Hacker News: pqh

New comment by pqh in "The Octopus: Stable Genius"

pqh — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:04:25 +0000

http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/Xenopsychology.htm

This is an interesting essay on the minds of our ocean-dwelling aliens.

New comment by pqh in "Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent"

pqh — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 14:01:41 +0000

Plus I'd argue that more vacation time would mean each employee has a more even spread of the workload. You depend less on individuals, and more on the team.

New comment by pqh in "A first naïve look at Truffle Ruby"

pqh — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 21:41:15 +0000

The stack traces suck sometimes with the metaprogramming. I have never chased down exactly what causes it, but sometimes you'll have lots of library code calls mentioned, and nothing from the application.

New comment by pqh in "Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?"

pqh — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 15:17:01 +0000

I think it may be the degree in those cases.

New comment by pqh in "What's Hiding Inside Egypt's Great Pyramid? Tiny Robots May Find Out"

pqh — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 23:05:40 +0000

Yet also the thrill of the unexplored goes away when one doesn't bother to explore.

New comment by pqh in "People leave managers, not companies"

pqh — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:56:43 +0000

I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.

New comment by pqh in "How I review code"

pqh — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:39:40 +0000

And if people are writing 150 character plus lines, those are really, no joke, a lot harder to read. If the line is going to break anyway, why not just break it yourself at a spot that makes sense?

New comment by pqh in "How I review code"

pqh — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:33:20 +0000

Text of the tweet so people don't have to click:

A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.

New comment by pqh in "Commission fines Qualcomm €997 million for abuse of dominant market position"

pqh — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:30:07 +0000

If I wanted to understand the differences in how the EU manages big companies versus the US, with points from all sides, where would I start reading?

New comment by pqh in "How to tame the tech titans"

pqh — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 14:22:50 +0000

I think you're neglecting the effect corporate backing can have on encouraging research from people who are less startup-minded and more I-like-knowing-I'll-have-food-on-the-table-minded.

New comment by pqh in "How to tame the tech titans"

pqh — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:59:52 +0000

I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over.

But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic.

Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.

New comment by pqh in "Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from"

pqh — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 23:49:08 +0000

Though you're more likely to shape your own failure. Let's be real.

That's not to say don't try, but be aware of the full picture.

New comment by pqh in "Intel Has a Big Problem"

pqh — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 21:54:57 +0000

How do people find the addresses to even start probing for stuff like this?

New comment by pqh in "JS things I didn’t know existed"

pqh — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 14:36:23 +0000

Use case for labelled breaks: collision detection in video game, where anything colliding with anything else ends the game, resets a counter, spawns Godzilla, who knows. With labels, you can break out of the top loop very efficiently.

New comment by pqh in "Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status"

pqh — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 13:57:28 +0000

They really could have done a tiered release. Keep the knowledge of the vulnerability as close as possible for the ~6 months they had it, then release it to a greater (but still restricted) set of people for another ~6 months.

the worst case would have been someone in the latter set leaking the info, which is just what we have now. So it could have been potentially better. There was really no reason to drop a bomb like this.

New comment by pqh in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

pqh — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 13:55:05 +0000

On top of that, the video games I play and enjoy are decidedly unreal and often intentionally simple or stylized.

New comment by pqh in "Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive"

pqh — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 17:25:42 +0000

I'd live in a big city if more cities and building architects cared about green spaces and noise. I'm glad people are doing research here.

New comment by pqh in "SPAs are harder and always will be (2013)"

pqh — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 19:00:09 +0000

Indeed, code reuse, testing, maintainability, etc are harder with the latter pattern. And with the latter you also end up using at least 3 languages in the same files. It's just really awful.

Yes, browser-rendering SPA frameworks are heavyweight, but they give an undeniably-better development experience. And that shows in the quality of the interfaces created through them, assuming your interface requirements are complex enough to justify it. I mean, I'm happy with Hacker News' interface and it's simple, but if I'm building the next Google Calendar, I am not using ajax and server-rendered templates.

New comment by pqh in "Mozilla Files Suit Against FCC to Protect Net Neutrality"

pqh — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 23:31:41 +0000

My rep sent a canned, formal-language-adorned "get stuffed" in response.

New comment by pqh in "To Save Drowning People, Ask “What Would Light Do?”"

pqh — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 19:20:30 +0000

http://www.icr.org/article/plants-math-ration-food-use/

This is a really cool example of plants using math too.