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valbaca

1,927 karma · joined June 28, 2013

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valbaca··on Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables with Less Randomness and Memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathemat...

Ω represents: an asymptotic lower bound notation related to big O notation

\delta represents: a variation in the calculus of variations

valbaca··on IntelliJ Rust
> Last time I tried this

When was that?

valbaca··on The away team model at Amazon (2022)
Working in away team models were my worst time at Amazon and this my worst times in my professional life.

You’re not supported but being expected to deliver by your “home” team. Meanwhile the away team has no obligation to help you. Can spin their thumbs and give you three day turn arounds on code reviews only to move the goal posts and/or hold you to some unattainable standard. For example “all integration tests need to pass” while the integration tests haven’t even STARTED correctly in over a year.

Not to mention the increased visibility and communication that comes with now effectively having 2+ managers you have to report to and keep in the loop.

FUCK. THE. AWAY. TEAM. MODEL.

I’ve lived through it and it seriously burned me out harder than anything else in my life.

valbaca··on Nearly half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with ‘forever chemicals,’
> apolitical bipartisan issue

Not when one party is dedicated to destroying the EPA and anything related to it

valbaca··on R/webdev could not solve this challenge: A “Is it Friday” website, no JavaScript
"Friday" according to whom/where?
valbaca··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://valbaca.com/
valbaca··on Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
You don't need to put an apostrophe before every s that ends a word. Only ones that are possessive, like "career's"

It's 20s, not 20's. It's sees, not see's.

valbaca··on Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
My family: not tech savvy, haven't mentioned AI once to me, except my mother-in-law who asked if I'd heard of it and wanted to (honestly) know what I thought.

My friends: very, very much in tech, we have a channel in our discord where we just laugh at AI/ML/Musk/Crypto because it's so stupid. It can't even fucking add two numbers. It doesn't actually help with internal, brownfield projects with complex business logic and custom internal integrations. It can't summarize legal documents or answer technical questions without completely making crap up. It's just sparkling auto-complete.

My work: I've been put on an LLM project. The purpose? Dunno. The goal? Dunno. Our VPs are on the hype train and I'm along for the ride as long as my paycheck keeps clearing (and interviewing in the meantime). They're literally taking tech and trying to find a use for it. It's just the blockchain hype all over again.

valbaca··on Ask HN: Why aren't modern programming languages, like Rust, more legible?
Try Crystal. (edit: or rather consider it. It's incredibly fast to execute, slow to build, and is as readable as Ruby)

Otherwise, Rust has to have the syntax to mean different things: values, references, mutable references, generics, etc.

In say Java, what’s just an Object is actually something like an Arc<Box<Option<Object>>>> Things are just more explicit to get the kind of fine grained control needed.

valbaca··on Why is the volume of a cone one third of the volume of a cylinder? (2010)
Isn’t it just the surface area of a circle as the circle shrinks? (Limit as Radius goes to zero) That’s what a cone is
valbaca··on Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?
12 YOE

Staff software engineer. Full-stack web & app engineer/architect. What that practically means is: Java/Kotlin Services on AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, SQL/Mongo/DynamoDB/Redis etc, JS/TS React for frontend web, Kotlin+Android, Swift+iOS. Starting to build out AI/LLM/ChatGPT stuff now as well.

Hours: remote 9-5, so 40 hrs/week (nice try boss!). But one could imagine someone working ~4hrs/day in such a position.

Salary: 240k base + 70k signing, 120k stocks, and 10% quarterly bonus

Loc: Seattle

I could probably work my ass off and get a 20% quarterly bonus and work toward Principle Engineer, but I've found promotions come out of luck combined with concerted effort. However I'm very financially satisfied and can prioritize my free-time and happiness. I've done my time at FAANG and even though they're trying to get me to come back, I'm happy with clocking out at 5:00pm on the dot with no on-call.

The more I've made, the less I've worked, and it keeps going up.

valbaca··on Tell HN: AWS Is Down
Widespread issues in us-east-2

Rumors say construction cut a cable.

valbaca··on MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown
It matters in that it helps people contribute, which contributes to growth.

Oh. and it's free.

valbaca··on MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown
What zealotry? Rust isn't mentioned until the last two points of eight:

mdBook is a command line tool to create books with Markdown. It is ideal for creating product or API documentation, tutorials, course materials or anything that requires a clean, easily navigable and customizable presentation.

- Lightweight Markdown syntax helps you focus more on your content - Integrated search support - Color syntax highlighting for code blocks for many different languages - Theme files allow customizing the formatting of the output - Preprocessors can provide extensions for custom syntax and modifying content - Backends can render the output to multiple formats - Written in Rust for speed, safety, and simplicity - Automated testing of Rust code samples

It mentions Rust because it's written in Rust and used by the Rust project.

In other words, the project wouldn't exist without Rust but

valbaca··on Gorilla-CLI: LLMs for CLI including K8s/AWS/GCP/Azure/sed and 1500 APIs
by https://shishirpatil.github.io/
valbaca··on Svelte 4
That website is AWESOME. I also found your dribble. Your work is absolutely stunning and inspiring.
valbaca··on Svelte 4
Yes. Svelte:React::SvelteKit:NextJS
valbaca··on Gotlin – understanding Kotlin coroutines better via goroutines
Blog post: https://valbaca.com/code/2023/04/26/gotlin.html

Github: https://github.com/valbaca/gotlin

valbaca··on Apple Reveals 'Vision Pro' Headset
When were airpods weird? People had already been wearing apple earbuds since the iPod came out and had been wearing headphones since the Sony Walkman
valbaca··on Ask HN: Struggling with Productivity and Procrastination
This is from my notebook. I don't have the original source and don't claim that I came up with this, but it's been incredibly useful for me (and pardon the succinct crib-notes).

How to fight procrastination

Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Trigger

If lacking Motivation:

- Build motivation by reminding yourself "why" in the first place

- Add personal, meaningful reasons to the task you put off.

- Remind yourself why you took it on

If lacking Ability:

- Breakdown the task

- Create a simple timeline:

1. Start at due date

2. Go backwards day-by-day (or week-by-week) and put milestones

3. Pin the timeline

4. Start on First Part

If lacking Trigger:

- Create a cue (A trigger is: "what, when, where")

- Take <15mins to decide task to start with. If you still don't know, pick one at random

- At the end of the day, put the next day's item at the top

Procrastination is a gap between intention and action.

Not all delay is procrastination.

To create intention: "In situation X, I will do Y to achieve subgoal Z"

valbaca··on What are the enduring innovations of Lisp? (2022)
I'm curious. May I ask what you're moving toward and what the motivations and reasons were? What was great and not great about building on/with Lisp?
valbaca··on Patterns: Exhaustiveness, Unconditionality, and Remainder
Other way around. Dart is a generic programming language. Flutter is the UI framework built with Dart.

https://dart.dev/

https://flutter.dev/

valbaca··on I didn’t learn Unix by reading all the manpages (2022)
I start with tldr then move into help or manpages as necessary. Then when I understand, I still come back to tldr to remember.

https://tldr.sh/

in browser: https://tldr.inbrowser.app/

valbaca··on Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML
> combines alcohol with flavored carbonated water

COMBINES. That's exactly what I'm getting at. Water (alone) cannot make an alcoholic drink. Neither can regexes (alone) parse HTML. But of course, you can suspend alcohol within carbonated water and make a hard drink. In the same way you can utilize regexes to parse HTML.

valbaca··on Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML
"You cannot make an alcoholic drink with water."

OP: "Oh Yes You Can Use Water to Make A Hard Drink. AH! But if I freeze water and pour in whiskey, I've used water to make an alcoholic drink."

-.-

valbaca··on Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML
OP moves the goalposts, not the comments:

"Here’s my HTML lexer. It doesn’t try to do a validating parse; it just identifies the lexical elements. You might think of it more as an HTML chunker than an HTML parser. It isn’t very forgiving of broken HTML, although it makes some very small allowances in that direction."

valbaca··on 1 in 5 adults don’t want children –– and they don’t regret it later
Grapes are literally toxic to foxes (and dogs).

What a perfect analogy.

valbaca··on Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”
"It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

Bad

Sick

Cleave

Sanction

Bolt

valbaca··on Ask HN: How to Protect Ideas and Implementation?
Lawyer up
valbaca··on The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’
'learn to code' was a refrain during the incredibly hot dev market of the past couple of years.

Hell, I'd have every plumber and electrician that came to work on my house ask which programming language they should learn. It was viral.

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