Hacker News Reader

bobbyi_settvon One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

No, he renamed it to "package: An Amazing Project.json"

bobbyi_settvon Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

That's not what I got from the two paragraphs it's possible to read. It suggest Uber "is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway" which sounds like it is doable, just not by them

bobbyi_settvon What makes a good REPL? (2017)

I used ipython for many years, but eventually moved on to jupyter. For me, it's even better. It still supports ? and ?? and the case of re-using your normal imports and variables is handled well by having a saved notebook.

bobbyi_settvon I lost €4k in a Facebook scam

> avoid installing native applications when you can help it

Why couldn't a web site have stolen his credentials in the same way?

bobbyi_settvon C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)

> There are performance critical paths where passing a size_t is just unnecessary

You would still be able to declare your function as taking a pointer (instead of an array, which in this world would be a far pointer) if you need to

He's saying to deprecate char[] as a parameter type, not char

bobbyi_settv on Never run ‘python’ in your downloads folder

Does anyone know of a write-up that describes Tensorflow's import magic? I'd be curious to read about what they're doing and why.

bobbyi_settv on Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

I'm not sure about the adsense part, but they definitely can for the part where gmail is flagging their newsletter as phishing. Gmail has an option where any user can report a received email as phishing.

bobbyi_settv on The harmful impact of Audible-exclusive audiobooks

I'm pretty sure Netflix didn't release any of those. If DVDs exist, they are published by the studio who made the show. For example, I just looked at HoC season 1, and it is released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
https://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Season-Kevin-Spacey/dp/B0...

bobbyi_settv on Live BTC transactions in Twitter hack

What is the point of someone sending btc back to himself?

bobbyi_settv on Microsoft Outlook is crashing worldwide with 0xc0000005 errors

I think what you're describing with GitHub is a modern version of the old maxim "No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM"

bobbyi_settv on Go generics may use square brackets [] not parenthesis ()

I also like this comment from the almost-empty /r/ProgrammerHumor/ submission linking to that thread:
Gives new meaning to the phrase "Native apps"

bobbyi_settv on Cheddar empire: Rise of a cheese superpower

It's typically made from seeds or nuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_cheese
So it's taste-and-texture replication. I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese, as much as to be something that can be reasonably substituted for dairy cheese in the typical cases where it is used. It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc.

bobbyi_settv on How to implement search-by-color when all you have is a good coffee

Using the distance of the colors in a Euclidian space makes sense, but RGB isn't the best space to use.
You probably want something like CIELAB which is (quoting from Wikipedia) "designed so that the same amount of numerical change... corresponds to roughly the same amount of visually perceived change."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space

bobbyi_settv on Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

If you're in AWS, you can use their ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) service instead of setting up your own haproxy. I worked on a team that used it for years without any issues orchestrating zero-downtime deployments. It was extremely easy and didn't require any real configuration.

bobbyi_settv on Kafka Removing Zookeeper Dependency

But to know whether you want that, you need to understand the application. Elasticsearch, for example, recommends using at most 50% of physical memory for heap:
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...
You also often want to stay below 32 gb to get compressed OOPs

bobbyi_settv on Drastic makeover looms for S&P 500

Bonds when interest rates are near zero?

bobbyi_settv on Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?

Just because you believe the government won't let the airlines go away doesn't ensure that the bonds are safe. Sometimes keeping a company in business involves a restructuring such that those bonds won't pay out as you're expecting.

bobbyi_settv on Popcorn Linux

In mainstream IT, you'd usually set up a Hadoop or Spark cluster on the machines and then write your code to run against one of those. What's the advantage of this approach over those?

bobbyi_settv on ‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems

The "just works" nature is why Zoom is popular. No one wants to have every meeting start with "Is Larry here? Oh, I think he's trying to dial in. I'm going to cancel this meeting and send out a new ID so he can dial in. Everyone watch for that so you can reconnect"

bobbyi_settv on Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)

It's not just about whether it exists but also the version.
For example, on my (Mac) laptop, /bin/bash is bash 3.2.57 (released in 2007), while "/usr/bin/env bash" gets the version installed by homebrew which is 4.4.19 (released in 2016).

bobbyi_settv on Dow Falls 2997 points worst drop since 1987 crash

If you're going to keep putting money in, you might want to diversify rather than throwing it all at one index

bobbyi_settv on MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small

> Why are we passing around binary data re-encoded to only use 6 bits per transmitted byte?
We're not. We're gzipping the json when we transmit it.

bobbyi_settv on The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods

> More reasons to not install apps unless necessary.
The reason is that my data might be anonymized and used to help make academic studies more accurate? I'm not losing sleep over that

bobbyi_settv on Things about the new Firefox browser for Android

Also, everyone on a Kindle Fire. My understanding is that since Firefox isn't in Amazon's app store, users need to download and then sideload it which means not getting auto updates.
I've been considering getting one and that's one of the things that's held me back (I use Firefox as my browser on my current tablet I'd be replacing)

bobbyi_settv on Debt is coming to the tech industry

A lot of that is sour grapes. The majority of people who loudly explain that they wouldn't want a large VC round are people who aren't in a position to raise a large VC round.

bobbyi_settv on Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate

I use Teams every day (mainly at my desktop, but sometimes via the Android app if I'm outside) because I work from home and I have found it to work perfectly fine. I text chat with teammates or others at the company and have regular meetings (voice/ screensharing) with no issues.
Whenever Teams comes up on HN, there are people complaining about how much infinitely better some cooler product is. I don't doubt that you see a huge difference, but I feel like I'm listening to a wine expert explain how some $1000 bottle of wine is better than a $20 bottle, when to me they taste the same.

bobbyi_settv on Writing Safe Shell Scripts (2019)

The point of mktemp is to use the right location on the current system, which may not be /tmp. If you're going to enforce that tmpdir must be /tmp, you might as well not bother with mktemp and just directly create a file or directory in /tmp.

bobbyi_settv on Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

This is a press release in their "Newsroom" section. They don't say "you" because they are describing what users can do, not what reporters covering this can do

bobbyi_settv on 13.3" full color ePaper display

I think the Kindle Fire makes you jump through hoops to get apps via the Google Play store though and as I understand it, you need to do that in order to get Marvel Unlimited on there, which is something many people really want to have on their comics-reading device.