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nickelbox

20 karma · joined August 8, 2017

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nickelbox··on Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
I've been happier once I tried using one of the myriad of tools out there for writing slides in markdown.

If you don't need to deal with images or anything to fancy, it's worth considering, imo. Since I had it version controlled, someone even sent me a patch fixing some typos, heh.

nickelbox··on More details about mitigations for the CPU Speculative Execution issue
IIUC, you're not misreading. KPTI solves the problem of leaking data from the kernel address space (besides a bare minimum). But this was an issue because Intel was speculatively accessing kernel addresses in the first place.
nickelbox··on Chemists provide theoretical interpretation to understand chemical reactions
It does seem to be rather poorly written, e.g. the next paragraph

> they actually don't follow Newton's Law, they follow Schrodinger's Law so that theory is what we call quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanical interpretation tells scientists a lot of insights.

nickelbox··on Show HN: GigaDiff – derisk your release with automated bug prediction
It sounds like it creates a mapping from lines to "bugginess." How much value do you think there would be in some sort of semantic analysis, e.g. "new function foo is suspect bc it calls bar, which has shown up in a lot of stack traces lately"?
nickelbox··on Which is the weirdest programming language?
Weirdest? This is just a lolcode derivative, isn't it?

What I found more amusing is https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10242 They even implemented a 2d N-body solver.

nickelbox··on Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think
That's very much true; I should have been clear my objection was primarily to something Snapchat-like.
nickelbox··on Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think
Ah, that makes much more sense now. You want to enable a community of plugins/widgets/apps built on top of the index. That's fascinating. I feel it would probably require some centralized base set of widgets similar to what Google already provides. That way the average user can just type "5 minute timer" without having to manually install the widget first. Quality/security outside that base set might be nightmarish. People put a lot of stuff into search bars.
nickelbox··on Vim-netranger
Haven't really looked at the source, but is the neovim dependence just for starting ranger async? In that case vim 8 support might come soon?

I have a neovim build, but I tried out SpaceVim on it and just went back to a very lightly patched vim since SpaceVim felt too bloated and I've been too lazy to clean it all up.

nickelbox··on Tim Cook needs to take responsibility for Apple's battery scandal
I understand why people are upset, but not why they are quite so upset. Apple always felt like the company that you went to when you wanted good UX. Unlike Android, they twist all the knobs for you, making tradeoffs like this so you don't have to care.

Of course, making battery degradation more clear would have been nice, along with some UI element explaining the impact as it gets worse.

nickelbox··on Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think
I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help improve it; the only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful visualization.

Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.

nickelbox··on Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think
I don't know if an open collaborative approach to search is really possible given that there's a whole SEO industry out there. If we could have the equivalent of white hat SEO folks help point out flaws and exploitable bits, then maybe?
nickelbox··on Towards a bra-free Instagram experience
I think the problem is that such statements (and worse) do come from professional adults. So I find assuming such views come from people with just enough wherewithal to type out a comment to be a) pointlessly hostile and b) a distraction from the troubling reality.
nickelbox··on The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season
OT: 25 is now old enough to be jaded?
nickelbox··on The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season
I agree it would be nice to be able to cast without Chrome on a laptop (looks like VLC had experimental cast support but removed it), but it's literally in the name...

As for Android, I was fairly certain iOS at least can cast as my Apple fanboy roommate was having fun messing with the volume and pausing playback.

nickelbox··on DARPA's “Unhackable” Computer
Oh, that looks interesting, thanks for the link!
nickelbox··on DARPA's “Unhackable” Computer
I had forgotten Cyclone's name, thanks for the reminder. I've always felt kinda sad some of the small features like int@ didn't make their way back into C. I'm glad at least C++ has non-null pointers via references (but with stricter semantics and potentially undesirable syntactic sugar) and fat pointers via span<T>, but it's useless when I have to write in C for legacy reasons.
nickelbox··on Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful
This is why I almost stopped reading when the article suggested a "normal statistician" would just use the mean score (it does later address this, for those who haven't read it yet).

IMO, NPS doesn't provide a good enough signal to be "the one number" you should care about, but it recognizes the actual numbers don't matter all that much. I've seen the same question used with a 5 point Likert scale which I imagine is easier to work with. You'd still have to deal with people responding like "0/10 can't think of any friend I'd recommend this to" :/

nickelbox··on China’s New Lenders Collect Invasive Data and Offer Billions
It would definitely seem like ML could improve performance here, if they fed it all the right features.

I feel like outstanding debts (amount, time since last payment) could be really helpful in this regard so people can't rack up huge debts from multiple lenders, but that would also be a privacy nightmare.

nickelbox··on Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
I feel like both of those get more attention than Red does. I've written a bit in both, but completely forgot Red existed (sample of 1, yada yada).
nickelbox··on Harvey – An effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64-bit operating system
It looks like something that just gets complied to VHDL and friends? Is there some way to make the description available to user code/GHC? Now that would be interesting.
nickelbox··on Open-sourcing MonkeyType – Let your Python code type-hint itself
The macro would only be used to generate k for convenience. It could be all implemented in straight, macro-less C++98 in O(minutes).

My point was just that you can implement almost whatever you want (even without macros, they'll just expand the design space).

nickelbox··on Open-sourcing MonkeyType – Let your Python code type-hint itself
You could implement the following with a decent bit of work (declaring k and reversed to be variables of special, hand-written/macro-generated types with overloaded operator, and operator=).

sorted( (k.weight, k.name).for_(k).in(somelist), reverse=true));

You would never be able to get that past code review, however.

nickelbox··on A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab
Vimium is available on Chrome, in case anyone gets confused.

I got a nightly build a while back but didn't feel impressed enough to change my $BROWSER. Maybe now I'll give it another shot, since TST w/o a top tab bar sounds fun.

nickelbox··on Cell – A functional, relational, reactive programming language
+1. But at least it's better than Zimbu where there's a closing brace but no opening one. That's my personal bar for bad language design decisions.
nickelbox··on Modern terminal-based text editor
How strong is this bias? There are plenty of bad programmers who use vim (usually not well, though).
nickelbox··on Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
Wait, really? The plugin page even uses 5t as an example of command repetition. Might not make the switch if that's the case.
nickelbox··on Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, and It Won't Tell Me How
Does your dentist have free WiFi?
nickelbox··on Show HN: C++ runtime/compile-time detection in constexpr functions
So would a valid tl;dr be, "modify the compiled program to catch any invocations not evaluated at compile time and make them return the correct value?"
nickelbox··on Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI [video]
I could imagine there being external Jeff Dean fans, but yeah, that jargon