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mekazu

76 karma · joined December 9, 2008

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mekazu··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
It’s probably a delimiter. Or an escape indicator.
mekazu··on I still love PHP and JavaScript (2022)
Agree that it’s good to get the certainty of zero memory leaks (assuming there’s no associated bugs in apache) but it’s not that hard to write code that doesn’t cause memory leaks for stateful apps as long as you are able to follow certain simple principles and avoid bugs in the third party libs you use.
mekazu··on Displaying My Washing Machine's Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth
I wonder if the author knows about `watch`. It seems like it might’ve saved some effort with a better outcome.
mekazu··on Andromeda Invaders: A retro-style game written in HTML5, Canvas, and Web Audio
This is an great example of how you don’t need fancy graphics for good, playable and engaging games. The music combined with the sound effects works really well too and is very simple.
mekazu··on I don’t believe in sprints
But they wouldn’t announce it until it’s pretty much ready.
mekazu··on I don’t believe in sprints
Most good software that I can think of has the luxury of being delivered whenever it’s ready. It’s not estimation that improves the quality of the product but good cost/benefit analysis, although you can get one from the other.
mekazu··on Renaming files with mv without typing the name two times
Could use mv -iv for interactive and verbose if you want a rollback or commit alternative.

The real question is: why move files at all?

mekazu··on Why Learn Awk? (2016)
I use Perl similarly to awk if I need to use regex rather than white space delimited fields.

I think if you know Perl really well and can remember the command line arguments - particularly -E, -n, -I and -p - then it’s a good swap in substitute for grep, sed, awk, cut, bash, etc when whatever 5 min task you’re working on gets a tiny bit more complex.

Similarly a decent version perl 5 seems to be installed everywhere by default.

I’m curious to know if anyone would say the same about python or any other programs? I’m not particularly strong in short python scripting.

mekazu··on C, what the fuck??!
> Therefore, this line actually says:

    !didIMakeAMistake() || CIsWrongHere();
> If you understand how short-circuit evaluation works, you can understand that this will result in the following:

   if (!didIMakeAMistake()) 
      CIsWrongHere();
Can someone explain this? I’d have thought that was right without the !
mekazu··on Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
Employees are valued by businesses more for their expertise than for their work. I’d rather have one dev who knows how to solve difficult problems than a hundred who don’t. Roughly.
mekazu··on The Lesson to Unlearn
I wonder why pg didn’t launch this article on a Tuesday.
mekazu··on Australia’s surprising disregard for free speech
Yeah if the last election result wasn’t a perfect demonstration of voter apathy and disengagement I don’t know what would be. Having said that, that’s just the majority - the rest of us are very engaged I promise! Just uselessly, impotently quiet.
mekazu··on Australia’s surprising disregard for free speech
National security is important, but so is whistleblowing, and the ability for journalists to protect their sources. There’s a trade off here between, and it’s worth looking at this from all angles to ensure that the AFP have the right intentions.
mekazu··on The clever cryptography behind Apple’s “Find My” feature
Sounds similar to P2PE.
mekazu··on I got tired of PHP and Perl, so I tried bash
I agree, and I like having those ‘oh wow, I can do that in bash? That’s dangerous, but awesome’ moments just by researching how to get stuff done. Really people don’t know what they’re getting themselves into when they start down the shell scripting path.
mekazu··on A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses
Yeah? I’m off to read some Jane Austen. Seeya!
mekazu··on Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar
Unit tests that don’t read or write to disk and don’t try thousands of repetitions of things should be bleeding fast, but the most useful integration tests that actually help find faults (usually with your assumptions about the associated APIs) often need interaction with your disk or database or external service and tend to take a bit more than a few seconds. I find you need both.
mekazu··on What's the Deepest Hole Ever Dug?
I kinda like the idea that Americans could be gradually migrated from Imperial to metric by osmosis over the course of a few thousand measurement based scientific articles.
mekazu··on Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers
Plastic is sometimes useful to preserve fresh food to some degree. Without plastic many goods wouldn’t be viable. Would be nice though if at least the necessary plastic was highly recycleable, as well as cost efficient etc.
mekazu··on MacOS monitoring the open source way
Was anybody else thinking these tools would be great for general development and debugging purposes? Anything that uses the network or file system anyway. The fact that they can detect malware reads as just an aside to me.
mekazu··on Jenkins X: a CI/CD solution for cloud applications on Kubernetes
Just remember the name XKCD is already taken.
mekazu··on TextQL: Execute SQL Against CSV or TSV
If only when googling “sql on csv” this comments page would show up first.
mekazu··on UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Is this reddit now?
mekazu··on Tweeting Made Easier
Many of the comments made here are < 140 chars. Others are more.
mekazu··on Seeing AI for iOS
Nope, the company is called shifty jelly. They've still got other iOS apps though so it wouldn't surprise if they were taken down.
mekazu··on FBI arrests author of NanoCore after it was pirated and abused by hackers
Would it be illegal to write say an excellent grepping or sorting tool that I really want someone to use as part of a criminal activity, even if it had heaps of other uses?
mekazu··on It’s about 50°F warmer than normal near the North Pole again
We know the greenhouse effect is real (just walk into a greenhouse and you'll know), so the only remaining question is whether CO2 causes a greenhouse effect in the earth's atmosphere. That should be reasonably easy to prove right? Sounds like basic chemistry (which I never did).
mekazu··on Feds Walk into a Building and Demand Everyone's Fingerprints to Open Phones
Keeping your fingers wet will also prevent the mechanism from working.
mekazu··on GitHub Code Search – Programmers' Goldmine
It can be difficult to verify the quality of code in GitHub. Even well know products that work really well can be implemented with awful code. I suspect the vast majority of projects on GitHub are experimental and unfinished. Using this feature would be very unlike a system like Stack Overflow where there are strong incentives to provide good answers.

Still, if the user is aware of these pitfalls then it could be quite useful. Perhaps it could be improved if GitHub provided some incentive for developers to showcase their better work as 'known good' examples and let the community vote on the quality, similar to the Stack Overflow model.

mekazu··on LambdaNative
No idea but coding against unit tests, rather than testing every change on a running app, should help avoid that frustration.
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