Hacker News: thesmallestcat

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Ask HN: Does increasing our life expectancy save or cost money?"

thesmallestcat — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 19:58:47 +0000

> the controversy arising

Could you be more specific? Are you talking about a Hacker News thread or something else?

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge"

thesmallestcat — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 04:47:48 +0000

You shouldn't have replied. You and the other guy are both out of your gourds, and you don't understand how crazy you look.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Deodorants, perfumes, soaps pollute air at levels as high as cars"

thesmallestcat — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 02:12:19 +0000

I sort of doubt that. In practice, it seems to incentivize influencing policy to drive up healthcare costs, with little regard for patient outcomes.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Learning to program is getting harder"

thesmallestcat — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 02:10:41 +0000

Before the tire fire that is rvm became "standard", it was normal to just download the version you needed and build it from source. There's nothing forcing us to use crappy, obscure tools like rvm and rbenv. And I agree with you on all points.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Deodorants, perfumes, soaps pollute air at levels as high as cars"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 21:59:53 +0000

Forget public healthcare, I'd gladly live in Canada for this protection!

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 17:36:00 +0000

Great advice! I'd venture that managing large files is an unsolved problem. It's a hack in most version control systems, and uploading/downloading files from a host, even S3, is a slow, serial process. Same for checksumming. Network speeds have more than caught up, and large files are a frequent process bottleneck. Something that makes it easy to manage and consume large files could be a big deal. It probably would require a new application protocol, maybe even a new filesystem similar to XFS.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 17:30:23 +0000

Static website generators.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 09:48:09 +0000

> Traditionally, there are two ways to study a page like this:

> 1. Type out every line of code

> 2. Copy+paste the code from their website, maybe play around and make small changes

Um... wut? How about:

3. Read the code. Think.

If you're reading programming books as practice, and think you're supposed to copy the code examples to learn, you're doing it wrong. If you need eval() to figure out what's going on, you need to spend more time practicing the basics, then step up to the book.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Murders in US very concentrated (2017)"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 09:30:29 +0000

uMatrix is your friend.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 04:27:05 +0000

I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 03:57:30 +0000

It's destructive, and Amazon can get away with being a crap book store now. I've ordered many thousands of dollars worth of computing books from them over the years. In the past six months, and especially the past couple months, "new" books come with massive creases, scuffs, and dents. Or a bad print with hard-to-read text. A copy you'd never buy in person, or B&N would knock something off the price because of the damage. When you paid $80+ for the book, it sucks.

I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN.

Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.

Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Promises are not neutral enough"

thesmallestcat — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 19:02:22 +0000

This is a known footgun of promises. But if you are using async/await, uncaught error in the promise chain is the same as uncaught error inline.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Fnl: zero-overhead Lisp syntax for Lua"

thesmallestcat — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 19:00:28 +0000

As a fallback. I like LISPs as much as the next guy/gal, but editing the AST by default is too low-level. The importance of paredit is a language smell in my opinion, not something to aspire to.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy"

thesmallestcat — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:29:44 +0000

This is like saying running for exercise is a waste of time because you could be driving instead. It's not about knowing a particular sort algorithm. It's about the discipline of solving performance problems in the small. Knowing how quicksort works isn't that helpful. Being accustomed to the thought processes that led to the development of quicksort is important in any non-trivial programming activity. I'm not writing Google-scale services, but I regularly encounter algorithm design problems on the job, and they're never the exact algorithm you studied for some white board exam. I think the author is approaching algorithm study with the wrong attitude.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "“Implement WebP image support” – Reported 8 years ago"

thesmallestcat — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 12:36:41 +0000

They destroyed the XPI/XUL platform and thousands of hours of work that went into those extensions. Now Firefox is a much worse version of Chrome, no reason to use it except for dubious ideology preferring Mozilla. Sacrificing the one network effect that kept Firefox relevant was a brilliant move.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Bringing AMP to Gmail"

thesmallestcat — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 15:14:12 +0000

Smoke signals here, can't trust the postman either.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Guide to Take-home Coding Challenges"

thesmallestcat — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 01:39:49 +0000

There's a good chance somebody on the other end's going to run your program without really vetting it. Especially if you include a convenient "test runner." Not a bad attack vector, just get your alias past the first screen and you might get arbitrary execution inside their firewall on a host with access keys and the like.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Ask HN: What are the books you wish your colleagues had read?"

thesmallestcat — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 07:08:31 +0000

Any, really.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Self-Control in Chimpanzees Relates to General Intelligence"

thesmallestcat — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 02:27:23 +0000

That's a sad way to think about life. Back of the envelope math says I can be pretty happy with way less than that, different standards and all I suppose.

New comment by thesmallestcat in "Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?"

thesmallestcat — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 16:41:57 +0000

I've had similar experience finding on-site work in a healthy market as I have as a remote worker. I don't think parent's advice is sound, claiming that software eng. is a dead-end path for most, with a five year fuse. Clearly if you're not excellent or willing to move to a city with jobs in your industry, you're going to be in for a rough time. Not specific to software eng.