Hacker News: colvasaur

New comment by colvasaur in "uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari"

colvasaur — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:59:35 +0000

That’s funny, I remember the only way to block ads on my Android phone back many years ago was to root it. I was thrilled how easy it was to block ads on the iPhone when I switched.

New comment by colvasaur in "New ‘past’ link on HN front page"

colvasaur — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:42:58 +0000

Is there a public API for this?

New comment by colvasaur in "Ask HN: How would you sort HN users by quality of comments?"

colvasaur — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 22:31:37 +0000

I don't think comment karma is publicly available through the site or API, but average comment karma could be calculated based on total karma of user minus sum of post karma divided by number of comments.

New comment by colvasaur in "Benchmarking AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Packet, and Vultr"

colvasaur — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 16:52:53 +0000

> The virtualized nature of cloud hosting makes benchmarking over a period of time vital to getting the full picture.

It's so nice to see a benchmark of VPSs that takes this into account.

New comment by colvasaur in "Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute"

colvasaur — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 04:42:08 +0000

Isn't everything client-side on the web inherently open-source?

New comment by colvasaur in "Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?"

colvasaur — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 22:27:18 +0000

An old statistics professor recommended I read The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. The book's voice has some ego and it's unnecessarily verbose at times, but it changed the way I think about modeling, forecasting, and day-to-day assumptions.

New comment by colvasaur in "New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking"

colvasaur — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 03:21:57 +0000

Their “April Fools” jokes made me realize the devs think my phone was just a toy and not a tool. Not that they owe me anything. Made me switch immediately to iOS.

New comment by colvasaur in "Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb"

colvasaur — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 18:53:48 +0000

Don’t hate the player or the game; hate the scrubs on the sideline.

New comment by colvasaur in "So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux"

colvasaur — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 06:04:38 +0000

I used to be irritated by middle-click paste as well. That stopped when I had someone explain it to me as follows:

> It’s just another clipboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the keyboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the mouse.

Perhaps that’s common knowledge, but that understanding made me instantly fall in love with middle-click paste.

In most terminal emulators, Ctrl-C deviates from normal behavior in favor of sending SIGINT. However, some terminal emulators (e.g. the one in elementary OS) makes the simple decision that if text is highlighted, copy it. Otherwise, send SIGINT. That closes all loose ends for me.

New comment by colvasaur in "When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive"

colvasaur — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 07:35:15 +0000

I feel a pull, so my reaction is to retreat rather than jump. Paradoxically, the desire to jump results in placing myself at a safer distance.

New comment by colvasaur in "Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?"

colvasaur — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 07:16:21 +0000

PDE constrained optimization. I was optimizing for many hundreds of thousands of parameters. I only needed the diagonal of the Jacobian by the end of the calculation, however it was necessary to build the full dense matrix first without rewriting massive parts of the logic.

New comment by colvasaur in "Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?"

colvasaur — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 04:15:35 +0000

3.5 years if you consider my MSc a personal project. There were three hallmark technical failures that are summarized as follows: (a) a computational failure -- at one point I needed to iteratively generate a 3 TB matrix, (b) a mathematical failure -- I made a math mistake, and (c) a software failure -- I tried to use a falsely advertised library to solve the above two problems.

By the end I was knee deep in source code written by mathematicians (read: an absolute mess) trying to fix bugs in code that was not even used in the library, not sleeping, and not eating. I had completely lost my mind.

The taste of failure was bitter on my tongue after the first two failures, but by the last I was truly a shadow of myself. The only lesson I learned from the last failure is that my mind has a breaking point, which is very valuable to know and sense.

My two cents: learn from your failures even if the only lesson to be learned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment.

New comment by colvasaur in "‘Emerging’ as a Writer After 40"

colvasaur — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 23:52:06 +0000

I'm at a transition point in my career and have been really thinking about doing this. Salary and career trajectory are my primary concerns. Do you feel comfortable with your pay and future opportunities? The only portfolio I have is documentation for my GitHub projects. Any advice on building it up if necessary?