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nandemoon Adventures in Nerdsnipery

I might be wrong but that looks like O(n^2) in the worst case, namely when the input is some permutation of (a+k, a+2k,...,a+nk).

nandemoon Area 120 – A workshop for Google's experimental products

https://www.quora.com/What-successful-startups-have-been-fou...

There are many more, though.

nandemoon Take Naps at Work

Did you read the article?

> In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers tested subjects on their perceptual performance four times throughout the day. Performance deteriorated with each test, but subjects who took a 30-minute nap between tests stopped the deterioration in performance, and those who took a 60-minute nap even reversed it.

nandemoon Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

If you believe in the Gervais Principle,

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

then OP is a "loser", and most answers divide into "losers" ("coming clean will be worse, so just keep doing the bare minimum") or "clueless" ("it is unethical to mislead your corporate masters"). I'd like to see what's the "sociopath" answer.

nandemoon Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

Yeah, but grandparent's claim is incorrect. Freebies aren't about compensating for overtime exemption.

For what is worth I'm in Japan so YMMV but I think this generally applies anywhere: if you switch from overtime-exempt to a hourly contract and keep working the same hours, your base monthly salary + overtime pay will be (in average) the same as your current salary.

The catch is "in average". Most corps will avoid having you do overtime if they have to pay extra for it, and conversely will try to switch off-hours support work to salaried employees. So you might end up working less hours and earning less as a contractor -- and sometimes that's what you want anyway. In other cases workers manage to game the system; in some orgs I know the contractors work longer hours than most non-manager salaried employees.

nandemoon The Future of Coal Country

There was a post on HN on US internal migration patterns a while ago. IIRC migration rates have decreased, but it's a fairly recent phenomenon (as in 1990s not 1950s).

nandemoon Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule

More power to you! But I hope you understand my point. The developed countries accept immigrants out of self-interest, not in order to help developing countries.

nandemoon Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule

The high bar is there to ensure the system satisfies the "will they contribute to our economy" criterion.

Sure, that results in immigrants being more qualified and having more earning potential than the average native citizen. Nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it means each immigrant will in average increase the country's GDP/capita. It also means the working class will be less likely to oppose immigration.

Where are you from? In middle-income developing countries (Brazil, India, China, Mexico, etc), educated, middle-class people typically earn well over $1000 per month. People who earn $200 per month usually don't fulfill the other requirements in the first place.

nandemoon Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule

So your reply to this...

> > This is literally a visa where the requirement is to create jobs for American citizens

is this?

> The complaints that I read are often that they aren't actually jobs that couldn't be fulfilled here, with local talent

nandemoon Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule

At that time, a lot of people (supporters or not) were under the impression that Trump was okay with legal immigration.

The travel ban made it clear that's not the case (it affected legal immigrants).

In fact, Bannon had spoken against legal immigration before the election, and continues to do so:

"Legal immigration is the real problem"

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/2/14472404/st...

nandemoon Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

"we’ve decided to make a change" could easily be interpreted as "we've fired him".

In any case, judging by the reactions to his tweet it looks like he can pick and choose his next job.

nandemoon How is Ruby different in Japan?

What do you mean? Perl did have support for the (several) standard Japanese encodings.

nandemoon How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth

Student loans are largely subsidized. If you call that usury then you'll have to call any interest-bearing loans "usury".

The main issue is why US tertiary tuition is so high in the first place. In fact, the virtually unlimited supply of student loans is part of the problem (more loans -> more demand for college -> colleges raise the price).

nandemoon How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth

Perhaps you meant "e.g." ("for example") and not "i.e." ("that is")? Because I'm pretty sure boarding costs aren't the only issue. I don't know about Australia, but tuition in Japan is much more reasonable than in the US.

nandemoon How is Ruby different in Japan?

> It might have been the only scripting language for a while in Japan

No way. Perl used to be quite popular.

nandemoon I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

> instead of in the 1990s when public support for interracial marriage crossed the 50% line.

WTF.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh...

nandemoon No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price

What makes a frequency response "good" is subjective. A lot of audiophiles prefer flat, but many like e.g. tube amps, which aren't exactly flat, or headphones with V-shaped frequency response etc.

> meaning that a "flat" or otherwise non-average frequency response would distort music in an unintended way.

Not sure how to make sense of this. A flat frequency response is by definition the one that does not distort the recorded music.

If for the sake of the argument bass-heavy headphones and speakers were all the rage and a sound engineer set out to record music compensating for such devices' frequency response, then they wouldn't sound "bass heavy" anymore.

nandemoon Canada's Tech Firms Capitalize On Immigration Anxiety

Canada has some advantages: English is an official language, it already has a legal and administrative system in place to receive qualified immigrants from almost everywhere, and a public that's favorable to it.

AFAIK the only other developed country that comes close is Australia.

nandemoon Canada's Tech Firms Capitalize On Immigration Anxiety

The point that grandparent and ohhhwell are making is, nobody says "I came to Japan and now my salary is 100x my previous salary in nominal terms (ie, before you factor in the exchange rate that eats 99% of your salary)". But for some reason people do say things like that when the currencies involved are USD/CAD/GBP/EUR. I guess it's just not as obviously "wrong".

Just normalize everything to a single currency; we can still talk about differences in cost of living. Sure, exchange rate fluctuations can be related to the cost of living, but it's not everything.

nandemoon Ask HN: What renders the terminal/shell?

You might want to read "The TTY demystified": http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php

If you're on Linux and using a text console (Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc), IIRC the characters are rendered by the VGA card.

If you're using a terminal emulator like xterm or iTerm, it's different, but I don't know the answer.

nandemoon Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

Maybe because they didn't know better? I was going to say "maybe they were bad programmers", but likely just "average" programmers.

No punch cards or BCD, I'm talking about DOS/Windows systems.

nandemoon Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

> 2 billion is a very large number that was probably not envisioned as reachable in the near future

I disagree. Simple napkin calculation: 100 million players playing 40 games each per year (about 1 per week) over 5 years = 10 billion unique games.

As others pointed out it was likely not a miscalculation, just a lack of calculation. The bug occurred only in the client and the decision to use a smaller data type was likely not a conscious one.

In any case, I wouldn't hold it against an individual programmer. But arguably this sort of bug indicates your development process has flaws (not enough testing, code reviews, etc).

nandemoon Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

Some people were.

But it's worse than that. In the 90s a lot of code used 16-bit values, character strings. That is, it stored a char(2), parsed it as 2-digit number and then converted it to a date by adding 1900.

So it was only really "saving space" when compared with storing a char(4).

nandemoon Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

Makes sense (but yeah, plausible depending on what you know).

nandemoon Redditors design worst volume sliders possible

Personally I think changing the volume dynamically like that would destroy the music.

And there's a simpler solution to your problem: intra-ear monitors (IEMs).

nandemoon Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

For some values of "plausible"? I'm pretty sure pre-Colombian mayans and aztecs didn't consume animal milk, as they hadn't domesticated cows, sheeps or goats.

nandemoon In 1957, Five Men Agreed to Stand Under an Exploding Nuclear Bomb (2012)

> Given those goals that they had, why would anyone expect them to behave 'ethically' or care about the side effects of their activity ?

Because the bomb was meant to be used (in "production") on foreigner civilians. And that was (and still largely is [0]) acceptable to Americans for a variety of reasons: "the Japanese were barbaric war criminals", "they did Pearl Harbor", "mass murder by atom bomb was compassionate given that the only other alternative was mass murder by conventional bombing/invasion", etc.

In contrast, the testing affected the health of law-abiding Americans. That's very un-American.

[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/17677/majority-supports-use-atomi...

nandemoon Ask HN: How do you feel about web scraping?

This doesn't address your question directly, but are you aware that Reddit provides an API? Why not use it instead of scraping?

nandemoon Ask HN: Company is offering me a move from NYC to Nevada. Should I take it?

Moving will result in saving more money, and that will further your goal of financial independence.

If the company goes down you can always move back to NYC.

> If I do, should I buy a house there or rent? My company is a startup.

Uh, why is that even a question? Just rent. If you do have money for a down payment then save it for when you're really getting settled.

nandemoon The young Japanese working themselves to death

> This is not uncommon in the US either, in the finance industry, at startups, at much bigger competitive companies, in medicine.

Is it anywhere near 25% of the US companies, though? I doubt it.

Finance and startups are high-risk, high-return endeavors. It's one thing to work 80 hours of overtime as a trader/VP/software engineer earning good money, having a sense of autonomy and accomplishment, etc. And if you quit or your startup fails, you can always get another job, change fields or even take a break. It won't be a black mark against you.

It's a very different thing to work 80 hours of unpaid overtime as a courier [0], with no autonomy and virtually no career progression. Sure, you can quit. But the perception is, "why would I quit if the alternative is just a different delivery sweatshop?".

FWIW professions/companies that have strong unions tend to have less problems with unpaid overtime, but they're a minority.

[0] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/04/business/corpora...