Hacker News: slunk

New comment by slunk in "Time to retire the CSV?"

slunk — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 16:11:02 +0000

> That's the main reason why CSV absolutely sucks too [...]

Is it? I think you're absolutely right that naive points of view like the one you're responding to will lead to avoidable bugs, but I'm not so sure the problem is CSV so much as people who assume CSV is simple enough to parse or generate without using a library.

New comment by slunk in "Machine learning won't solve natural language understanding"

slunk — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 11:38:08 +0000

> It has nothing to do with what the model is being used for.

I may be misunderstanding this passage of the article, but I thought the author was claiming that machine learning (specifically training) was equivalent to compression, while language understanding is equivalent to decompression. Therefore, they can't be the same thing. Why does language understand have to be analogous to training an ML model rather than using an ML model for inference?

New comment by slunk in "Machine learning won't solve natural language understanding"

slunk — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 11:30:23 +0000

I was hoping there would be discussion of this point higher up in the thread, because I had essentially the same reaction as you while reading this passage. I'm no expert of machine learning, NLP, or linguistics, but this struck me as a pretty obvious flaw in the author's argument.

New comment by slunk in "A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)"

slunk — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 11:12:32 +0000

I was also struggling to convey this point. I think you've hit the nail on the head.

New comment by slunk in "A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)"

slunk — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 10:53:24 +0000

You've gotten a couple responses making arguments that the atoms required for a language like lisp are fundamentally simpler than eval in Perl and that makes the difference... Fwiw, I don't find these arguments very compelling. It's not so much that they're entirely false, but the "most beautiful program ever written [sic]" that we're talking about here is "beautiful" precisely because it elides all these "simple" details. I do get the vague sense that it is essentially a more verbose `eval $1`.

New comment by slunk in "Show HN: Static.wiki – read-only Wikipedia using a 43GB SQLite file"

slunk — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 22:54:44 +0000

It's one thing if you have a source of revenue so justify your S3 costs. My interpretation of the parent commentator's concern is that this person has opened up a multi gigabyte S3 file publicly and sent lots of traffic its way (via hacker news) for what appears to be a passion project.

New comment by slunk in "Compiling Rust is NP-hard"

slunk — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 20:47:07 +0000

I don't think using an IDE to catch lots of stupid simple mistakes is bad. It's how I prefer to work.

> It looks really strange to me to observe other developers constantly compiling and running their code just to see if it works. It kinda looks as if they did not exactly understand what they are doing because if they did, they would be confident the implementation works.

Explain to me how this statement doesn't apply to your use of an IDE, but the other engineers you've observed don't understand what they're doing.

New comment by slunk in "Compiling Rust is NP-hard"

slunk — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:13:49 +0000

> So in a sense I am not strictly practicing my approach

Developing in an IDE that compiles almost continuously is about as far from the development philosophy you're advocating for here as one could get :P

New comment by slunk in "Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots"

slunk — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 20:58:37 +0000

Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

New comment by slunk in "Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots"

slunk — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 20:39:42 +0000

One can't help but wonder what kind of a person would tweet their "apology" for unintentionally defacing the entirety of Scots Wikipedia in more broken Scots. Seems... Insensitive, no?

New comment by slunk in "Nestur: NES Emulator in Rust"

slunk — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 22:15:29 +0000

Thanks for clarifying that for me!

New comment by slunk in "Nestur: NES Emulator in Rust"

slunk — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 22:08:45 +0000

Yup, fair enough.

New comment by slunk in "Nestur: NES Emulator in Rust"

slunk — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 22:02:00 +0000

Without knowing enough about Rust to speak authoritatively... u8 can represent larger integers than i8 (no sign bit). Surely it's not completely safe.

New comment by slunk in "Ask HN: What are your favorite YouTube channels to learn stuff?"

slunk — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 22:47:42 +0000

Lots of good suggestions in here. One I haven't seen mentioned yet is NileRed for those interested in chemistry (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFhXFikryT4aFcLkLw2LBLA).

New comment by slunk in "Responsive Pixel Art"

slunk — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 02:41:06 +0000

Personally, I'm impressed by how the image dimensions were mapped to the image, not the fact that it can be done at all. There are plenty of boring and simple ways to map dimensions to an image. This was clever and well-implemented, imo. :)

New comment by slunk in "My Amazon Burnout Experience"

slunk — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 19:43:20 +0000

I stopped reading a few paragraphs in when all the author had managed to convey was how great they are. I also find it strange that someone so competent who wants to remain anonymous would reveal so much information about their situation in the company. What little I read seems like it would be enough to pinpoint them within the organization.

New comment by slunk in "Why Is Mayonnaise Loved and Hated So Deeply?"

slunk — Sun, 03 May 2015 20:14:04 +0000

"Hellman's doesn't resemble the real stuff"

That's a little exaggerated, don't you think? I'm no mayonnaise expert, but those lists of ingredients look pretty similar to me.

New comment by slunk in "Reduction in Garbage Collection Pause Time in Ruby 2.2"

slunk — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 18:44:50 +0000

Are you suggesting that ruby's design is more broken than PHP's?

New comment by slunk in "Show HN: Linkwok – Picking up where search engines left off"

slunk — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 17:06:59 +0000

Although I agree with others that the video leaves a bit to be desired, I thought I understood the point well enough and was looking forward to trying it out... Then I attempted to do just that and was instantly greeted with "INTERNAL ERROR

AN INTERNAL ERROR WAS ENCOUNTERED." :/

New comment by slunk in "Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments"

slunk — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 04:44:12 +0000

Even if this system worked flawlessly as intended, doesn't it disincentivize getting to 1000+ karma? Unless I'm misunderstanding, your most active users don't seem to get any benefit (they see all the comments, good and bad, like everyone did before). Maybe if there was also an "unendorse" option... but then you've just implemented meta-(up|down)voting.