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olskool

37 karma · joined February 4, 2018

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olskool··on Show HN: Regex Cheatsheet
If you believe it is possible to become an expert in regular expressions as they exist in modern computer languages in "a couple of hours at best" you are delusional.
olskool··on Minimal Viable Programs (2014)
Knuth once wrote that you should plan to throw away the first version of any program because you will anyway.
olskool··on Show HN: A command-line flat-file note management app in Python 3
UNIX shells are available on Windows. I use git bash.
olskool··on Seattle is building more apartments from 2015-2020 than in the previous 50 yrs
The quoted article also says that 25% of downtown area apts are currently vacant.
olskool··on Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
Every company I've worked at had a responsible person who was the only one able to push code into production. If you allow anyone to do that you are an idiot.
olskool··on Patterson's Cipher for Jefferson – Challenge Solved After 200 Years (2009)
This type of transposition cipher has been easily cracked for decades.
olskool··on Ask HN: Elizabeth Holmes has 200 patents – if tech didn't work, why not noticed?
She went to Stanford university which is not an Ivy League school.
olskool··on Ask HN: Elizabeth Holmes has 200 patents – if tech didn't work, why not noticed?
I worked at a small tech company that was bought by a large company. They sent a patent attorney to talk to us. He said to send his office anything that might be patentable. He said that patents for big companies were kind of mutually assured destruction in the sense that if someone sued us over infringing on one of their patents if we had enough patents they were probably infringing one of ours.
olskool··on Learn just a little Awk (2010)
Back in the 1980s my company wouldn't buy me a database so I hacked one up in awk.
olskool··on Google is working on Python 3 for App Engine Standard Environment
I tried Appengine when it first came out but Google never seemed to support it much so I gave up on it.
olskool··on PHP 7.3.0 alpha 1 Released
Did PHP ever change the misfeature that there is no warning when you reference an uninitialized variable?
olskool··on A decade after debut, first A380 jumbos to be broken up
A major problem for the A380 is that it is too large for the gates at most airports and the airports have little incentive to build up for just a few flights.
olskool··on Gitlab is not the only GitHub alternative
We saw how much worse Skype got after MS bought them. Hard to believe Github will do better.
olskool··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
Just as bad I'd download CPAN module A then CPAN module B and CPAN would totally trash A.
olskool··on Do platforms work?
So if your house caught fire you'd tell the fire dept to fuck off and let it burn?
olskool··on How San Quentin Inmates Built a Search Engine for Prison
I wish more prisons would spend more time developing programs to give people skills to help when they get out.
olskool··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
Python was never intended to replace Perl. Perl was designed to extract stuff from text files. Python was designed as a scripting language for system programming. IM(Seldom Humble)O Python beat Perl for two reasons (a) batteries included (CPAN became a clusterfuck) (b) C API lead to stuff like SciPy, NumPy and Pandas.

FWIW I've used both Perl and Python professionally and Python rules.

olskool··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
Over the years I've written too many awk one liners to count. Most of them look ugly - hell awk makes Perl look elegant - but having awk in your toolkit means that you don't have to drop out of the shell to extract some weird shit out of a text stream. Thanks Aho Weinberger and Kernigan!
olskool··on GDPR Hysteria Part II, Nuts and Bolts, Actionable Advice
I don't find anything in your postings to be reassuring. To say that the regulators will be too busy to mess with my blog won't be of use to me the day they do choose to mess with my blog.
olskool··on Ocean-going robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and science
If you are at a high enough altitude clouds would never get in the way so solar power works much better.
olskool··on Modifying the Python object model
> unwillingness to drop the C API

Is a feature not a bug. It makes things like NumPy, SciPy and Pandas possible.

olskool··on Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues (2015)
This is truly a favorite of mine.
olskool··on Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
So did they actually fix anything? On 16.04 on my HP EliteBook the sound fucking dies every single time I do a resume. Not to mention the random times the terminal stops printing characters.
olskool··on A giant 360 LED clock
Beautiful!

I had not heard about this kind of addressable LEDs but now I'm inspired to think of my own projects.

olskool··on The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995)
Best blinking light machine I ever saw was the Nanodata QM-1. More than a thousand LEDs. It had a program called 'tsq' which was short for 'Times Square' which would display a scrolling message.
olskool··on A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
If he could get feature size down to 10 microns someone might have a shot at making a microprocessor.
olskool··on Python Assignment Expressions (PEP 572)
A use case not mentioned:

print (x := <something>)

olskool··on Displaying Weather on a 32x16 LED Matrix
By "west coast" OP probably means CA. Despite popular belief there are other states on the west coast of North America. The weather in OR, WA and AK is much more variable.
olskool··on Police extracted fingerprints from WhatsApp photos to convict drug dealers
Opens the possibility of framing someone by Photoshopping their fingerprint into a photo.
olskool··on Why doesn’t the IRS send me a tax bill based on the info they already have?
The tax preparation companies such as H&R Block and Intuit spend a lot of money lobbying Congress to keep this from happening.
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