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slpsys

144 karma · joined March 25, 2009

hi, everybody
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slpsys··on Tether is starting to depeg from USD again
a friend found this thread last night, which is basically a continuation of the analysis you put on your blog a few months ago about tether's crypto assets having made them insolvent, but looking at the way their foreign exchange problem has also made them insolvent: https://twitter.com/Cryptadamist/status/1536119735053697024

you might have seen it already, seeing as you're tagged, but thought it was worth mentioning

slpsys··on Ask HN: What is the most important thing you learned at your last job?
Default? The two sweetest words in the English language!
slpsys··on Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
There is an objective, but it may not be exactly as you reason about it. There's a great video that made the rounds last year about building a neural net that plays Super Mario World, that may help visualize what's going on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

There's also a great snippet in the currently-ongoing AlphaGo videos that explains that when AlphaGo plays in ways that you may not expect, it's because it's strictly worried about _winning_ (even by the slimmest margin) with the greatest probability, and not necessarily by winning handily, like a human might.

slpsys··on Improving HTTPS Performance with Early SSL Termination
The 200ms is pretty well spelled out in the beginning of the post. It's not that cert checking is taking 200ms by itself, it's that sending any packet cross-country takes 80-100ms, round trip, and so if you have to go cross-country two extra trips...there's your 200ms.
slpsys··on PyBrain: modular Machine Learning Library for Python
SciPy, OpenCV bindings, PyML, et al. I've worked more with Ruby than Python (and like the language itself better), but there's no question Python has the more momentum in this space.
slpsys··on Beware of the CEO conference addict
I enjoyed how the caption photo changes between sites.
slpsys··on Answering The Should I Go To College/Drop Out? Question For Young Entrepreneurs
I would look at this article as being about opportunity cost though, not necessarily that each of the bullet points must be extant in a program in order for you to enroll or stay in college. Ask yourself: would I be _more_ likely to meet smart people on my own without college? Would I be _more_ likely to study and engage subjects that are new and challenging? Not that I'm not implying an ultimatum between college and sitting around at home; it's all dependent upon your own motivation and circumstances (e.g. move to a city, if you think that would increase the likelihood of those things). However, anyone who's successful and hasn't gone to college _or_ made sure to attend to those aspects has likely just gotten lucky.
slpsys··on View the HTML Source of subway.com; it's a marvel of modern browser technology.
..ish!
slpsys··on James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle
This isn't always evident from the outside, and it may not even be evident from the inside, until you realize you should be advancing along that non-existent career path.
slpsys··on A New Kind of Science is on the iPad
"The actual print production process was quite an adventure—going right to the edge of what was possible."

I liked the book a lot, but have a hard time not seeing this as hyperbole. Yes, it's the printing industry..but it's just just diagrams and text; I don't remember anything that a few weeks of learning LaTeX couldn't accomplish?

slpsys··on The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
Right, that was my point (which was written from my phone, so it was terse). RSS is just XML, but to my knowledge, no one's _delivering_ RSS over anything but HTTP in a generic way. Indeed, it's a syndication system _for_ the Web. I will admit, I didn't read the entire article (again, on my phone), but as another commenter pointed out, most of the examples were either pretty-printed data over HTTP, or were services that have never existed in the sphere of the Web.
slpsys··on The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
"At work you scroll through RSS feeds..."

...is the author of The Long Tail really this ignorant of technology?

slpsys··on Zed Shaw on C++
No, that's just what you'd need to make it compile
slpsys··on You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate
hah. i don't know how i just noticed this now, but i've already been a sonic.net customer for 6 months. it still sucks they're one of the only decent companies in an area so flush with tech.
slpsys··on My Google Interview
Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case. As others have pointed out, it is _not_ a lottery as to false positives, but it certainly can be for false negatives; Yegge himself points it out with "interview anti-loops."

But you know what? From a certain perspective, that's fine. We're currently going through a hiring phase at the startup I work for, and I'd much rather turn away people who might be ok than lock someone in who slid by. From his StackOverflow profile, cletus is a top-notch developer (or at the very least passionate and knowledgeable), it just sounds like he encountered his anti-loop. The biggest problem I see (and encountered this myself with them) is that there's no real feedback, even if your raw score was only just below the mark, where it might behoove everyone if you came back and interviewed with a little more experience and/or preparation.

slpsys··on Ask HN: How do you pick stocks?
Options, warrants, futures, currencies, bonds, ETFs, et al. Check out: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_instrument, but obviously, these are often or the more advanced (with the exception of ETFs, which are traded as stocks, or bonds).
slpsys··on You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate
"Even now in San Francisco, one of the springs of innovation on the net, a standalone DSL line from AT&T costs $35 a month for a top speed of 1.5 Mbps down and 384 up, with reliability that’s simply embarrassing."

This is my single biggest gripe about living in the Bay Area.

slpsys··on Roll your own computer science masters
tl;dr. This didn't need to go on beyond, "I'm not interested in jobs where a CS masters is useful." This was just a primer on being a decent software engineer.
slpsys··on MessagePack - Extremely efficient object serialization library
Very interesting, though I'll take more of a look later on. The speed test does seem a little contrived, as it's for one case, and it looks [briefly] like some of the gains are due to greater specificity of primitive types.
slpsys··on Garmin Connect team asked to relocate - this is how they declined
Hey, mootools. But point well taken.
slpsys··on Why I love everything you hate about Java
Disagree. There's 'boilerplate' introduced by the framework/pattern, which may be necessitated when you throw out default assumptions to scale (which I, wooster, the OP, and yourself probably all agree are not so cumbersome after all). Then there's boilerplate introduced by the language. That's where wooster diverges, and I agree.
slpsys··on Reddit clone in 60 minutes and 4 lines of C
Alternately, you must need to learn how to RTFA.
slpsys··on People who make $250,000 or more a year can afford a tax hike.
Except that example assumes perfect fungibility. There's no guarantee PayPal would be a huge company if it were founded in England, Ireland, et al.
slpsys··on People who make $250,000 or more a year can afford a tax hike.
Exactly. "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." It's not as if wealth can be generated from the void. The top 1% often give so graciously to the universities that made it possible, but complain heartily about the governmental institutions that have, as well.
slpsys··on You Think The Google Interview Is Tough? Try Getting A Job At A PE Firm
it's a term I lifted from steve yegge's [long-winded] software blog (RIP) - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
slpsys··on You Think The Google Interview Is Tough? Try Getting A Job At A PE Firm
Uh, I still do? The person writing the article seems to think that if you can approximate how many piano tuners there are in New York, you automagically get that Google dream job. They're both tough, but very different, processes. I can only hope the author doesn't work in the business side of software, as they clearly suffer from Shit's Easy Syndrome.
slpsys··on Dear Google, who I am supposed to use google wave with?
No, I don't think. From the messages you get if multiple people edit a wave too quickly, the site seems to be pretty intensive given the resources they're currently running it on. If I had to guess, I'd say they're cultivating the server resources to match the needs of who's currently using it, and throttling the number of new users so that they don't overextend themselves. It seems like they're capacity beta testing, not feature testing (right now).
slpsys··on California to withhold a bigger chunk of paychecks
They gave IOUs for refunds, then paid them fairly quickly. I filed mine electronically on April 10th or so, and received my refund within a few weeks--it's not like they just didn't pay. I don't disagree on the whole, though.
slpsys··on Why Coding Tests Are A Bad Interview Technique
Wrong. It can easily be an indicator of a company (or series of companies) that doesn't want to go through the hassle of firing you.
slpsys··on Something simple I wish I learned 17 years ago
It's in a handful of canonical texts. I first encountered it in the first few pages of Debugging Applications, by John Robbins; the updated .NET version is great, but even the original Win32 edition is full of gems, just like Code Complete.
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