Hacker News: vesak

New comment by vesak in "Moving from Go to PHP Again"

vesak — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 04:58:31 +0000

Congratulations for being the last straw. I'm getting out of this site for good.

New comment by vesak in "Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers"

vesak — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 14:31:52 +0000

Nice alternative to Spotify is Apple Music. They recently opened up their API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi) which has been used to create a nice web interface by https://musi.sh/

Their suggestions AI is quite a bit behind Spotify's unfortunately. Dunno if that's by a lack of design or because of Apple's privacy stance -- probably the former.

New comment by vesak in "Moving from Go to PHP Again"

vesak — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 11:50:03 +0000

>A strict type > would be very weird because besides returning TRUE and FALSE it'd need to throw a TypeError, I guess?

Yes, which would make it behave exactly like probably every language with strong runtime typechecks. Very weird indeed. It's obviously much more preferable that the code sometimes does the wrong thing without warning.

And of course with static typing, it would be extremely weird since the code wouldn't even pass the compiler!

New comment by vesak in "Moving from Go to PHP Again"

vesak — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 07:38:00 +0000

What's the equivalent of === for < and > in PHP?

New comment by vesak in "Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play"

vesak — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 17:15:37 +0000

Yet another reason not to use Spotify. Their IPO was a huge red flag, of course.

New comment by vesak in "The Apple iPhone XR Review"

vesak — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 06:26:39 +0000

At this point, the 7 won't probably get updates nearly as long as the XR will.

New comment by vesak in "Matrix at FOSDEM 2019"

vesak — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 10:16:27 +0000

Note that Dendrite is doing a bit more fancy architecture. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/blob/master/DESIGN.md -- there's a bunch of readers and writers, with Kafka in-between to mediate flow of messages.

Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen, but I'm a bit skeptic towards complicating things from the get-go.

New comment by vesak in "Did Finland’s basic income experiment work? [video]"

vesak — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 16:12:56 +0000

>who needs $10,000/month to live

Those who have a monthly mortgage payment of $9000. Substract $500 (or more if the government doesn't help you with their costs) for each child in your household.

New comment by vesak in "Systemd as tragedy"

vesak — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 10:21:42 +0000

You've done great work as a whole, as you probably know. Try not let the lowlifes get to you.

New comment by vesak in "Ask HN: What kind of information do you look for before learning/using new tech?"

vesak — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 17:32:04 +0000

Yes! And I’d like to add that a lack of such criticism just feels wrong. Like I’m researching into a cult instead of a tool.

New comment by vesak in "When FP? And When OOP? (2013)"

vesak — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 12:03:39 +0000

Haha, ok. I'm even lower on that scale: not even a hobbyist game programmer.

I thought they actually just use structs and whatever data structure works.

New comment by vesak in "When FP? And When OOP? (2013)"

vesak — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 06:41:16 +0000

Game programmers use entity systems, not OO... or do they?

New comment by vesak in "Show HN: Musish – Web client for Apple Music"

vesak — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 18:22:35 +0000

Here’s a few guesses:

1. It’s not 100x (or even 2x) faster or significantly more stable than Apple Music

2. It’s always easier to make a nice app when starting from scratch versus trying to fix existing older software to be nice

3. Apple did a good job with their APIs

New comment by vesak in "My PHP Development Setup"

vesak — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 11:21:13 +0000

Why take it personally? We complain about the language and to some extent the original creators of the language -- not its users. Complaining (at its best) makes things happen.

I worked with PHP in '98 (ported a perl thing into this cool new web language) and then much later in 2014-2017. I found much to complain on the second time :) PHP7 is a good update, nevertheless.

New comment by vesak in "Guix: An advanced operating system"

vesak — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 12:18:25 +0000

Of course they can. Check out Ansible. It's quite comparable to these systems, even if less pure and lacking some of the features.

New comment by vesak in "If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?"

vesak — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 14:58:12 +0000

I didn't find SICP good or bad, but utterly boring. In fact, so boring that I couldn't bring myself to finish even half of it in 3 separate tries.

Perhaps I should've read it as my first programming book, but that time's long past.

Anyone else had this problem? I'd gladly take tips on how to get over it, since I do honor classics and don't think I'm above them.

New comment by vesak in "How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project"

vesak — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 06:19:46 +0000

Well, if a person is producing below a living wage, then it's difficult to pay that person a living wage.

New comment by vesak in "So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux"

vesak — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 16:37:32 +0000

Man, this is so weird.

I used Linux from 1996ish to 2017 and then just moved almost everything to Apple. I don’t remember the exact reason, but probably it had something to do with Wayland taking forever to stabilize, and the community starting to smell bad. And I’m happy, probably happier than before. Sure, Apple’s stuff isn’t perfect, but it’s way closer to it than any Linux combination I ever tried. The only thing I miss is i3, but turns out, not that much.

I hope my move didn’t jinx the whole platform...

New comment by vesak in "Apple tells suppliers to produce 10% fewer new iPhones"

vesak — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 07:45:54 +0000

Nah, the headphone jack can move to the history books already. They oughta replace it with something standard, though, like USB-C. Bluetooth isn't an acceptable total replacement as long as batteries add bulk and need to be recharged. When that's fixed, Bluetooth everywhere will be fine also.

New comment by vesak in "Toyota Lifts the Veil on Its Guardian Driver-Assist System"

vesak — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 08:23:32 +0000

Well, as many futurologists say... a self-driving car (or drive-assisting) doesn't have to be perfect. It merely needs to be better than a human driver. Data seems to suggest that that hurdle isn't that high.

Then again, I do share your concern about hackability. Just a single grand catastrophe would turn the scales over for a long time. And nothing suggests that car software is of high quality currently.

>Do you drive while text messaging

Amazingly many people do, even after being told that it's about as dangerous as driving drunk.