Hacker News: grandiego

New comment by grandiego in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

grandiego — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:06:45 +0000

Yes, strings appear like an afterthought, and sadly the Octave version has slight incompatibilities which may be a PITA for any non trivial script which aims to be compatible.

New comment by grandiego in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

grandiego — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:02:06 +0000

For my thesis I did something similar: bash scripts to extract raw data from a Subversion repository, to be preprocessed with PHP scripts (now I would prefer Python but had more experience with PHP) for text extraction and csv output, and finally Octave did the math magic, generating tables and saving graphics in png format, ready for import into my Lyx document.

New comment by grandiego in "Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price"

grandiego — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:12:24 +0000

In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors. While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited. Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.

New comment by grandiego in "Why Startups Die"

grandiego — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:36:51 +0000

Of course almost all startups expect a long live, but strategically it may be better (for the founders) to close when the fundamental assumptions are no longer valid, in order to do a future clean restart in a brand new endeavor (usually after a detox period).

New comment by grandiego in "The rise of async AI programming"

grandiego — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:22:34 +0000

Same here. I've read the author's braintrust.dev as "brain - Rust - Dev", so I was expecting a discussion on Rust Async development.

New comment by grandiego in "‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]"

grandiego — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 03:40:41 +0000

Hope some day Muslims (in all Arab countries) just accept the right of Israel to exist. Else, this attack/retaliation dynamic will continue for ever, with people taking sides from a blob of propaganda channels disguised in news platforms.

New comment by grandiego in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"

grandiego — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:24:57 +0000

I believe even today there's no way to control/isolate memory leaks on a per-war basis.

New comment by grandiego in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

grandiego — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:13 +0000

At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.

New comment by grandiego in "Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)"

grandiego — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:41:16 +0000

Applets died because of many reasons, like absurd startup time for the JRE (often just for silly animations), absurd memory requirements (for the time) and associated crashes, weird compatibility issues in the initial releases of the Java platform, a silly security model based on the assumption that only good actors will be able to get a CA certificate in order to do whatever they want in your PC, an immature sandboxing technology in browsers (not only IE), etc.

New comment by grandiego in "A receipt printer cured my procrastination"

grandiego — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:11:30 +0000

> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.

From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.

New comment by grandiego in "A receipt printer cured my procrastination"

grandiego — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:58:35 +0000

Right, epiphenols. And despite some BPA-free options there are many alerts about the risks of the replacements. Maybe is time for a cool old style matrix receipt printer using regular paper?

New comment by grandiego in "Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling"

grandiego — Sat, 17 May 2025 05:22:08 +0000

Hibernate... a real PITA every time the application needed something beyond basic single-table CRUD queries; sadly for me it happened 99% of the times. After some months of torture, plain JDBC with their stupid checked exceptions was refreshing, even without wrappers.

New comment by grandiego in "The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans"

grandiego — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 03:46:15 +0000

Writing from a country with dysfunctional judiciary, I think this is a logical way to overcome crime, at least temporarily. There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.

New comment by grandiego in "Annotated Unix Magic Poster"

grandiego — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 03:02:01 +0000

The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)

New comment by grandiego in "Convert Linux to Windows"

grandiego — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:08:40 +0000

> to distribute applications in the form of what are essentially tarballs of entire Linux systems.

No so bad when Linux ran from a floppy with 2Mb of RAM. Sadly every library just got bigger and bigger without any practical way to generate a lighter application specific version.

New comment by grandiego in "Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default"

grandiego — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 02:15:24 +0000

> Most utilities do not have to face the network

True, but code from those utilities may eventually be used in the network (for example, through copied functionality and shared libraries). Also, a creative pipeline may actually involve them (think of the Unix philosophy.)

Eventually plain C has to die or be relegated to unavoidable places like in the assembly cases, even if Rust is not the best alternative after all.

New comment by grandiego in "Pen and Paper Exercises in Machine Learning (2022)"

grandiego — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 23:36:16 +0000

Beginner here. A takeaway I got from the Andrew Ng's Coursera course (specifically for neural networks) is that adding more neurons and layers than the "minimum needed" is usually okay (that is, no risk of overfitting when considering reasonable regularization terms.) Sadly, there is no rule for that minimum, so you must do trial and error; on the other side, carelessly extending the network will be inefficient and eventually slow. For the activation functions, the output layer's is mostly determined by the problem being tackled, and for the inner layers you usually start with ReLU and then try some of the common variants using some heuristics (again related to the current problem.) Of course you should consider other successful models for similar problems as your starting point.

New comment by grandiego in "Crew-9 Returns to Earth"

grandiego — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 16:22:03 +0000

Sad world where people expects successful people to hire a PR team just to be liked.

New comment by grandiego in "Zlib-rs is faster than C"

grandiego — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 23:44:51 +0000

> the response from leadership was "yes, something like that would be better in the long run, but we want to ship this now."

Sounds like the Rust's async story.

New comment by grandiego in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

grandiego — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:53:26 +0000

> it shows that you should never give up your nuclear weapons for any agreement or treaty

This is something every related country already knows, think of Pakistan and North Korea. Are you expecting China and India to drop their nukes because of some nice treaty?

> World needs to help out Ukraine...

... to achieve peace ASAP, because thousands of lives are being lost.