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molloy

174 karma · joined June 8, 2012

Tinker, bard, writer, quixotic pragmatist, software consultant, adrenaline junkie, aspiring teacher and artist

Keen interests in world-building, storytelling, normative ethics, playing games, reading, cooking and eating food, diving into complex systems, collecting, making, tweaking, and using tools, and spending time appreciating nature, friends, and family.

You can reach me at yo at molloy dot soy, but I'm not looking for paid projects currently. I will edit technical writing or blog posts for FOSS software if I have the time–feel free to make requests!

submissionscomments
molloy··on How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works
It blocks all third party scripts by default, allows first party scripts by default, and offers a very intuitive and clean interface for selectively allowing frames, xhr requests, scripts, etc. It has a better UX than uBlock in my experience.
molloy··on DC’s war on rats goes digital
Cats can decimate local bird populations as well
molloy··on Bitcoin mining uses more energy than Ecuador – but there’s a fix
You can spend fractions of a Bitcoin, so it doesn't matter what the price of a full one is. ~15,000 satoshis (a satoshi is the lowest it can be split, 1/100,000,000 BTC) is currently equivalent to 1USD.
molloy··on The Depression Thing
I have psychomotor retardation (thanks for putting a name to one of my biggest struggles!) due to major depression but exercise really does help more than anything else. It's definitely hard to exercise, but often it's not that I can't do anything at all, it's that I use up all my willpower doing one thing in a day. But if I make that one thing exercise, then for the rest of the day it's like my psychomotor retardation goes away completely and then other tasks are manageable. I actually brush my teeth, do the laundry that's been piling up, make a healthy dinner and clean up the kitchen after, etc.
molloy··on FBI Hunt for 2 Missing Pigs Reveals Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms
Moral arguments for veganism aren't made because they're more emotionally satisfying than arguments for animal welfarism, that comes across as pretty condescending to suggest. A lot of vegans don't support welfarist approaches. More effective in what metric/s? Do you have sources to back that claim?
molloy··on p5.js – A library to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators
I just started learning d3 today for a work project, and yeah the selections and `data()`, `enter()`, `exit()` definitely add some cognitive overhead. Now that I've (mostly) wrapped my head around it, I like it a lot (and I'm also happy with d3's documentation!) Have you used react-faux-dom? [0] I've only just started using it, but so far it feels like a good solution for marrying react and d3.

[0] https://github.com/Olical/react-faux-dom

molloy··on It is as if you were doing work
Funnily enough, that's a quote by Samuel Beckett. I was named after one of his books :)
molloy··on It is as if you were doing work
The text that you end up "typing" is actually very motivational!
molloy··on A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction
It's more like stealing from an unlocked locker at a public pool.
molloy··on Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)
No, unfortunately you're spot on.
molloy··on When the State gets it wrong, innocent people die – I was almost one of them
This is why people still support animal agriculture.
molloy··on Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
Do you mind sharing your vim extension? Would love to check that out. My coworker is interested in learning vim and he uses VS Code, so it sounds like a good introduction.
molloy··on Tmux and Vim – better together
If you'd like a consistently high-quality default user experience for emacs, check out Spacemacs![0] Especially since you're a Vim user. It's a distribution built around evil-mode with fantastic defaults.

[0] http://spacemacs.org/

molloy··on When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
You may not be aware of this, but the dairy and egg industries kill an insane amount of animals. I too was an ethical vegetarian for years before discovering that and reevaluating my dietary ethos.
molloy··on When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
The term you're looking for is lacto-ovo vegetarian.
molloy··on Is Fat Killing Us, or Is Sugar?
In turn, I recommend you read How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. http://nutritionfacts.org/book/
molloy··on Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?
I use org-mode for daily todo tracking (and more); I have it configured to auto-generate a TODOS.org file at every project root. I add these to my org-agenda and can easily capture todo items, schedule them (with a calendar view), view my daily/monthly/yearly agenda, and more (i.e. org-pomodoro) with a quick keyboard sequence.

I recently decided to start tracking my life todos in addition to the work projects, which was as simple as creating a life directory and running `git init`.

Org-mode does require using emacs, if it is too crufty for you or you don't like the learning curve, try spacemacs! Its org layer[0] is well configured, and it is also well suited for modal editing if that's your thing.

[0] http://spacemacs.org/layers/+emacs/org/README.html

molloy··on Show HN: Nomouse
> but what about "I want to move the cursor to the open brace character right there"?

Check out avy-goto-char! In my setup, `<SPC> j j {` and then one or two homerow keys would move the cursor there. And the rest of the avy functions are useful as well: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy/blob/master/README.md

There are other options too that can be situationally more efficient, but avy-goto-char is faster than reaching for your mouse (at least anecdotally) and you don't have to think about.

molloy··on Awesome OS X Command Line
The first way that comes to mind is to use alias, e.g. `alias ipaddress="ipconfig getifaddr en0"`. Then running `ipaddress` would do what you want. To avoid having to run this again every time you log in, you can add the same line to your `~/.bash_profile`, which configures your shell when you log in before the initial command prompt. You can then type `source ~/.bash_profile` to reload your configuration without having to log out then back in.
molloy··on What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007)
> I've yet to find a language that can communicate between threads as performant-ly.

Minor nitpick: Erlang uses processes, not threads. Your comment doesn't explicitly say that Erlang uses threads though, so perhaps I'm being overly pedantic.

molloy··on Ask HN: Favorite subreddit?
Their IRC channel is pretty shitposty but when anything newsworthy happens it's the first place the news is aggregated to and discussed, generally even before making it to the subreddit and often while the newsworthy event is still ongoing.
molloy··on Raytracer.el: a raytracer in Emacs Lisp
Thanks!
molloy··on Raytracer.el: a raytracer in Emacs Lisp
Oh no, I meant raytracer.el. Would it fall under the GPL by default? (Does running raytracer.el within GNU Emacs count as extending it?)
molloy··on Raytracer.el: a raytracer in Emacs Lisp
Awesome project. While going over it to figure out how it worked, I looked up the 'cl' package and noticed that it has been deprecated in favor of cl-lib. [1] Also, what license (if any) does this fall under?

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CommonLispForEmacs

molloy··on Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8
Start emacs-client at startup and you'll only have to deal with the load time on boot. Also, you can do a minimal Spacemacs install. It's not actually all that complex if you look under the hood, and a really nice thing about it is that you only have one dotfile to back up on a git remote or few.
molloy··on Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8
I've been meaning to try neovim, but I'm so in love with evil-mode spacemacs. I only switched to evil-mode recently, but I can already tell that there's no going back from modal editing for me. Can anybody speak for benefits of using neovim over spacemacs?
molloy··on Why So Few Resisted Hitler
To those wanting to avoid the paywall, click the 'web' link under the submission title.
molloy··on Belarus finally bans Tor
The answer to that depends on the cause.
molloy··on Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)
Dairy cows are typically slaughtered before 5 years of age and are sold as beef; at that age they are considered 'spent' and no longer meet production standards. Also, they must be forcibly impregnated in order to produce milk, and their male calves are either slaughtered for veal or raised and slaughtered for beef. Supporting the dairy industry is supporting the slaughter of cows.
molloy··on Macbook Pro Touch Bar runs watchOS
^[ is the keyboard escape sequence for ESC, I even prefer using it on keyboards with ESC keys since it's less of a reach. It's really nice for vim and evil-mode.
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