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tominated

25 karma · joined March 24, 2012

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tominated··on Cancer expert given experimental treatments for incurable brain tumour
Cancerous tumours will continue to grow if any cancer cells are left - surgery is usually necessary but won't cure it. Glioblastoma are some of the most aggressive brain tumours on top of that.
tominated··on The Little Typer (2018)
I've read through maybe half and doubt you'll find it useful for Rust development. If you're interested in learning a dependently typed language it is fantastic though.
tominated··on Ask HN: Did you deliberatively develop any new hobby in recent years?
I took up film photography after catching up with a friend that was in to it. They shared some photos from when we met up and there was such a sense of nostalgia to them. I did some research and found a camera that fit what I wanted (I ended up with an Olympus OM-2n), and once I got one from ebay I just started going and walking around my neighbourhood while trying to look with a more critical eye than I usually would. When my first roll came back I was hooked.

I tried digital photography quite a while back but it never stuck - I think the limitations of film (limited shots, fixed ISO for the whole roll, no way to review until you develop it) make it so much more compelling for me - I've stuck with it for longer than most other hobbies I've tried. I end up shooting around 5-10 rolls a month, which admittedly gets pricey. I desperately needed a hobby outside of tech and this has been such a nice way to get away from a screen and appreciate my environment.

tominated··on WebGPU computations performance in comparison to WebGL
If you have WebGPU compute support available, you'd probably wanna go straight to using WebGPU instead of WebGL for rendering too. But I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to use the result in WebGL afterwards - there's probably going to be a bit of data conversion involved though
tominated··on The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t
I still have my N9 lying around somewhere - had to get the sim tray replaced two or three times but otherwise I loved it. How did you update the security certificates? I tried to boot mine up a while back but it was basically unusable on the web because of HTTPS.
tominated··on Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire
Not quite - think of the functor as a container for the recursive field, not the values attached to leaves. The leaf is your base recursive case and doesn't have a value to map over. Having your functor instance map over this recursive field is what allows you to write a non-recursive function that expects the field to have the already processed value from it's children!

And yeah, the compiler can derive the functor instance! I don't know the mechanism for how it works but I think it might assume the last type parameter is the 'container' field (think the values in a list or maybe)

It's not in the standard lib, but you can find a few implementations (it's usually called cata for catamorphism) available on hackage. I have used recursion-schemes and it works pretty well.

I learned about this stuff via this excellent blog series: https://blog.sumtypeofway.com/posts/introduction-to-recursio...

tominated··on How does chemo brain affected your software engineering job?
I had chemo for a brain tumour when I was 11 years old, and while it certainly affected my thinking during the treatment and maybe a few years afterwards, you wouldn’t be able to tell now (15y later). The brain is amazingly adaptable and as long as you stay learning and busy you’ll be fine in the long run. I’ve been working as a software engineer for 8 years now with no issues
tominated··on Luxe: free, cross platform, open source, rapid development game engine
A little off topic, but Racket is definitely used by Naughty Dog in their games. Here's a talk they did a while back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c
tominated··on Escaping Hell with Monads (2017)
The do block syntax is actually just a syntax sugar for the `bind` function (also written `>>=`). The above would de-sugar to something like this (I may have syntax wrong):

  getData >>= \a ->
  getMoreData a >>= \b ->
  getMoreData2 b >>= \c ->
  getEvenMoreData a c >>= \d ->
  print d
The type signature of the `bind`/`>>=` function requires that both sides be the same type of monad, so it won't actually typecheck unless all of the get data functions return the same type of monad (future, list, optional, etc).

There's a number of ways to get around this in haskell (monad transformers, free/freer monads, etc) but they're all pretty complicated unless you're pretty familiar with the language.

(Disclaimer I'm probably a little wrong in my description - I'm still learning haskell)

tominated··on CES 2018: Look to the Processor, Not the Display, for TV Picture Improvements
Visio had a line of TVs that we're almost this - they had no TV tuner, minimum UI, a tiny simple remote and just a Chromecast built in. After I had mine for a year it got an automatic update giving it a horrible smart TV UI and they forced you to order a new remote. It's such a shame because it was pretty much perfect for me before this happened, and now they've lost me as a future customer.
tominated··on Octo: CHIP-8 retro game programming in the browser
That's awesome. I recently made a chip-8 emulator in haskell, funnily enough: github.com/tominated/chip-8-vm
tominated··on Popcorn Time Is So Good at Movie Piracy, It’s Scary
I believe that is the will of the publishers that are using Steam, not Valve.
tominated··on PostgreSQL indexing in Rails
I probably phrased that incorrectly. I definitely think that you should have validation logic at the database level. I've had a couple of major issues in the past (while still learning web dev) where lack of indexes/constraints has pretty much ruined my database when I tried use them in production
tominated··on PostgreSQL indexing in Rails
I was searching for the same thing myself recently, and it seems that DHH is against having any sort of logic in the database - he believes that all validations and constraints should be in the application instead of being in both (which I believe is the correct way).
tominated··on Ask HN: How did you get started with the programming languages you use?
I started out doing HTML/CSS and very little PHP (enough to slightly customise wordpress themes) back in high school. In grade 12 I got on to a national competition sort of thing that taught you python as you went and ended placing really well. I really enjoyed the challenges, so I decided to try and teach myself a bit more, but schoolwork got in the way, so I shelved that idea for a year or so.

I later decided after doing a fair amount of front end design work for friends and family that I'd try and learn back end development, so I tried python again, using the flask microframework. I did a few small projects with that, then I found sinatra on ruby and ended up really enjoying ruby more than python. I ended up working pretty much entirely in ruby for any back end dev stuff (although it wasn't very much), and slowly improved my javascript skills.

During Uni, I have also learned enough C# to make my way around. In my second year, I got a job doing front and back end dev, and made my first big project using sinatra and I loved it.

Later on we needed to write some software that interfaced with a label printer, and the best library we could find was for java, which none of us knew (nor did we want to learn). I had been reading about clojure and liked the look of it (and heard that it had great java interop) and I made my first (very dodgy) clojure app to interface with the printer.

I got hooked on functional programming then, and in the past year and a half, I've learned up on a few different languages. I have vastly improved my Javascript skills after using Backbone.js and then Angular.js. I also improved my Clojure skills, by re-writing my first work sinatra app using compojure, as well as a few side projects. I also took an interest in Erlang and Elixir after hearing about both on HN, and I learned the basics by reading 'Learn you an Erlang', and trying to make a few small project in both. I'd love to use Elixir some more, but I don't have a good project idea that suits it's use-case. Just recently I also learned C in a uni subject.

I'm always looking to expand my programming knowledge, I just have trouble coming up with ideas of what to program!

tominated··on NCSS Challenge 2013: Help teenagers get a running start in Computer Science
I did this challenge when I was in year 12 in 2010. It was great fun and is one of the main reasons I got in to programming professionally.
tominated··on New Opera 15 Beta with Blink engine
Oh cool. Last I heard was that they weren't going to use Blink.
tominated··on New Opera 15 Beta with Blink engine
Blink is Google's fork of WebKit, which is being used in the upcoming versions of Chrome. Opera is using plain WebKit.
tominated··on Erlang 16B Released
Elixir is a fantastic language and it's a lot of fun to code with, but you need to know at least the basics of erlang to use it well, because although it has an excellent standard library, it's not as comprehensive as erlang's.

I would definitely recommend anyone that wants to try Elixir, to at least try learn some erlang first. The learn you some erlang book is pretty fantastic.

tominated··on Jolla Mobile: website launch and Sailfish OS sneak peek
You and me both. I miss it whenever I use a phone that isn't my N9. It just seems so natural. The actual shape of the phone helped a lot though - I don't think it would work as well if the front was completely flat.
tominated··on Raspberry Pi now with 512MB RAM
Of course this happens on the day I finally receive mine...
tominated··on Ask HN: Just bought my first Mac. What should I know?
You can use Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Dn by holding fn while using the arrow keys.
tominated··on Ask HN: Just bought my first Mac. What should I know?
You can install the command line tools without XCode if you download them from the Apple Developer site.
tominated··on Developers, what headphones do you find best to wear while coding?
Might I also suggest along those lines, The Alessandro MS-1i headphones. They have the same drivers as the SR80, but they are slightly cheaper (depending where you're buying from).
tominated··on ClojureScript: 4 Things That Might Worry You, but Shouldn't
I've been meaning to give clojurescript a try (I've fiddled with clojure), but is there anything comparable to backbone or ember?
tominated··on 4bit - Terminal Color Scheme Designer
Pretty awesome. One thing that puzzles me is that the preview is showing a fish prompt, but it only outputs an Xresources file.
tominated··on Backlift beta now open, featuring auth, validation and auto refresh
I got a beta invite about a week ago, but after reading how they only want you to use JST templates and such I avoided it. Is this actually the case or is that just the standard template (and documentation) recommendation?
tominated··on Textmate2 Goes Open Source
That's actually one of the things I miss most when using other editors. Most seem to undo a bit too much.
tominated··on Google Engineer on Australia's slow growing Silicon Valley
I did the NCSS challenge back in 2010 and I'm so glad I did. It got me in to programming and now I am doing a Bachelor of IT because of it
tominated··on SLR Camera Simulator
It doesn't actually do anything
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