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stonemetal

3,102 karma · joined November 7, 2008

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stonemetal··on JSCaml: A compile-time transformation from JavaScript to OCaml
http://forum.dlang.org/post/l37h5s$2gd8$1@digitalmars.com

Not sure of the full time line but they hired Andrei Alexandrescu after he started working on D, and he was pretty open about using D at Facebook.

stonemetal··on The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight
If OS News is correct it will be patent free on 29 nov 2027.

http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_M...

stonemetal··on The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight
H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. If I am not mistaken H.264 is only the video compression part, while MPEG-4 is full audio, video, and container.
stonemetal··on Announcing the tokio-io Crate
>why was there a need for its own terminology?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern

The Reactor pattern has been around for more than twenty years. It wasn't something thought up by Tokio.

stonemetal··on An 85-year old millionaire hides $1M treasure in the Rocky Mountains (2016)
Note he claims to have made two trips in one day. So make that a place where a 85 year old man can carry 20lbs. Also make it much less than 8 hours from the road.
stonemetal··on Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice (2016)
>The phrase argues against growth in general

How so? Is who you are as a person one who stagnates? To me it would seem you have it backwards. Being a 16 year old shitty driver and pretending that you have nothing to learn about driving would be against growth. Being a 16 year old shitty driver who knows they are shit is being yourself. Hopefully wanting to get better is a part of who you are, so you do that too.

Being yourself is two things. Being honest about your knowledge, capabilities, and goals. Set your own goals according to your own desires and needs, not those forced on you by others.

stonemetal··on Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up
Vim and Emacs support Android. Vim is also on iOS.

VIM: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.a...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vim/id492668168?mt=8

Emacs: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zielm.emac...

stonemetal··on New GitHub Terms of Service require removing many open-source works
You don't have to contribute via github you would just have to grant the project the rights needed to use github. GPL Java projects usually have a classpath exception added, now github projects need GPL with github exception.
stonemetal··on What does Atari mean?
To add to that the wikipedia page claims : "In Japanese, atari (当たり, あたり, or アタリ) is the nominalized form of ataru (当たる, あたる, or アタル) (verb), meaning "to hit the target" or "to receive something fortuitously". The word 'atari' is used in Japanese when a prediction comes true or when someone wins a lottery."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari

stonemetal··on What does Atari mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari
stonemetal··on Fossil SCM
Veracity is the only other SCM I know of that takes the distribute everything approach of Fossil. Are there any others?
stonemetal··on How PostgreSQL is tested [video]
Postgresql testing works the same way it has worked for the last 20-30 years. Each test consists of a SQL script, an expected result file, and a result file. A shell script runs the SQL script through the pg commandline, and dumps the results to the results file. Diff then tells you if the test pass. Also the shell scripts were rewritten in C for cross platform support. Not available via SQL, ie vacum? No tests. Concurrent modifications? No tests. Testing query plans that don't use order by have fun.

They have a new test suite built around TAP (https://testanything.org/) and perl so now they have automated tests for more things like certs, and replication.

stonemetal··on Whole Foods is struggling
It is really hit or miss. It takes a large city like Dallas to have a permanent farmers market. Smaller towns might have a month where they have a farmer's market every weekend, but nothing the rest of the year.
stonemetal··on Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016)
It can be represented as a hierarchical structure as long as the relationships are simple. In any of his examples if you added a number of extra relationships to complicate what is there, the hierarchical structure becomes a generic graph.
stonemetal··on New H1-B Visa bill doubles the salary requirements to $130K/yr
>supervisor's research projects (lots of grunt coding)

Hobby projects that A) have no users so stability and usability is unimportant, B) have no one review code, or the results so correctness is unimportant, C) have no requirements to support it after the paper is written, so maintainability is unimportant all add up to shit general skills.

If a PhD has specific expertise you need then great, otherwise expect a mediocre entry level dev with a chip on their shoulder.

stonemetal··on New H1-B Visa bill doubles the salary requirements to $130K/yr
>Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area.

Why? The H1B is supposed to bring in high skilled labor not new grads. If 80K is the going market rate for someone with those skills then you will be able to find someone to do the job for 80K. Artificially suppressing wages is the reason you can't find anyone to do the job for the "reasonable" rate.

A pay spike will draw more people in to the field and allow wages to find their natural level.

stonemetal··on Fifty Shades of Gray Code
Ah, I see what you mean. [000, 001, 011, 111, 101, 100] is a grey code of length 6, so not power of two is possible. However trying to come up with an odd length code is a real head scratcher. It may not be possible in binary, but is easily accomplished in higher bases.
stonemetal··on Fifty Shades of Gray Code
I worked in industrial automation controls for a while. There they used a concept called quadrature to determine servo movement precisely. Quadrature is basically a grey code of [00, 01, 11, 10] that is repeated. You know what direction you are going by where you are and what comes next. If you are on 01 and see 00 you know you are going left. If you are on 01 and see 11 then you are going right.

With a tad bit of math involving the gear box attached to the servo you know that one tick is real world distance X. From there it is a matter of establishing a "home" position, and counting your ticks as you move.

stonemetal··on Fifty Shades of Gray Code
As long as the code has adjacent entries vary by only one bit it is unnecessary to use them all. The author gives the example [110, 010, 011, 111] of a code that is valid but doesn't use all 2^n possibilities.
stonemetal··on Ask HN: It's 2017, should I learn Python 3 or 2?
Learn 3. There is no point in learning a legacy system unless you need to support a legacy project. Even then start with 3 then learn the couple of things you need to do to support the older system.
stonemetal··on Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish
One dose costs $4,000. A full treatment is more than one dose. That sounds like over 100 doses if all you do is pop some pills. If I had to guess it probably isn't 100 doses but you have to do other things like stay in a hospital during the course of treatment, other tests, or something else that adds to the price tag.

AKA the price tag on a service is usually much more than the cost of goods sold.

stonemetal··on Dow Hits 20000 for First Time
Alright how about NASDAQ and S&P 500 hit record highs at the same time.
stonemetal··on The struggle with Rust
Rust prevents data races, OCaml/F# don't provide such guaranties. Though it isn't so much of a problem in OCaml since it doesn't have concurrent threads.
stonemetal··on Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?
This reflects my experience 90%. One time I contacted a company in a whose hiring thread here on HN. They asked if I had code on github they could look at. When my response was no, they broke it off.
stonemetal··on I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into a Constitutional Trial
There are two parts to it. The seller notifies the state that they have sold the car, and the buyer has to register with the state that they bought the car. Taxes are due when the buyer registers with the state, so guess which part doesn't get done as often?

If the seller forgets to send in the sell notification and the buyer flakes out on registering the only person they know to pursue is the seller. Hopefully the seller has a signed bill of sale so they can point the finger further down the ownership chain.

stonemetal··on Dart in 2016: Fastest growing language at Google, 2nd fastest in TIOBE
Mostly meaningless garbage. The top of the list kind of follows my general awareness of language popularity, but it goes off the rails pretty quickly. Python above VB and JasvaScript seems off in particular. Below that it just gets wacky, Dart above Objective-C for instance.
stonemetal··on Dart in 2016: Fastest growing language at Google, 2nd fastest in TIOBE
TIOBE goes to Alexa goes down the list and gets the top 25 sites that have a search box on the front page, and will tell you how many results come back from a search(this means odd choices like ebay are in the mix). 15 of the 25 are Google owned ie google.com, google.fr, youtube.com. They then search for "X programming" and use the reported number of results.

Therefore it would be very easy for someone at google to manipulate the index. I am not sure why they would bother since the index means nothing. There are much easier ways for Google to make Dart a thing if they wanted it to be a thing.

stonemetal··on Working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code
Visual Studio does, but only in the "Enterprise" configuration($6K per seat). I haven't used it to be able to speak to its quality.
stonemetal··on Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M
Stack was never owned by Fog Creek was it? I thought the only relation was that they shared Joel as a co-founder.
stonemetal··on Are video game programmers looked down upon by other kinds of programmers?
Looked down on? not really. They are given an appropriate amount of crap over their big egos, and lack of engineering discipline. Game development gives one a great tool set that is valued by other software engineering segments.
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