Hacker News: mmatants

New comment by mmatants in "Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decision-making"

mmatants — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:59:30 +0000

Yeah this kind of stuff makes my blood boil. One can shame and belt their kid into compliance, and it might even get them (barely, only if they're lucky) all the way through university but holy shit the lifelong damage of self loathing and burnout and broken relationships it creates is im-fucking-measurable.

Taking a neurological imbalance and turning it into a morality thing is abuse. Even if unintentional. This is real. Parents look for simple answers like "give em the strap" but how is that less reductive than "give em the pill"?

New comment by mmatants in "Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer"

mmatants — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:09:10 +0000

To add a data point, I used to do Pomodoro timing (25+5 min) but now switched to 15 min timer with a loose 2-5 min break. It's still hard to actually pull out of hyper-focus/anxious perseveration sometimes, but the shorter timer period seems to match my task cadence better. And the non-timed break just vibes better because it doesn't feel like punishment then.

New comment by mmatants in "Petscii Side-Scrolling Platformer by Jimbo"

mmatants — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 18:35:34 +0000

Reminded me of one of my favourite text-art/PETSCII adjacent creators I follow - Mrmo - who creates satisfying retro stuff like this custom font/tileset: https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmotext

New comment by mmatants in "Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics"

mmatants — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 21:32:07 +0000

Suburbs are not the only place to raise kids though. Probably not the best place for it either.

New comment by mmatants in "Prolog at Work"

mmatants — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 17:25:53 +0000

One clever hack I've seen is Yield Prolog (https://yieldprolog.sourceforge.net/) which basically translates the querying/backtracking execution model into mainstream language syntax - such as JS, Python or C# - using the `yield` keyword and loops. Supports things like variable unification, too.

New comment by mmatants in "Lichee Pi 4A"

mmatants — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 17:27:53 +0000

I also want to mention the Lichee Pi Nano, though it is much smaller and targeting a different use case: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/08/17/licheepi-nano-cheap-.... Made an embedded distro Buildroot config for that one some time ago (https://github.com/unframework/licheepi-nano-buildroot).

New comment by mmatants in "Web Development Simplified with Svelte"

mmatants — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 14:24:57 +0000

I'd say for 95% of data fetches https://github.com/slorber/react-async-hook works really well without needing generator syntax or explicit promise cancellation boilerplate. I'm not the author but a satisfied user.

New comment by mmatants in "Show HN: Publisheet – Publish Excel sheets as interactive web pages"

mmatants — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:00:12 +0000

At least for parsing PDF into table I had decent success with Tabula.

New comment by mmatants in "Update on AB5"

mmatants — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 21:36:18 +0000

The fact that choosing to use Uber represents a certain amount of trust in the driver (basic background check, identity information, etc), makes it more than lead generator or transparent broker.

New comment by mmatants in "Whatever happened to Six Sigma?"

mmatants — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 22:09:52 +0000

Law as an industry is pretty dysfunctional. Plenty of data governance issues, losing track of documents, etc. A lot is at stake there, for sure, but that's actually the thing that process helps with - reliability and safety. And law is very resistant to incorporating that.

New comment by mmatants in "Show HN: Simple tool to make a habit of exercising"

mmatants — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 03:08:55 +0000

I had some success with https://www.beeminder.com/ in my short time of using it so far. Essentially, it moves items from "important + not urgent" quadrant to "not important + urgent" one: by dinging your card $X dollars if you don't comply.

However, I also had to shift my mindset towards trying to progress via small inconsequential chunks, rather than trying to "fix everything". E.g. the idea is to just show up to the gym - not exercise - but if latter happens, then sure, why not (and it usually does). I think it helps snap out of the failure avoidance mode.

New comment by mmatants in "How to Build Good Software"

mmatants — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 05:19:18 +0000

Apparently, Peter Naur (the N in BNF) wrote this up nicely back in 1985 in "Programming as Theory Building": http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

1890s New York Street Photos by Jacob Riis

mmatants — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 20:12:18 +0000

Article URL: http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=930

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031678

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mmatants in "Drawille: Pixel graphics in terminal with Unicode braille characters"

mmatants — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 17:16:37 +0000

This is a really neat looking project (and the GH readme references the original HN discussion). For folks who are generally into TTY UIs and dashboards, I also want to point out the Blessed terminal rendering lib and its ecosystem (which even includes a React bridge!):

  - https://github.com/chjj/blessed
  - https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib
  - https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

(edited for syntax and also to clarify I am not affiliated with the above, just a fan)

New comment by mmatants in "Small functions considered harmful"

mmatants — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:02:25 +0000

Rules like DRY or keeping line counts low are based on surface metrics and definitely lead people to over-fit the model based on incomplete information.

Underlying principle of maintainable code is "simply" that it is a concise and flexible expression of knowledge. The "simply" part is in quotation marks because, of course, it takes a good amount of self-awareness and meta-consideration to understand why some ways to express knowledge are better than others. There is also a limit to how "perfect" it can get, because it really depends on the audience too.

This is also why it's OK to let it slide sometimes and move on to more interesting topics - there are diminishing returns on splitting hairs, once broad strokes of good encapsulation and basic readability are applied.

DeepDream for voice – Artificially intelligent impressions

mmatants — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:37:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWLqlXCu3OM

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932354

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by mmatants in "Creating a Book Cover Using JavaScript and P5.js"

mmatants — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:21:18 +0000

This is an impressively thorough walkthrough.

New comment by mmatants in "Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise"

mmatants — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 15:29:30 +0000

I think one of the biggest saps of motivation in that situation is that even successes are meaningless. Because one instinctively doubts the whole thing then (even a broken clock is right twice a day, but it still doesn't make one feel great).

New comment by mmatants in "Visiting a site that uses Disqus when not logged in sends URL to Facebook"

mmatants — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 22:24:11 +0000

Re #2: - patio11 recently fired off a few tweets about doing away with comments on his blog: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/813895918692876289

Can't say I would disagree. A lot of folks these days just seem to append an HN/Reddit link to posts that get discussions on those sites. There's the blog as an expression of author's personality, and then there's the discussion space as an area with a life of its own.

New comment by mmatants in "Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults (2009) [pdf]"

mmatants — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 23:06:37 +0000

I became so much happier when I realized how much my education-minded parents and my environment gave me a leg up (even in the economically declining Eastern Europe of the time). Helped me chill out a lot and feel less pressure (and hence have much more actual productivity).

Starting advantage does not mean you are not working hard now. Just means that you should do good things with that advantage. Make it shine!