to have a client that wants me 3 days/week.

marshmellman··on Show HN: Tremor 3.0 – Open-source library to build dashboards fast
I don’t understand this absolute opposition to customization. What would you do instead?
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Science Fiction books that predict where ChatGPT might lead us?
I loved this book, but I only recommend it if you’re reading on a Kindle or similar. There was so much jargon and technical words that I had to look up the definitions of.
marshmellman··on ChatGPT – The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot
My hunch is that we’ll eventually realize that we never cared about intelligence in the first place, just “human-ness”.

After all, there’s very low moral concern for cows, pigs, dolphins, etc regardless of intelligence.

marshmellman··on March 20 ChatGPT outage: Here’s what happened
Are you confident that an audit would have uncovered this bug? I’d be surprised if audits are effective at finding subtle bugs and race conditions, but I could be wrong.
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
Can you share what helped it click? I’m in the same boat, trying to understand it through analogies.
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Why JavaScript experts tend to not use TypeScript?
Nice, that would be great!
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Working in a VR Headset?
“Arguably” seems right. It’s definitely not obvious from the data points in that chart…
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Why JavaScript experts tend to not use TypeScript?
A DAW in TypeScript? How can I learn more about this?
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Are mini breaks worth it?
I just took 6 months off and recently found a contract for 3 days/week. It wasn’t that hard for me. Companies didn’t blink an eye when I mentioned a break due to burnout. I’m a 30yo software engineer in the US. I think I do have more risk tolerance than most, though.
marshmellman··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2022)
Location: Seattle

Remote: Yes and on-site in Seattle

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Node.js, React, TypeScript, MongoDB, Docker, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://www.jonmellman.com/media/resume.pdf

Email: jonmellman at gmail

Senior/staff full stack engineer currently looking for contract or part-time work. I will build your prototype, level up your engineering team, design your integration, modernize your stack, etc. I excel at making systems and teams more effective through simplification.

marshmellman··on A word for “the number of things you need to know to understand the code”?
You might look to psychology’s concepts of “cognitive load” and “working memory”.
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