Hacker News Reader

Lozzeron Lisp in Small Pieces of Clojure, part 3

I'd add Let over Lambda (LOL) to that list.

Lozzeron A manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene

If you belive Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radius then the atomic radius of Helium has never been measured, but it is predicted to be smaller than Hydrogen.

Lozzeron Falling Chinese Space Station to Crash This Weekend

I think you'd enjoy the book "The Newtonian Casino".

Lozzeron Implement table partitioning

Metadata operations on partitions can be very fast. One simple example is date based housekeeping. Deleting a month of data will be quite intensive on most databases, whereby dropping a partition from the table is effectively instant.

Partion switching is also fast. Say you have a summary table that is rolled up by month, but you want to recalculate the summaries every so often. You can build a month into a new table and then switch the new table for a partition in the summary table.

Lozzeron Fall cleaning: Optimizing V8 memory consumption

http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

Lozzeron AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

Firstly there are vastly more positions in Go. Secondly, it's very hard to evaluate a Go position, especially at the start of the game when there are few stones on the board. In chess you can get a long way using a simple evaluation (K=99, Q=9, R=5, B=3, N=3, P=1).

Lozzeron Announcing SQL Server on Linux

The last one might be heped by trace flag 4199. You can apply it to individual queries with option (querytraceon 4199):

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/psssql/2010/09/01/slow-quer...

Lozzeron Socat: “the hard coded 1024 bit DH p parameter was not prime”

I expect you have enough hardware to factor widely deployed primes. Compound numbers might be a different story.

Lozzeron John Nash Has Died

Didn't wear a seatbelt and headbutted the person in front, snapping their neck. Sucks to be them, I guess. But at least you stuck it to the man.

Lozzeron Anti-Patterns Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of

design

Lozzeron Show HN: Untrusted, a JavaScript adventure game you play by modifying its source

I thought https://gist.github.com/anonymous/cfe03f2ddb0052b38081 was kind of neat, as you still have to solve the puzzle a bit after using it.

Lozzeron Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality

Admittedly in the UK, but the ISP I use don't have a problem with people running servers: http://www.aa.net.uk/

Lozzeron How our users exploited concurrency and how we fixed it

For a lot of RDBMS, transaction semantics can be later with different transaction isolation levels. There levels like repeatable read which work in this way, but the default level is usually weaker.

Lozzeron UK still has 13,000 black-and-white TVs

If you're watching live (or nearly live) broadcast on iPlayer, you still legally require a license: http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/...

Lozzeron Linux brings over €10 million savings for Munich

    CTRL + V
    CTRL
    T

Lozzeron Why you should not be displaying relative dates.

If you're parsing from a real time feed, then that's fair enough. But if not $now isn't appropriate.

Lozzeron Tesco Discount Barcodes, Cracked

Funnily enough if you buy Tesco's electrical goods online and pick up at store you don't get a paper receipt. The security guard (through lack of training) wasn't keen on letting me out without one.

Lozzeron Building a Bejeweled Bot

I had a go at something similar for the Facebook version a couple of years ago. My main goal was to stop playing the game, but it was also an excuse to try Clojure. At the time it absolutely thrashed my best scores, though I'm sure it won't work with the updates the developers have made since then.

I think it was the first thing I wrote that drove home the power of having a REPL for exploratory programming:

https://gist.github.com/490689

Lozzeron Lets Talk About Something Diabolical: A PyPy Intro (David Beazley PyCon keynote)

He referenced a previous talk about the GIL:

http://blip.tv/rupy-strongly-dynamic-conference/david-beazly...

Lozzeron Linus Torvalds: Programs exist for their users

More likely HURD

Lozzeron "I've isolated the bug to a database query"

We have a legacy database we support that creates a new dynamic stored procedure (with the same body) every time it performs a particular operation. How you can have enough knowledge to do this, but not to use a single procedure is beyond me.

Lozzeron Public market newcomers getting crushed in sell-off

Have the counter-parties insuring Greek debt paid up?

Lozzeron Why I left Google. What happened to my book. What I work on at Facebook.

I don't think governments are going to be bailing out advertisers just yet.

Lozzeron War on Urchin

No, because you would reasonably requests with different parameters to return different pages.

Lozzeron For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

Sounds like your network is suffering from http://www.bufferbloat.net/ .If your OS supports traffic shaping, you can probably fix this by limiting the upload speed there to a fraction under your actual bandwidth. E.g in Linux by using the tc command.

Lozzeron My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs

It's probably irrelevant, but maybe http://www.method-combination.net/blog/archives/2011/03/11/s... will help

Lozzeron C to Go: Could Go replace C?

From the first line of the man page for yes:

yes - output a string repeatedly until killed

Lozzeron It is good to have friends

I've used an offset mortgage to keep a large cash reserve, but to pay off real estate if I'm not using it.

That's for personal stuff, not sure if there are corporate options.

Lozzeron Why Can't Developers Estimate Time?

I estimate by considering an optimistic, pessimistic and normal value for each task. I then have a spreadsheet that does a modicum of statistical analysis to give you times against probability that the task will be finished.

Some of the benefits I find are:

1. Getting into the pessimistic mindset helps produce better estimates

2. Tasks with a large spread are things you aren't really clear about, and are an obvious target to be attempted first

3. Giving a range of values to the person asking for the estimate seems to help them remember it is an estimate.