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> in practice every job where I've been tasked with making something fast, only linear time complexity was good enough.

Presumably you weren't tasked with making something fast, were linear time complexity was overkill. In other words, quadratic complexity may have been fine in many cases, but you weren't tasked to make those fast.

I'm not saying you claimed otherwise, but somebody might misread you as saying "in practice, only linear time complexity is ever good enough".

mbar84on Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?

Having neither had a great family, let alone parents who read to me, I can say school was a catastrophe and I very much agree with OP. The primary lesson of school, the training that happens every hour of every day of school is this: Sit down, shut up and listen. School is not about teaching and education, it is about training obedience, apathy, resignation and of course baby sitting. It is an institution from the 19th century, developed for a society of farmers, factory workers and dutiful drones of cannon fodder.

mbar84on Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code

With the leverage we're all getting out of the Monaco editor component, can somebody give that team at Microsoft a Touring award or something?

mbar84on Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

> Typed languages are better when you're working on a team of people with various experience levels

I would extend this to say that a test suite, static analysis, linting, code formatting and a ci setup are more and more important, the bigger your team is.

mbar84on Pip has dropped support for Python 2

Since the Python2->3 migration discussion is being had again here, I'd just like to advertise my compatibility library that can help with migrating old projects: https://github.com/mbarkhau/lib3to6

mbar84on Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests

I believe data transmission between the satellites is planned, or at least it was, maybe they dropped those plans entirely.

mbar84on Joint Chiefs remind U.S. forces that they defend the constitution

This is one of the earliest things I wondered with the Trump presidency. If the order came down to e.g. "Nuke Jina!", would they actually follow that order.

mbar84on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://gitlab.com/mbarkhau/sbk

WIP documentation: https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/sbk/READMEv2.html

Looking for long term contributors, especially for documentation and code auditing.

mbar84on Jaywalking decriminalization, 100 years after the auto industry made it a crime

I remember a work colleague from Canada asking if it was OK that we were walking across a busy street in Frankfurt Germany. I was a bit confused, but said that, Yes it's OK to walk across the street. In retrospect I might have added, you also don't have to ask anybody if it's OK to go to the bathroom. North America is a strange place.

mbar84on Google outage – resolved

Different failure mode. If the cloud goes down, many more people are affected. If your self-hosted thing goes down, only you are affected. If everybody self-hosted, would the overall downtime be lower? Even if it were, would it be worth the effort of self-hosting?

mbar84on Face masks considerably reduce Covid-19 cases in Germany

It is not enough for the authority to be knowledgeable, their incentives must also be aligned. If people appeal to the authority to do something, then it may do whatever is expedient regardless of merit.

With limited knowledge, I'm inclined to go along with measures that are low cost and have a plausible explanation wrt. effectiveness. That being said, if the mask situation has shown us anything, it's that the authorities are neither trustworthy nor competent.

mbar84on I Tried to Reduce Pylint Memory Usage

I have some large projects that I wanted to adopt pylint for. The initial hurdle was too large so I wrote this:

https://pypi.org/project/pylint-ignore/

mbar84on Create system diagrams with Go

I was thinking about writing a markdown extension that would render a code block into an image using this and this extra system dependency is also what turned me off. It's just an extra roadblock for users and whole block of extra instructions for each platform that users have to figure out. It would be better if it would just work out of the box.

mbar84on All Python versions less than 3.6 are now EOL

Please have a look at lib3to6, I hope you find it useful to convince them to stop writing for Python2.7 only.

mbar84on Python Lib3to6

In light of the recent Python 3.6 EOL discussion and the resulting comments about Python breaking backward compatibility, I wanted people to be aware of this option for maintaining support for older interpreters.

At the price of an extra compile step, you can write your code for Python 3.6+ and convert the syntax to be compatible both with newer and with older interpreters.

mbar84on Analog Terminal Bell

Sounds like a missed opportunity. ASCII maybe could have had BLL, BLM, BLH (low, medium, high) with different frequencies and you could have encoded something in those bells instead of having to count a sequence.

mbar84on At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on

Opportunity cost.

mbar84on Attention is your scarcest resource

One way to deal with this is to use the element picker mode of uBlock Origin. Often it's not too much of a hassle to just zap the bell icon and be done with it.

mbar84on Lessons from the Gnome Patent Troll Incident

Copying is not theft[1].

I know Copyrights != Patents, but the whole idea of intellectual property should be abandoned. It is born out of rent seeking and any benefits it may have were never justified by the costs of the patent system[2].

If you think the patent system needs to be fixed, rather than abolished, please reconsider.

[1]: https://questioncopyright.org/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele...

mbar84on Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

Can these findings be used to put some bounds on the number of prisoners?

mbar84on Scrollbar Blindness

The other being

    System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys

and map Caps Lock to Escape

mbar84on Being OK with not being extraordinary

I remember feeling particularly inadequate when watching Google IO presentations in 2018. All these teams of highly payed engineers presenting the work of a year or more within a few days. Not a healthy thing to compare oneself to.

mbar84on The creeping scourge of tooling config files in project root directories

A nice convention in python projects is that you can use setup.cfg or pyproject.toml for many tools and they each just use their particular section.

mbar84on In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved

If you would specify the width/height of the image, you could avoid the page reflow that makes the quicklinks jump down.

mbar84on In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved

The worst case of this for me was a completely static site which, sans images) loaded in under 100ms on my local machine. I inlined styles, all images with width and height so there is no reflow when the image arrives, no chaining of css resources, deferred execution of a single javascript bundle, gzip, caching, the works. Admittedly it was a simple page, but hey, if I can't do it right there, where then?

Anyway, it all went to st as soon as another guy was tasked with adding share buttons (which I have never once in my life used and am not sure anybody else has ever used).

I won't optimize any pages over which I don't have complete control. Maybe if a project has a CI/CD setup that will catch any performance regressions, but other than that, too much effort, thankless anyway, and on any project with multiple fronted devs, the code is a commons and the typical tragedy is only a matter of time.

mbar84on The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

I have no problem with a paywall in principle. I do have a problem with 20 paywalls for 20 sites, most of which I would only read an article every other month. News publishers need to get their act together.

mbar84on Alacritty v0.5

Throughput vs latency. Latency is not the absolute best (still fine though) but it can keep up when you accidentally spam your terminal with a huge logfile.

mbar84on You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

I recently learned that the rate of rotation of the earth depends on how much water vapor is in the atmosphere. I suggest we use this information to turn the earth into a precision time keeping instrument. Instead of regularly adding/removing leap seconds every so often, we geoengineer the atmosphere to increase/decrease the rate of rotation of the earth, so that it on average rotates exactly 86400 SI-Seconds per day.

mbar84on How Did Vim Become So Popular?

> VS and other editors quietly get along with their work and feel no reason to advocate for their editor like it was a religion.

Well of course not, because their editors SUCK!

mbar84on Wireless Is a Trap

Sometimes when a persistent noise goes away I will realize that I've been slightly tense the whole time and all of a sudden I feel relief. Depending on what you mean by "switched on the wifi", could it be that there is some subtle piezoelectric noise that goes away when you turn of a device completely?