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pgcosta

65 karma · joined July 21, 2012

Portugal
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pgcosta··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
Nice! Been looking a lot at EU based software I've been working with on an automated deeptech job board just for EU as well - https://deeptechjobs.eu/
pgcosta··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
Your resume web is awesome! Congrats!
pgcosta··on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day
I though about having something like this! This can be a great tool! For engineers this can be a great tool to summarize the standup update, or even to recall what did we do yesterday I'll check it out now
pgcosta··on Why Ruby on Rails still matters
"It struggles with LLM text streaming, parallel processing in Ruby[3], and lacks strong typing for AI coding tools."

What's the struggle specifically? How these general articles of opinion get to the first page of HN I'll never understand. Just random statements without anything to back them up.

pgcosta··on KsqlDB: A Streaming Database
This looks awesome!

I'm currently in the process of making my MySQL database stream it's change-data events, and I feel the pain of stitching all the apps together to make it happen.

This seems to be a killer technology.

pgcosta··on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
What a bunch of whining babies. Are you really this upset with such a tiny change? :D

I like the new editor. They shouldn't revert the changes. Like any change on any software, people will complain first, some issues will be solved, and then will adapt and stop complaining.

How can this have such an impact in your lives?

Stop slacking and work ;)

pgcosta··on Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
Coal kills more than nuclear. Modern nuclear is safer and reliable.

It's similar to the fear of planes vs the actual safety statistics of planes.

pgcosta··on Rails, still?
The annual "is rails still relevant" post :D
pgcosta··on Ask HN: If you had a month of free time, what would you do?
thailand
pgcosta··on Show HN: Verb Master – A site for practising Spanish verbs
congrats it's very nice!
pgcosta··on Ask HN: Master vs. Udacity nanodegree
I hope to be either retired or dead in 50 years :D
pgcosta··on Ask HN: How much do you make at a remote job?
I make ~€9/hour after tax working in Barcelon as a rails dev :s

I'm currently super underpaid trying to switch jobs though.. It sucks here

pgcosta··on Floyd–Hoare logic
Nope. If you want to develop software for critical system(medical appliances, satellites), this should be a must. The only problem is the cost of implementation. On top of that you also have to account that there are non deterministic problems in Hoare logic, like finding the cycle invariant.
pgcosta··on Amazon Home Services
We wanted flying cars, instead we got goat rentals. :D
pgcosta··on Ask HN: What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?
Starbucks said coffee :D
pgcosta··on Formula 1: The super-fast net driving teams to the podium
"It’s really the engineers making the pre-race setup for the car and making real time adjustments during the race"

"8.5.2 Pit to car telemetry is prohibited." source: http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/tech...

"F1 drivers merely are “along for the ride”" This is wrong on so many levels. F1 is a very physically demanding sport. Their reflexes have to be as good in lap 40 as they were in lap 4. They need to perform changes to the car in real time, mostly between turns, as they're told. They need to know how to attack, defend, overtake, save tyres, save fuel.

The difference is that 10/15/20 years ago they did all this without not much data, and now they have much more context to each decision.

You clearly do not watch much Formula 1.

pgcosta··on Programming is not math?
That is the problem: programming should be math. If we view programming as metaphysical, we can never hope to build good software. That will change in the future.

I don't believe that 50 years from now we will be still writing code to fly a plane or run a web app, and questioning ourselves: will it run? will it crash? Does the code does what it is supposed to do? Do these two functions do the same thing? Certainly as time goes on, programming will be ever more a well defined formal system, so much that big parts of development will just be auto-coded(by machine).

That is why functional languages are so good. They are very close to mathematics, and allow us to build formal systems on top of them, that remove any ambiguity that might exist. And this is(or should be) one of the reasons why functional programming is so 'hip' now: it allows us to reason about program design using the Algebra of programming.

Of course right now we are stuck with the methods we have to build software. And that means you can have a programming job without knowing much about math, or even using it day to day.

But that will change in the future. (My humble thoughts on it, based on the views I got from a university class called 'program calculation')

if you are curious about algebra of programming, although there are many more resources online: http://wiki.di.uminho.pt/twiki/pub/Education/CP/Bibliografia...

pgcosta··on Ask HN: What is a project I can complete in a night?
I feel like anything related to twitter is very troublesome. They are very restrictive.

I tried to make an agregation of all the people I was following, and mining their 'about' text, and right off ran out of api requests quota.

pgcosta··on Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?
Minho Univ. Portugal

Functional Programming: Haskell

Imperative: C

Object: java

Computational Logic: Prolog

Graphical Computation: c + opengl

OS: c

Concurrent: Erlang, java

Compilers: c+yacc+flex

Program Calculation: Haskell

I've notice very few places teach program calculation. It is an interesting trend and you can learn more about it here: http://www3.di.uminho.pt/~jno/ps/pdbc_fm.pdf

pgcosta··on Google to Acquire Nest
I understand why this is a good aquisition, but still 3.2B... The valuation was 'only' 2B. That escaleted a lot!
pgcosta··on Google to Acquire Nest
We can figure out what to eat. But it takes time. Imagine that you want to personalize your diet. Take certain ammounts of protein, calories, fat, etc... It would take lots of time if you would prepare a weekly plan for yourself. Thats a good Idea.

But I do feel what you'r expressing, like we need an app to do everything.

But I much rather live with these little apps and have lots of good information than to live completly oblivious to everything like my grandads (kind'of. I still have my hippie moments).

pgcosta··on Trevolta - Crowd-funded Travels
I think it's a great idea and has lots of potential!
pgcosta··on Shopify POS
Funny how square totally copied their design! [/irony]
pgcosta··on Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams
It looks really good, and seems very simple and intuitive. You should add Polls or ramifications or both. Imagine if there are 3 options to make a task. You should be able to show those three options, and let the people vote on the one that should be made. Just a thought. Good luck.
pgcosta··on Google Glass is Ridiculous
I don't know what is more ridiculous: the article or the fact that it is on the first page.
pgcosta··on Kim Dotcom's back with a new 50GB free storage service: Mega
That image they got on their site, that appears while the app is loading, with the cloud and the gears is practically the same one that stripe has on their website.
pgcosta··on A New Look for Facebook
This is a very nice contribution of how to "prettify" facebook. Facebook is and has been so ugly, and in many ways just complicated and not functional. I also believe this may be flawed but I think facebook really has to do something about it's design.
pgcosta··on Does category theory make you a better programmer?
One of my CS teachers is very bold on saying that understanding program calculation can increase the quality of code, though he fails completely to help his students apply the knowledge he "preaches". Anyway is a very intelligent guy(genius like), and is making a book on the subject (still incomplete). Here's the link if you're interested: http://wiki.di.uminho.pt/twiki/pub/Education/CP0809/Material...

My teacher does bring up interesting points, such as the lack of programming quality these days, and the lack of precision in what should be very precise and defined, namely "software engineering".