Hacker News: ResidentSleeper

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion"

ResidentSleeper — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 18:52:10 +0000

The unusually downvoted answer holds the key to the riddle: it's the hardcoded tribalism making us justify our purchases as if they're political statements.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices directly via TCP,UDP"

ResidentSleeper — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 12:00:23 +0000

Most people I know just click "yes" on all popups until the website starts working. In between every other website asking for notification/location permissions and a huge pile of GDPR popups (which are actively hostile towards users that attempt to opt-out), we've managed to condition web users into routinely agreeing to give up their privacy and security. Hooray.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them"

ResidentSleeper — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 13:25:14 +0000

Backups protect against a wider class of problems. For example, a software vulnerability/bug or a human error could result in the deletion of an object in all replicas (because deletions are replicated too), but you'd usually need another incident to occur for you to lose the backup as well.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Intel’s 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake SoC Detailed"

ResidentSleeper — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 14:19:12 +0000

Being in the market for an enthusiast CPU is predicated on being enthusiastic about CPUs in the first place, and that's become somewhat difficult in the last couple of years.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "C's 'while' is spelled 'for' in Go"

ResidentSleeper — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:08:31 +0000

Looking at the syntax (as a Go beginner), I'm not really sure whether that's less or more to learn. Seems like one of those arbitrary language design decisions that don't make a huge difference either way.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing"

ResidentSleeper — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:17:42 +0000

@vhanda (unable to reply directly for some reason)

First of all, congratulations on shipping a decent, polished Android app! These increasingly seem to be a rarity these days.

Regarding the subscription model, the monthly price quickly adds up, especially for users outside the US. For example, one of the most common apps in my country offers a pro subscription for a yearly price of $3, compared to a minimum of $24 ($2 * 12) in GitJournal (and this would be on top of whatever I'm paying for my desktop note-keeping app...). I would suggest that you review the pricing for low income countries (especially since the regionalized "go pro" slider UI seems glitchy, eg. I can't reselect the default price, can't select values to the right). A lower yearly subscription or a single purchase option would go a long way towards convincing me to upgrade.

I think not including ads was an excellent choice and I probably wouldn't have continued using the app with them. I was going to suggest hiding the locked pro features to make them less annoying, but upon review it's not that bad.

I'll keep using the app and leave a review on the store later when I gather more thoughts.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing"

ResidentSleeper — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 14:37:49 +0000

I've recently started using GitJournal [1] to access my notes on Android, but I haven't used it enough to be able to say whether it's worthwhile. One annoying drawback is that it requires a monthly subscription to get access to all of the (convenience) features.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.gitjournal....

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99"

ResidentSleeper — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:10:10 +0000

Parent comment might come off as offensive, but it very accurately represents my experience with several Google apps that I've been using recently (YouTube, Google Play Music/YouTube Music, Google Photos, Google Maps, ...). But I'm on Firefox, so I guess nobody cares.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Memory in JavaScript – Beyond Leaks (2019)"

ResidentSleeper — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 09:39:57 +0000

I'd be surprised to learn that there's any sensible optimization that the compiler/runtime can make to ensure optimal data locality. The problem is difficult enough that the entire Unity engine is being pretty much rewritten to make use of sequential memory access.

In addition, I really, really wish more JS developers actually cared to learn about optimization and about how the runtime/hardware actually works. We've "developed" the web to such a slow, buggy mess that I've given up on the idea that there's any way to fix it. I hope somebody figures out a way to start over, preferably with no scripting capability, because apparently giving people any half-baked scripting language results in them soon developing nuclear footguns with it.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Show HN: Correct Horse Battery Staple password generator"

ResidentSleeper — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:17:53 +0000

On the other hand, I'd wager that the set of words that you can recognize is vastly larger than the set of words that you're likely to come up with on the spot. Hence, using a generator would still result in higher entropy then trying to come up with a password yourself.

Random numbers picked by humans are notoriously biased. I'm guessing it's even worse when you ask them to come up with random words.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Piranha: An Open Source Tool to Automatically Delete Stale Code"

ResidentSleeper — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 05:16:19 +0000

A while ago I deleted my Uber/UberEats account (they didn't make it easy btw) because of how utterly unusable their apps were compared to competition. After me and my girlfriend spent 30 minutes trying to order food on 3 different platforms, which has been a repeated experience with them for years, I decided it's time to give up. Same obvious UI/UX bugs as over a year ago - I'm actually dumbfounded at how this is possible, do they even use their own app? To sum up, I tend to look at tech coming from Uber through a somewhat sarcastic lens these days.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Shan, Shui: Procedurally generated Chinese landscape painting"

ResidentSleeper — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 10:56:09 +0000

All of these are often of little concern to artists, who prefer to get in the flow of actually getting stuff done. Organizing your project is fun and all, but there's A TON value in eliminating context switches and shortening your iteration loop. Source: I participate in game jams.

Obviously, it would be nice to follow this up with refactoring, but you could also spend this time on another project, of which the author has many (and likely thanks to this "fire and forget" attitude).

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? (2018)"

ResidentSleeper — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:50:15 +0000

Whether or not it's comparable depends on the level of distinction you're trying to make. Obviously, CPUs don't think or experience the world (but on the other hand that kind of "feature" seems increasingly likely to be implementable in software, even if our current CPU architectures are rather unsuitable for that goal). However, if we're gonna talk about energy efficiency and computation performance, now that it has become evident that the brain is merely a kind of a computer, we can definitely look for parallels.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "LinkedIn employees use forum about diversity to defend racism"

ResidentSleeper — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 05:56:27 +0000

Additionally, the article fails to address any of the points (seemingly calmly!) made by the employees accused of racism. This is a disgusting way to hold a conversation of this much importance. As an outsider, to me America seems laser-focused on tearing itself to shreds.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%"

ResidentSleeper — Fri, 08 May 2020 07:43:46 +0000

> They probably care about their bonus and how it all advances themselves on their career path.

That doesn't sound anything like the priorities of a competent CEO. I think you're missing my point, too.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%"

ResidentSleeper — Fri, 08 May 2020 07:15:48 +0000

Take a look around this comment section. This move isn't being received well by anyone and nobody is buying his bullshit. That, and mass layoffs are typically an excellent indicator of incompetence.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Deep Dive Into C# 9"

ResidentSleeper — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 18:07:27 +0000

The term ctor refers to good old type constructors. It's a common abbreviation, and it's even the keyword for defining constructors in .Net IL.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus"

ResidentSleeper — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 22:36:13 +0000

Materials absorb different parts of the frequency spectrum with varying efficiency. Regular earplugs are made to simply stop as much sound as possible and hence there's a lot of muffle at the top of the spectrum (that's easiest to achieve - cover your ears!). Concert earplugs are more carefully designed to absorb the entire spectrum as uniformly as possible.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus"

ResidentSleeper — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 22:24:31 +0000

I've had this exact problem attending most concerts (only classical music seems mostly fine). The music sounds very distorted (like a damaged speaker or an audio recording with heavy clipping) and after a while it gets physically painful to listen. Movies are sometimes uncomfortable, but the volume level is less constant which helps a lot. I've asked around and nobody seems to share this experience. I didn't use to go to live events often and it actually took me years to realize that my hearing's at fault.

New comment by ResidentSleeper in "Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database"

ResidentSleeper — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 15:37:46 +0000

That's sad to hear. I've had a lot of fun playing around with Azure's table/blob storage services. Never deployed a large production app with them, but the performance seemed decent (eg. when using table storage as a json store). I did look at Cosmos DB but decided not to give it a try when I saw the pricing.