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seisvelason Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity (1976) [pdf]

I haven't seen LessWrong mentioned in quite some time! I remember the first time I heard about them, from this article in Harper's:

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want...

LessWrong is great as intellectually stimulating entertainment but I don't think they are actually any good at all for making people more rational.

seisvelason Ask HN: Who's Blogging (November 2019)

https://epiphany.pub/@seisvelas

Dynamic, hosted on Epiphany. It's the best dev platform I've found.

I mostly rant about data engineering adjacent topics.

seisvelason Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2019)

I'm Alex, a mid-level data engineer. Outside of work, I like kendo and doing weird algorithms in SQL.

  Location: Mexico City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes, within Mexico
  Technologies: Python, SQL, AWS (especially Redshift and RDS), 
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zqJSuWo6ikMbg0_siau99L6eMYicb5_6y3rE657evE8/
  Email: alex.alvarado@resuelve.mx

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

You are the second person to reference quicksort in Haskell in this thread. The other person even mentioned it not being true quicksort. Who knew quicksort in Haskell was such a beloved piece of code!

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

To me it's removing lines of code without affecting readability (or even improving it). Like when you don't know about a language feature so you implement a hacky version, then find out there's already a very elegant standard way to do it so you get to lance that hideous monstrosity you made off your code

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

Oh my God, his Lisp interpreter in Python: amazing. At the time I was just getting a grip with Python and starting in Lisp, it came at just the right moment in my autodidaction.

Really really good, although for a lot of people here it might be a little elementary (but then, the best code always feels elementary even when doing something advanced!)

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

> I think a much better question would be most beautifully structured codebase.

That would be an interesting thread too! I think gorgeous snippets have a different kind of beauty that just generally well done projects.

To me, it's kind of like comparing the beauty of a gem to the beauty of a bridge.

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

My first language was QBASIC and much of the first code I read (other than modifying PHP scripts I didn't really understand) was from Pete's QB Site. I'd hardly call it beautiful, but definitely nostalgic and cool.

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

Deleting code is a beautiful feeling. Python's new walrus operator has gotten a lot of hate recently, but a few days ago I was writing a script and realized I could get rid of a few lines (AND have my meaning be clearer) using the walrus operator. So satisfying.

seisvelason Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

What about the code did you find so striking? Any part in particular you recommend checking out?

seisvelason How to Become the Best in the World at Something

ESR wrote a semi-famous email to Linus Torvalds about exactly this phenomenon:

http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3

seisvelason The Decline of Stack Overflow

I occasionally ask and answer questions on StackOverflow, but I find the 'old system' of forums, mailing lists, and chat (now it's Slack sometimes instead of IRC) to be making a minor resurgence.

Recently when a question about Racket went unanswered I resorted to the Racket user mailing list and received exceptional advice. The #python IRC channel is unbeatable for help debugging small snippets (of the kind and size you'd normally put in a StackOverflow post), and the Elixir Forums are just fantastic - they go to great lengths as a community.

The support you'll get in those kinds of places is almost always better than the answers you'd receive on StackOverflow, but the downside is the inconvenience of decentralization. Take Racket for example - the user mailing list is by far the best resource for questions, but how would you know that? There is also an /r/racket subreddit, a [racket] StackOverflow tag, and a (pretty dead) official #racket IRC channel on Freenode. A user is as (if not more) likely to check those places before even thinking to hit the mailing list.

I myself had a StackOverflow post closed recently, but I don't think it's so dramatic. And some tags are certainly better than others. Asking a question on [react] will lead to a flood of poorly written answers from people seeking quick points, for example. [asm] on the other hand has Peter Cordes, who is like a code angel and veritable blessing to all of Hacker Kind.

seisvelason The Redshift Hate Logs

Thanks! Your personal site (https://mdub.dev/) is gorgeous, by the way! But there's a small bug: When I try to click the first post (Github OAuth 2 in Go) nothing happens. All the others work.

Edit: Actually, I noticed another bug too. When I go to the sidebar, only part of the little circle icon above your name shows up. If I zoom out I can see it. Interestingly, zooming out also makes that first link work! So maybe you tested everything on a bigger screen than I'm using? (I'm on a MacBook)

seisvelason Love Letter to Clojure

If you are interested in a typed Lisp experience, I highly recommend Typed Racket :)

https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/

seisvelason Love Letter to Clojure

I use Racket to create programming languages, however I am considering getting into Clojure for web development. Racket's web development ecosystem is actually pretty great, I'm just curious about Clojure's.

Might someone who's played with both give me some pro's and con's of Racket vs Clojure?

seisvelason Open letter to all developers with blogs

You're welcome! I'm enjoying the site quite a bit, it's gorgeous.

I don't think the GitHub for the project is updated but from now on when I notice things I'll raise them as issues there :)

seisvelason Open letter to all developers with blogs

Sure! In the little tour it gives you, when it's describing the play button, I couldn't click Next or Finish because they were hidden behind the little tag input area. I just zoomed out on the page with CTRL + minus and was able to click.

I imagine you didn't notice this due to it being specific to my screen size (I'm on a macbook, I'm guessing you're using something else?)

seisvelason Open letter to all developers with blogs

I just signed up, this is exactly the kind of platform I've been wanting. Thanks!

seisvelason Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says

The only evidence I've seen to counter this (very common) critique is the disturbing practice of 'chadfishing'. If you make a profile and put a picture of a hot guy, you will be flooded with female interest.

Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.

seisvelason Google wins privacy case: ‘Right to be forgotten’ applies only in EU

Saying someone shouldn't be a babysitter is a long way from saying they should still be in prison, or even from saying they're unhireable. Different jobs require different kinds and degrees of trust - it isn't that black and white.

> If the implication is they wouldn't be hired, that implication applies to every job.

Unhirable for one, high trust job doesn't mean unhirable for every job. For example, I don't care if a sex offender washes my dishes at a restaurant, but I wouldn't want them teaching my preschoolers.

seisvelason A list of themes and starters for JAMstack sites

I'm a data engineer but my blog is a JAMstack site!

seisvelas.github.io

To host the posts I just use embedded Github Gists and call them with the Gist API with React. I made this project at work after one of the web devs did a seminar thing on React Hooks and I wanted to try it out! It's weird how web dev seems to move so fast, yet the general approach seems very similar to the jQuery/PHP days (the last time I did any serious web development).

Edit: I like this more than static blog generators because I don't have to rebuild / publish when I want to post. I just make a new Gist who's filename starts with 'blog_' and my site will filter for all the blog posts when the page is loaded!

seisvelason Google wins privacy case: ‘Right to be forgotten’ applies only in EU

I think he's suggesting they went to prison and were released, and he'd like to be able to access someone's criminal record before hiring them as a babysitter.

seisvelason WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

The advantage is similar to that of a large gym chain - you can pay more to get a membership that's valid at all the WeWorks in the entire world. This is great for people who regularly travel between many large cities.

seisvelason Building a Dark Web Crawler in Go

I did the same in Racket when I made a Tor search engine. Here's the source code of the crawler!

https://github.com/torgle/torgle/blob/master/backend/torgle....

seisvelason Too Much Dark Money in Almonds

The Yang campaign has emailed but is extremely polite. I don't live in the US but since being on the mailing list, the donation solicitations were respectful and only moderately frequent. I still unsubscribed.

I think this pattern really caught fire when Obama heavily employed it in 2008. That campaign bombarded your inbox for donations.

seisvelason The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All

I get why people downvoted you, but I am very glad to have clicked that link. Thank you

seisvelason A Love Letter to Personal Websites

I love the Racket stuff on your site! If it were me hiring seeing something cool and unexpected like that would be a much bigger plus than a generic Material UI site.

seisvelason Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp

They made their language using Racket! Great to see Racket style Language Oriented Programming being used for something so cool

seisvelason Americans' fear of losing their jobs grows

Declining birth rate would also reduce demand for labor, not just supply, no? Assuming that the relationship between population and demand for labor is linear (probably isn't, I don't know economics).

seisvelason Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

If your job is very 'real world engineering'y, work on projects that tickle theoretical itch. Try to implement a y combinator in a language you like without looking it up. Or learn physics and do simulations to help you.

The real question is why should you keep your programming motivation up if its not something you're enjoying? Find something you enjoy and do that! Programming is a means to an end. If you want to enjoy the means more, find a more inspiring end!

It's a bull market right now, you can try working in a very different kind of programming.