HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vishbar

160 karma · joined July 1, 2014

submissionscomments
vishbar··on Mailable Live Animals
That is really interesting! I never had an ant farm, and I'm glad I didn't given what you've said.

Are ants similar to bees in that there's one egg-laying "queen" that you have to gather, or can you just gather a collection of individuals from a colony?

Your kid probably already knows about this, but have him check out the YouTuber AntsCanada. I'm not particularly into ants but I find his videos fascinating.

vishbar··on My Beef with RuboCop
Is there not an autoformatter available? We use linting as part of our Python workflow and it works pretty well along with black. There's really not much linting work: just write your code, run black, and it's good to go.
vishbar··on The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple
Leaving aside commercial methods or more...shall we say, exotic methods like explosives or elecroshock, bait fishing is generally more effective.

I do both: I trot bait when the river I fish is unsuitable for the fly.

vishbar··on Data structures and algorithms I actually used while working at tech companies
Due to the physical architecture of CPUs/etc., data structures that have "worse" asymptotic performance are often quite a bit faster than those with "better" performance. For example, iterating through a small array to find an item and test for existence is often quite a bit faster than using a hash set for the same operation.
vishbar··on The KDE community is moving to GitLab
Sure, so now instead of just having a source control remote, you’re now looking after a publicly accessible box in the cloud with all the security headaches that brings. Plus you’ve got to manage credentials essentially manually, make sure people have the right access permissions to repos, look after backups, etc.

I worked at a company that started out with a setup like this for the dev team. It felt like a massive burden was lifted when we moved to Github Enterprise. We weren’t using the project management features at all, just the source code hosting stuff.

vishbar··on Ask HN: What are good distance learning Bachelor's/Master's degrees one can do?
I've studied there for an MSc in Computing. It was good. The classes are a bit business-schooly but I got some good support from tutors. Obviously it depends on the individual tutor--the one for my project module wasn't as clear and supportive--but some are really fantastic.
vishbar··on New COVID-19 cases reported across Japan
Realistically, how well will someone with a nonspecialist knowledge of biology be able to contribute to these projects?

That statement's not intended to pass judgement; I'd really like to know as it'd be great to contribute to a good cause.

vishbar··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2019)
Hey, are you OK with UK passport holders?
vishbar··on Elegant Error Handling with the JavaScript “Either” Monad
Scala's for-comprehensions (and Haskell's do-notation) help quite a lot as well.
vishbar··on Ask HN: High-Quality Online Degree for Mathematics?
I'm doing a masters in Computing with them now. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, and it is definitely rigorous (though more on the management side rather than the technical side).
vishbar··on “Write Drunk, Edit Sober” Is Bad Advice
There's definitely a different style of development, in my experience. After a few beers or when very sleep-deprived, I find myself avoiding "analysis paralysis" and just getting something written, even if it's not super elegant. There can definitely be a benefit to doing that, though I wouldn't recommend slamming shots at 9am before the workday starts!
vishbar··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)
Astrology and machine learning just seem so different. One is a poor attempt at prediction using dubious, shoddy, poorly understood methods that generally amount either to general wooly vagueries or completely wrong conclusions that are no better than random chance, and the other deals with planets.
vishbar··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)
How does machine learning apply to something like astrology?
vishbar··on Ursula Le Guin has died
I almost always skip the intro of books like this. I didn't skip this one. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books of all time.
vishbar··on Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name to Long Blockchain
Visit my new startup's website, http://serverless.blockchain.ai/mongodb!
vishbar··on Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
We use it in production for a Storm-based ETL pipeline. We've not had any problems that have been related to our use of Kotlin.
vishbar··on Microsoft ASP.Net Core 2.0.0 released
How is the tooling these days? I played with .NET Core a while ago (before the move away from project.json and just after the move to the dotnet command line tool rather than dnx/dnvm/etc.). I found the documentation for the tooling to be confusing, sparse, and often contradictory. Have things improved? How much manual XML munging is required with the new csproj format, assuming one isn't using Visual Studio and is developing on Mac/Linux?
vishbar··on Why I’m Learning Perl 6
.NET has both nonblocking evented IO and standard blocking IO in the stdlib. Most modern libraries use asynchronous IO, however lots of legacy applications still use blocking calls, making them unsuitable to run in the thread pool.
vishbar··on Amazon Echo Look
There's a much more immediately practical reason to keep it in-firewall as well: if the utility company accidentally cuts a fiber line outside my house, I don't want to be suddenly unable to turn off my hallway light.
vishbar··on PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
We used it a lot for full automation tests for the UI. It's nice being able to interface with a full-featured browser that can run javascript, etc. And take screenshots when things go wrong.
vishbar··on COAP endpoints on IKEA Trådfri
If Tradfri bulbs use ZLL, is it theoretically possible to connect Tradfri bulbs to an existing Hue network?
vishbar··on How to Learn Hadoop for Free
I've recently started working in the big data space and it definitely seems like the primary use case for Hadoop these days is HDFS. Spark seems to have entirely subsumed Hadoop MapReduce for most batch processing workloads.
vishbar··on Open Source License Business Perception Report
I thought the AGPL only applied to modifications of the AGPL'd software? E.g. you'd have to open source any modifications of the AGPL service you make.
vishbar··on How I Start: Go (2014)
I see what you're saying between Swift, Go, and Rust, but I'm not sure C# belongs in the same category. There are orders of magnitude more real-life lines of code implemented in C# than the other three combined. It's much more comparable to Java.

F# may be a better comparison.

vishbar··on Chronic sleep deprivation suppresses immune system
Even if that is obvious to you somehow, it still needs a study. A lot of "obvious" ideas have been overturned when put under experiment.
vishbar··on The .NET Core 2 Wave
I really want to use it as I much prefer Linux as a hosting platform over Windows, but I really enjoy C# and F#. When I last looked, however, the tooling just wasn't there. I found documentation still referencing the outdated dnx command as opposed to dotnet, and building something as simple as a console application required quite a bit of boilerplate project.json. I haven't looked at it since, but I hope the move back to csproj will simplify things a bit. I'd really like to see the dev experience ironed out a bit more as it's quite an exciting project.
vishbar··on Direct Primary Care
I think this is applying a "car insurance model" (sorry in advance for the car analogy) to healthcare. Ignore third-party insurance for the moment as it's not really applicable to health. You don't generally make an insurance claim for something like an oil change, 30/60/90k mile checkup, or something like that. On the other hand, if a tree fell on your car and smashed the engine, that's when insurance kicks in: for the catastrophes.
vishbar··on Rumors of Cmd’s death have been greatly exaggerated
I use vim in cmder occasionally. The only way I've been able to use it properly is to disable conemu hooks before I execute it.

Basically, I've defined a function my profile to:

* Save the ConEmuHooks environment variable value * Set it to "Off" * Execute vim * Reset it to the previous value

I alias this command to "vim".

It's not pretty at all, and it caused me to use Sublime or VSCode most of the time, but it worked for me.

More info here: http://conemu.github.io/en/ConEmuEnvironment.html

vishbar··on Rumors of Cmd’s death have been greatly exaggerated
Doesn't Bash (or any Unix shell) fail to fit your definition, then? Bash contains an interpreter for a language that, while lightweight, is still a separate interpreted language. In particular commands like cd can't be executed as separate programs.
vishbar··on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
It looks like your SFW link is broken
Page 1 of 2Next →