Hacker News: ryangs

New comment by ryangs in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

ryangs — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 09:06:24 +0000

While laudable, this seems significantly harder to implement than banning advertising. Not that either are particularly feasible policies but this one seems harder.

New comment by ryangs in "Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)"

ryangs — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:50:00 +0000

Epistemic statuses are a great aid in sharing ideas without sounding overly confident.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bbtvDJtb6YwwWtJm7/...

New comment by ryangs in "Postgres as a Graph Database: (Ab)Using PgRouting"

ryangs — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 03:22:51 +0000

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/graph-types/ gives an interesting take on why we don't see a graph type as a primitive on more programming languages. Essentially boils down to graphs being very vague and depending on the topology of your graphs you are going to want different implementations for reasonable efficiency.

That said, there are graph databases.

New comment by ryangs in "My Struggle with Doom Scrolling"

ryangs — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 01:37:53 +0000

I like this. Testing the browser extension now and pretty happy with it (after tweaking so returning to a tab has a grace period). I was using StayFocused, which is okay, but too tempting to just disable it (and annoying if I need to access a blocked site for work purposes).

New comment by ryangs in "A visual demo of Ruby's lazy enumerator"

ryangs — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 23:47:41 +0000

Java Streams and Kotlin Sequences provide similar iterator capabilities. Iterators are great for this lazy performance but can sometimes be difficult to debug. Especially if you are nesting many iterators, then extracting the underlying collection can be complicated. But necessary in many workflows.

New comment by ryangs in "Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]"

ryangs — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 17:33:40 +0000

Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.

New comment by ryangs in "Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle"

ryangs — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:03:33 +0000

>Debug information tends to be large and linking it slows down linking quite considerably. If you’re like many developers and you generally use println for debugging and rarely or never use an actual debugger, then this is wasted time.

Interesting. Is this true? In my work (java/kotlin, primarily in app code on a server, occasional postgres or frontend js/react stuff), I'm almost always reaching for a debugger as an enormously more powerful tool than println debugging. My tests are essentially the println, and if they fail for any interesting reason I'll want the debugger.

New comment by ryangs in "Notepad++ is 21 years old"

ryangs — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 20:00:25 +0000

What is your pattern for navigating to a function definition (as an example of a basic IDE operation that doesn't seem supported)? Grep?

New comment by ryangs in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

ryangs — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:17:52 +0000

What are some of the challenges involved with international hiring in a remote environment? I work at a fully remote startup with ~200 employees. We hire from a couple dozen countries but I know there are fairly significant barriers whenever we add a new one. What are some of those challenges? Are they getting more streamlined?

New comment by ryangs in "Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough"

ryangs — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:07:13 +0000

I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.

New comment by ryangs in "Typing lists and tuples in Elixir"

ryangs — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:31:39 +0000

But the nonempty list never has an element, so we don't need to worry about the type mutation of removing an element from it. Filter just returns a nonempty list.

New comment by ryangs in "Types as Interfaces"

ryangs — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:55:25 +0000

The problem is that user inferring doesn't scale. For small projects this is reasonable but for enterprise software engineering it is easy for a constraint that isn't enforced by the type system to be missed by an engineer leading to a bug. Whereas typed constraints naturally propagate throughout the system.

New comment by ryangs in "A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan (2022)"

ryangs — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 21:19:20 +0000

Indeed, still in use. Also presumably the Aho of the Aho-Corasick string matching algorithm.

New comment by ryangs in "Did Turing prove the undecidability of the halting problem?"

ryangs — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 14:40:03 +0000

Right - it is saying that there is no algorithm to do this in general. Any specific instance may have a solution.

New comment by ryangs in "Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic"

ryangs — Wed, 15 May 2024 18:26:24 +0000

Interesting read. Does not seem to be working with the same set of facts as the ACX post[1], especially around FDA approval.

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-biow....

New comment by ryangs in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022)"

ryangs — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:50:23 +0000

Big fan of todoist. I've been using it for less than a month, but have already switched to the yearly subscription. I use Obsidian for my notes, but for remembering to do something, I now use Todoist. Any passing thought that I want to deliberately go back to (or even patterns of thinking, like every 6 months, reflect on this concept) can be put into Todoist and I know that I'll see it again.

I contemplated trying to do all of this in Obsidian but the conventional advice seems that while you can, it isn't worth it. Todoist offering a simple mobile interface where I can quickly add a task is great. I wish reminders worked a little better (I'd been using alarms on my phone for reminders I want at a specific time, and Todoist reminders aren't nearly as attention grabbing).

New comment by ryangs in "Watching Ads on Amazon Prime Video Is a Deal Breaker for Some"

ryangs — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 17:16:02 +0000

I've noticed some streaming platforms have ads for other shows/movies they've made. I don't love these but can tolerate them because:

1. They are only at the start of a show, so I'm not interrupted. 2. They offer a skip button. 3. They are ads for somewhat-relevant content and I don't tend to explore the space of other things to watch very much.

That said, it's a knife-edge for me. If they got even a smidgeon worse I probably wouldn't watch anything on those platforms.

New comment by ryangs in "Why I Like Obsidian"

ryangs — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 14:23:18 +0000

Linking is an exceptionally good idea. It is very transformative to how I think about organizing information and doing it with Obsidian the past few months has felt great. Besides future proofing, I love the speed of processing a simple text format like markdown (plus local first) allows. Everything opens instantly, which feels very different from things like Google docs or Microsoft Word. About the only note tool it doesn't replace for me is spreadsheets that use math. There are plugins but it doesn't feel quite as clean as Google sheets for this purpose.

New comment by ryangs in "Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees"

ryangs — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 19:25:00 +0000

Being 'fair' helps company relationships with current and future employees.

New comment by ryangs in "Why can't you multiply vectors? [video]"

ryangs — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:17:30 +0000

Highly recommend Freya's various deep dives into various game development contents. She also has twitch vods for developing those videos which are also fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/@Acegikmo