Hacker News: hebdo

New comment by hebdo in "Announcing TensorFlow 0.8 – now with distributed computing support"

hebdo — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 22:03:12 +0000

I doubt it is a priority. But I can certainly recommend Amazon GPU-enabled instances (~0.6$/hour/GPU, not that much actually).

New comment by hebdo in "Millionaire migration in 2015 [pdf]"

hebdo — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 23:06:27 +0000

I've been seriously contemplating it for about a year now: is it the time to abandon Europe and find new life elsewhere? Asking for the honest HN opinion, is the old continent already the sinking ship? On one hand it is comforting to consider that there is ~1000 years of history of civilized Europe behind us, with rich culture, the discovery and development of science and, in general, prosperity. On the other, it took less than a century for the Western Roman Empire to collapse.

New comment by hebdo in "Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?"

hebdo — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 16:55:06 +0000

Varnish cache.

1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it!

2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what should be on disk.

3) LRU garbage collection of cached objects requires a synchronized priority queue. Varnish people transformed the decades old idea of implementing a heap in an array that every CS graduate knows and came up with a faster, paging-aware solution (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327).

New comment by hebdo in "How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem"

hebdo — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 18:59:04 +0000

Didn't know that, thanks for the information. I was rejected in the H1B random lottery step (sigh) after getting an offer from a grown startup in SF, and did not investigate the green card process deep enough.

New comment by hebdo in "How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem"

hebdo — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 18:50:12 +0000

You can change jobs while being on an H1B. It is commonly referred to as H1B transfer.

New comment by hebdo in "How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem"

hebdo — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 18:41:09 +0000

I'm quite sure that by writing "I'm not in the slow lane" he/she meant exactly that he/she is not from India or China.

New comment by hebdo in "Investigation: Police Shootings"

hebdo — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 19:56:28 +0000

Sorry for the choice of words, but my point was that a person armed with just a knife can still be very dangerous. The use of a gun in such a situation cannot be simply called a deadly overreaction, without going into details. Therefore I do not see my comment as unreasonable.

New comment by hebdo in "Investigation: Police Shootings"

hebdo — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 19:35:27 +0000

If you think that a knife threat should never call for a firearm response then I recommend this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xpcrDzy344

New comment by hebdo in "The strange non-transitivity of random variables (2014)"

hebdo — Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:37:41 +0000

While Kolmogorov's definition of probability looks a bit spooky at first, I definitely recommend going through it at some point. Not only it feels nice, it also makes understanding probabilistic concepts easier (e.g. understanding that a statistical space is simply a "lifted", or rather parametrized, version of a probabilistic space).

New comment by hebdo in "Why Japanese leaders attacked Pearl Harbor"

hebdo — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 21:46:51 +0000

Not for the first time, and perhaps not for the last time, these words are so relevant.

A war that need not have been fought was about to be

fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language

difficulties, and mistranslations.

Why did America drop the two bombs? Why did it not drop the first one over the Tokyo bay? Why Japanese leaders hesitated so much to surrender, despite being so much overwhelmed by foreign power? Why nobody managed to stop Hitler from inside Germany? Why all the genocides in the history had to happen?

The world is complicated, it does not always choose the right path. Decisions of even the greatest importance are sometimes made with insufficient information, and are subject to all kinds of cognitive failures. It's easy to judge after you know all the facts.

New comment by hebdo in "China stocks hit hard, rest of world shrugs"

hebdo — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 16:44:33 +0000

Calling a 5% change in the Shanghai Composite index a "hard hit" is an overstatement, given what has been happening there over the last months (particularly April-September).

New comment by hebdo in "Gaming the H-1B system for good"

hebdo — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 21:10:21 +0000

I've applied for H1B in the past, knowing everything one should know about it beforehand. Either my choice was idiotic, or being a slave in the US is better than being free in my home country (Poland).

While I agree that H1B is a stupid system, for everybody, I also think you should be more careful with your choice of words. Saying H1B is slavery is like comparing US police brutality cases to Nazism.

New comment by hebdo in "Jessica Livingston"

hebdo — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 19:11:34 +0000

I suggest you read the essay again. PG clearly writes that Jessica's way of dealing with people is by listening. And she's damn good at that. It is harder to listen when you speak, or when everybody watches your every move.

New comment by hebdo in "Jessica Livingston"

hebdo — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 19:08:31 +0000

There is no special key, no special pattern that unlocks one's extraordinary performance in a given area. Some people happen to have the right combination of brains, experience, commitment, and luck. And they leave the world impressed.

You could literally ask the same questions about Mozart or Einstein. Let me try that: what's their secret? Can you learn it? Is it experience, something you either have or have not? Are men better suited for the job? What clues are you looking for while analyzing a theory? Is there something like a 'perfect' symphony, or did he make a list of positive and negative tone patterns? Are some chords more important than others?

New comment by hebdo in "Don't copy paste from a website to a terminal"

hebdo — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:09:58 +0000

Do not cat log files either: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/15101/how-to-avoid-e...

New comment by hebdo in "The Impossible Music of Black MIDI"

hebdo — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 19:51:23 +0000

Random noise cannot be (on average) loselessly compressed, not even by 0.0000001% of the original size. To see that it is the case it is sufficient to notice that a compression algorithm is essentially a way to reorder all possible inputs, all at once, and then apply the pigeonhole principle. Kind of similar to the proof that if a loseless compression algorithm shortens at least one input, it must also extend at least one.

Claiming that there exists an algorithm that loselessly compresses random noise to 86% of the original size is just wrong.

New comment by hebdo in "The Confessions of @dick_nixon"

hebdo — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 22:10:58 +0000

Well, what he said is: 1) he does not like pro-marijuana lobbyists/activists ("bastards" as he calls them), 2) all of the pro-lobbyists (from his times) are Jewish, 3) he does not know why is there such a connection, 4) he provides a crappy explanation (psychiatrists? really?). Now I have no idea whether or not 2) is true (probably not), but correlations between ethnicity and lifestyle preferences can and do exist. Take Chinese approach to parenting - clearly different.

To sum up, the only thing that could possibly be offensive is either 2) or the overall tone of the fragment. Hence my question: is it because it's plain false? Or is it because such language is always xenophobic, regardless of available evidence?

New comment by hebdo in "The Confessions of @dick_nixon"

hebdo — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 20:04:07 +0000

Serious question, however stupid, ignorant or offensive it might sound: why is the following anti-semitic? Because it was false in Nixon's times? I'm not that familiar with the history of the United States in the 70s.

You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.

New comment by hebdo in "Hitler's Drug Addiction"

hebdo — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 21:13:56 +0000

Yes, that's correct. Only codeine can be considered a preform (of morphine), because it is metabolized in human livers into morphine. Having said that it's worth to remember that opiates are really very similar one to each other.

New comment by hebdo in "Hitler's Drug Addiction"

hebdo — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 21:01:53 +0000

The fact that Hitler was a serious addict is true. He was also bipolar, and it is quite likely that the combination has contributed a lot to the beginning of the end of Operation Barbarossa in 1943 (through his faulty decision about not attacking Moscow in 1941, before winter, and before Stalin realized what is really happening). The thing to remember is that amphetamines were way more acceptable in the early 1940s (because the bad side effects were not yet that obvious), for example Wehrmacht soldiers had "superpower chocolate bars" beefed up with amphetamine. They were allowed to consume it in a dire situation. There is a lot of unnecessary buzzing happening in the article though.