Hacker News: wilsonthewhale

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "A New Future for Icanhazip"

wilsonthewhale — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 15:14:28 +0000

> if you actually had any insight into Chinese culture

Thanks for the blind assumption. I'm Chinese myself.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "A New Future for Icanhazip"

wilsonthewhale — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 04:37:15 +0000

yup. toxik's comment disgusts me. So much for being against the government and the bad apples and not against the common citizen. Let's just cut off all the devs doing their jobs every day from accessing github, or let's just cut off everyone who was curious enough to bypass the GFW and look around on the outer internet, or let's just cut off someone simply trying to contact an international friend. The truth is: people like toxik could not care less about any person who happens to live inside the borders of "public enemy no. 1".

Sigh.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Google can't pass its own page speed test"

wilsonthewhale — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 16:59:49 +0000

I tried a couple pages from SourceHut, which famously prides itself on its fast performance.

The projects page (dynamic, changes with user activity on the site) https://sr.ht/projects: 100

A patch page https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/23162: 99

A source page https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/pages.sr.ht/tree/master/item/ser...: 100

SourceHut often "feels" a bit slower in that the browser does a full navigation whenever you click, but the absolute time is definitely low and I applaud them from building such a fast (and accessible!) experience.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer"

wilsonthewhale — Sun, 30 May 2021 18:14:21 +0000

There it is again. Care to name any of those timeless philosophies without resorting to the minutiae of cons cells?

Clojure has very tangible and definite downsides and tradfeoffs (to name some: weaker REPL, though not as weak as some Schemes. JVM required. Heavy interop reliance), but it has served well as the flagship functional lisp.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"

wilsonthewhale — Sun, 30 May 2021 03:00:04 +0000

as an addon, I'd love to see more organizations try to tackle this problem without just lifting the flawed GitHub model.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"

wilsonthewhale — Sun, 30 May 2021 02:25:45 +0000

As others have mentioned, this is a shame. I found the Phabricator review model much more flexible and easy to work with than GitHub and Github-clone workflows.

It's basically the traditional ultra-scalable mailing-list + patches workflow, but with very nice tooling and UI on top.

I'm going to miss it when I leave FB some day.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 27 May 2021 17:09:08 +0000

You can have a "Messenger-only" FB account, which would allow you to keep in touch with said friends.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Cheating at School Is Easier Than Ever–and It’s Rampant"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 13 May 2021 15:09:17 +0000

A great example of this is how Dijkstra used to conduct final examinations where students basically showed up and had a real-time, in-person discussion with him. It must have taken forever to get through everyone, and probably isn't feasible anymore with modern class sizes.

I think a good approximation is project work, and then requiring presentation of said work. Normal exams don't really cut it.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Honeywell gets hit with $13M fine for defense export violations"

wilsonthewhale — Fri, 07 May 2021 22:59:03 +0000

You have really high hopes for the standard American. The offhand racism against Chinese people (not the PRC) I see in online communities, even supposedly liberal ones like Reddit, is very telling.

As an American of Chinese descent, I honestly have very real concerns about my own safety in the next decade or two going forward. Japanese internment camps happened not too long ago, they can happen again. Or worse.

Even if it weren't government sanctioned, violence against us is still on the rise[1].

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56218684

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "History of Programming Languages"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 06 May 2021 02:50:33 +0000

Most of the papers were a joy to read. The C++ one just seemed like a massive changelog, though.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "OpenBSD 6.9"

wilsonthewhale — Sat, 01 May 2021 01:25:47 +0000

Like clockwork. I first started using the system in 6.4, so each release is a reminder to me of how quickly time has passed. Looking forward to a painless upgrade of my two servers and continued improvement of the project!

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Modern C++ Won't Save Us (2019)"

wilsonthewhale — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 02:25:28 +0000

Web logic is in Hack (offshoot of PHP), but all of the surrounding infrastructure has always been heavily skewed towards C++.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk"

wilsonthewhale — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 17:14:47 +0000

Probably because it's a log-structured file system, and those _really_ don't like running low on free space.

They work by appending to the log then compacting sometime later, not modifying things in-place. As such, you always need a reasonable supply of free blocks so this can occur.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:02:51 +0000

I don't understand the rationale of people tying the state of being a "real Lisp" with cons cells. As if that were the only contribution lisp has made, instead of homoiconicity, REPL-focus, etc.

The polymorphic sequence abstraction in Clojure is the definitively modern way to manipulate data structures in a lisp family language nowadays. It retains `first` and `rest` as abstracted `car` and `cdr`, but in return all collections (vectors, lists, sets, and hashtables) work transparently with it.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Patten Matching in Nim"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:09:13 +0000

Personally, I'm skeptical of the "great for beginners" point. I've helped a few beginners in Python who had subtle, yet program-breaking bugs just because their return statement was indented to the wrong level. It would have been easier to just use a brace-delimited language and run the autoformatter to reveal any discrepancies.

(Or we could be using a lisp, but that's another problem :) )

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

wilsonthewhale — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 18:45:47 +0000

I would argue yes. There has been an impressively little amount of churn in the last 10 years.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Should random() be banned?"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 22:13:35 +0000

No mention of arc4random(3)? Seems like a solved problem in BSD land.

The key takeaways I feel like are: 1. You want as simple of an interface as possible. arc4random(3) returns a single random 32 bit integer, or you can tell it to fill a buffer with them. 2. Just make it cryptographically secure. arc4random does it and it seems to be fine.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower"

wilsonthewhale — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 01:42:18 +0000

I'm not on the team that handles this, but I highly doubt that this is the case.

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Java 1.0 Turns 25"

wilsonthewhale — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 16:39:12 +0000

If you've been following the development progress, they've gotten the VM side largely ironed out and under testing. Nothing on the language side has been polished yet though.

As an honest estimate, I'd give about 2-4 more years. But it's definitely further along than I thought it would be.

See: https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/sov/

New comment by wilsonthewhale in "Google Blocking Web Privacy Proposals at W3C (2019)"

wilsonthewhale — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 02:06:39 +0000

I also find it funny how in every browser related thread there's inevitably someone selling Brave in the comments, usually near a Firefox comment.

I've never personally used Brave -- my only interaction with it was when one of my profs in university invited a guy for a talk who then basically proceeded to shill Brave for half the talk. It left an awful taste in my mouth and continues to do so.