Hacker News: doug1001

New comment by doug1001 in "What's the most important US law that seemed insignificant when passed?"

doug1001 — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 04:37:25 +0000

No idea about the most important, but one US law that had massive (and apparently unintended) economic consequences is the IGRA (Indian Gaming Regulatory Act)? not a lawyer, but I believe this Act was the legal catalyst for the proliferation of casinos on Native American tribal lands ("reservations")

New comment by doug1001 in "When the Internet Stopped in Belarus"

doug1001 — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 01:22:15 +0000

fwiw ,except for election day, viber has been up continuously--used it every day to communicate with family

New comment by doug1001 in "The Incredibly Stupid One"

doug1001 — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 20:49:14 +0000

is the former pilot you are referring to, Ron Bliss? He passed away in 2006; he and i were neighbors; i knew him very well

New comment by doug1001 in "What Was the Purpose of Saloon Doors?"

doug1001 — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:55:43 +0000

exactly! or break a chair over someone's head so that they fall backwards through the doors and out of the saloon. Every epiosode of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wild Wild West, et al that i've ever seen.

New comment by doug1001 in "RStudio 1.2 Released with Support for SQL, Stan, Python and D3"

doug1001 — Sun, 05 May 2019 02:45:47 +0000

also an ESS user; do you still use/prefer ESS vs RStudio for package development?

New comment by doug1001 in "Mermaid – Generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text"

doug1001 — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 19:34:37 +0000

graphviz: rock solid, and bindings for just about every language

New comment by doug1001 in "How MeUndies built a $32M company"

doug1001 — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:57:08 +0000

wow, so much for disrupting the underwears space

New comment by doug1001 in "A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy"

doug1001 — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 06:22:39 +0000

really fine, fine writing. Eg:

>I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

New comment by doug1001 in "In Memory of Jesse Helms and the Condom on His House (2008)"

doug1001 — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 07:11:06 +0000

maybe ageism will be stimgatized as form of bigotry

New comment by doug1001 in "The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015)"

doug1001 — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:02:22 +0000

i'm a regular reader of this blog; there's always something non-obvious (at least to me) plus just really fine, fine writing--eg,

"Some Dart users really dig a functional style and appear to be playing a game where whoever crams the most work before a single semicolon wins."

sort of the Dave Eggers of software engineering

New comment by doug1001 in "Forking Redis: SSL/TLS and Transactions"

doug1001 — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 17:26:59 +0000

i love redis and have been using in production for over five years. But i'm interested to read the story of this fork because the practicioner-focused redis book this guy wrote is one of the best software-related texts i've read in the past 7 - 8 years. ("Statistical Rethinking" by Richard McElreath, and "The Art of SQL" by Stephane Faroult are two others that had the same impact)

New comment by doug1001 in "Ask HN: How do you teach you kids about computers and coding?"

doug1001 — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 05:24:25 +0000

in Roblox; i am building a simple game with my 7-year old daughter on the Roblox platform. A nice combination of gui-based building and scripting and a cool objective (a completed game added to the registry of games on the platform so others can play it.

i am

New comment by doug1001 in "U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art"

doug1001 — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 17:33:37 +0000

seems to be about some new dating site for Spanish geologists

New comment by doug1001 in "Ascii art – dead or alive?"

doug1001 — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 09:34:41 +0000

nice one

fire up the redis server--you'll see some ascii art there

New comment by doug1001 in "A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)"

doug1001 — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 03:22:05 +0000

read through the OP and scanned a few examples on the J Project Wiki

i suspect that, to capture the full value of J, one needs to already know the array-oriented paradigm (or at least have a strong motivation to learn the two in parallel)

knowing the AOP paradigm also helps understand the programming patterns as well as the syntax

still, the dense syntax has extraordinary power

for instance, n-queens in J (from Rosetta Code) is just 4 short lines:

    perm   =: ! A.&i. ]             
    comb2  =: (, #: I.@,@(


a fundamental AOP patterns is evidenced here:line 1: create the 2D array (n x n chessboard)
line 2: populate the array with candidate solutions
line 3: eliminate invalid solutions ('mask' them)



New comment by doug1001 in "A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)"
doug1001 — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 02:54:10 +0000

similar background (started my career in APL, only language i've ever used that had its own keyboard)
also NumPy, and Nd4j via scala bindings
of course NumPy and Nd4j are libaries
i strongly recommend Julia as an array-oriented programming language
particularly because it has quite a few other features to recommend it
Julia follows the Matlab syntax conventions more closely than NumPy (or R) which i think was a good design choice



New comment by doug1001 in "Sum Types Are Coming (2015)"
doug1001 — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 18:25:48 +0000

the category theory term is co-product
(which honors the convention of expressing a dual using "co-" and indeed co-product is the dual of product)



New comment by doug1001 in "Migrating to Python 3 with pleasure"
doug1001 — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 06:13:49 +0000

agree completely
aside from that, python has a separate ordered dict class



New comment by doug1001 in "Only 13 arrests in 7 years of SF online auto break-in reports, DA says"
doug1001 — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:22:32 +0000

the number of SWAT unit deploys probably exceeds this number by some absurd ratio



New comment by doug1001 in "Nursing Home Recreates Communist East Germany for Dementia Patients"
doug1001 — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 17:43:50 +0000

beat me to it! An awesome film