Hacker News: dvirsky

New comment by dvirsky in "GenChess"

dvirsky — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 23:08:15 +0000

You can set it to not be diagonal.

New comment by dvirsky in "Museum of Bad Art"

dvirsky — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:46:45 +0000

I knew a guy who was selling his art online, he was making tongue-in-cheek, technically bad art but it was very deliberate as part of what he was trying to get at, he had a real artistic vision to his work.

His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.

New comment by dvirsky in "Quincy Jones has died"

dvirsky — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 18:40:44 +0000

Dua Lipa has amazing arrangements for example.

There is a great podcast called Switched on Pop, which delves into music theory behind pop hits and their songwriting and arrangements, and analyzes them to show what makes them great. It will give you fresh perspective on how much thought and talent goes into some of these songs. https://switchedonpop.com/

New comment by dvirsky in "There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)"

dvirsky — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:30:08 +0000

> Antimemetics remains a top 10 all-time though.

It's good, but didn't leave that big of an impression on me, maybe because I didn't know all the SCP stuff beforehand, I just liked qntm's other works so I read it.

New comment by dvirsky in "There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)"

dvirsky — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:09:15 +0000

I actually think the ending of it really prevented it from being that (at least for me). It started good, then the second act was like "Whoah, this is the most amazing sci-fi I've ever read", then the third act was just all over the place and completely lost me. And that's the revised ending, I didn't read the original one.

New comment by dvirsky in "Logo: Programming with Turtle Graphics (IBM PC) (1983)"

dvirsky — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 19:46:23 +0000

That is the first programming environment I ever used. It was an amazing starting point.

New comment by dvirsky in "Poets' Odd Jobs"

dvirsky — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 22:07:58 +0000

I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.

New comment by dvirsky in "Poets' Odd Jobs"

dvirsky — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 22:04:08 +0000

IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to make a living.

New comment by dvirsky in "Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them"

dvirsky — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:08:48 +0000

These are the same trees known as Cum Trees, right?

My neighbors have a couple, I didn't know these before moving to the US, and the first time I smelled them was... something.

New comment by dvirsky in "Introducing GNOME 46, "Kathmandu""

dvirsky — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:25:19 +0000

I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.

New comment by dvirsky in "MacBook charger teardown: The surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)"

dvirsky — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:01:29 +0000

How is it charging as fast as a charger 3 times more powerful?

New comment by dvirsky in "Forum reactions to Satoshi's Bitcoin paper"

dvirsky — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:09:14 +0000

Same here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.

New comment by dvirsky in "A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters"

dvirsky — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 21:42:20 +0000

Bloom Filters are already lossy compression, so depending on how sparse they are I'm not sure you'll get too much benefit out of it, but maybe I'm just thinking of much, much smaller filters.

BTW we ended up open sourcing that BF library that encodes and decodes filters in multiple languages, the company has been out of business for nearly a decade but the project is still out there https://github.com/EverythingMe/inbloom

New comment by dvirsky in "A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters"

dvirsky — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:59:58 +0000

One example: I personally used it to deduplicate recently viewed ads in an app, to avoid spamming users with the same ad too much. One interesting challenge there was that we needed to make sure that the client and server encode and decode the filter exactly the same, despite being implemented in different languages.

New comment by dvirsky in "NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes"

dvirsky — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 23:34:52 +0000

What would happen if a 1g probe traveling at 10% of the speed of light hits an inhabited planet with an atmosphere? The kinetic energy is insane, but will it just burn out in the atmosphere or will it manage to hit the surface and go boom, assuming earth like atmosphere?

New comment by dvirsky in "Lode Runner (HTML5 Remake)"

dvirsky — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 19:39:32 +0000

This is pretty great, I used to love this game as a kid. I played it on a PC in the late 80s. Besides being a fun game, it was probably the first game I've played where you could design your own levels, which was awesome, we used to challenge each other to custom levels in our school's computer lab.

New comment by dvirsky in "A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique)"

dvirsky — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 20:23:02 +0000

> It looks like Critque is a branch of Gerrit

IIRC Gerrit is an open source re-implementation from scratch of Critique.

New comment by dvirsky in "Reflecting on 18 Years at Google"

dvirsky — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 19:08:19 +0000

Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )

New comment by dvirsky in "Redis as a database (2021)"

dvirsky — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:44:35 +0000

This needs 2021 in the title, but it's actually really out of date and might as well have 2011 in the title. Redis has modules which can provide a bunch of extra capabilities that do allow querying, indexing, etc. [Full disclosure: I used to work on Redis and created much of the basis of those modules, but haven't been involved in the past 5 years]

New comment by dvirsky in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

dvirsky — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:34:38 +0000

* When RSS was a thing but in my country a lot of news/content websites hadn't adopted yet, I wrote a service to quickly define scrapers that turn those sites into RSS feeds.

* In one of my former workplaces I wrote (alongside another person) a gamified shared playlist app that allowed everyone to participate in being a DJ for our company hackathon (people getting more upvotes getting more playtime, songs getting many downvoted being skipped in the middle, etc). That was a lot of fun and surprisingly a very emotionally engaging experience for everyone.