HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bvinc

1,184 karma · joined June 1, 2016

submissionscomments
bvinc··on Rechargeable vs. Alkaline Batteries
I use the bins right by the entrance of Lowe's and Home Depot stores. They also have bins for compact florescent bulbs.
bvinc··on “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]
I just tried to build libra on stable rust. At least the first thing that failed is that it's depending on futures 0.3. So it's almost certainly using async/await.
bvinc··on Ask HN: How to deal with constantly getting cut off in work discussions?
I spent some time in India. One social aspect that I noticed right away is that lines aren't really a thing. If someone is ordering food at a cart, and you stand behind them, other people will assume you don't want to order and they'll just go around you.

I imagine that living in a place with such high population density causes behavior that seems rude and pushy to us in America.

bvinc··on Show HN: LessPhone – A minimal Android launcher to reduce phone use
I like this idea. I went looking for an Android launcher for this purpose. I settled on "niagra". It doesn't really limit anything, but it allows me to hide the app menu visually. I just have 7 apps on my main screen. And there's no "recommended" or "recently used" apps, and there's no google search bar and no browser on my main screen. I like it. I've simply forgotten about a lot of apps over time. Out of sight out of mind.

Another interesting thing that I do: I use uBlock Origin to gimp websites and hide recommendations to limit my browsing, without limiting my use of the actual website.

I want all my actions to be purposeful, no aimless browsing, no recommendations.

bvinc··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)

  Location:  Burleson, TX
  Remote:  Yes, and I have experience working remotely
  Willing to relocate:  Yes
  Technologies:  Go, Rust, Java, c++.  Senior full stack developer for a large code base.
  Résumé/CV:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-vincent-7236746/
  Email:  brainn /at/ gmail.com
bvinc··on Show HN: ZeroHTTPd: A web server to teach Linux performance, with benchmarks
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't modern web servers often use a handful of threads, and use epoll for each thread? If so, could this be a Part VIII?
bvinc··on A final proposal for Rust await syntax
It says that it is also backed by kqueue and supports FreeBSD , NetBSD, and OS X.

I found this issue where they're discussing rewriting the Windows implementation using the library `wepoll`.

https://github.com/tokio-rs/gsoc/issues/3

What would be the advantages of supporting AIO on Linux?

bvinc··on A final proposal for Rust await syntax
I'm not sure why it wasn't chosen, but I can give you some arguments against it. The braces introduce line noise. They introduce a new scope. I believe that rustfmt will currently put a newline after the opening brace. And it has the general problem that it can't be read from left to right.

(P.s. I'm not trying to start a debate, just trying to answer the question.)

bvinc··on A final proposal for Rust await syntax
Most of the work you're talking about has been completed for a long time in the crate "mio". It abstracts out all of the platform dependent async io operations into a single consistent interface.
bvinc··on We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview
Fizzbuzz isn't a trick questions that you have to have heard of. It's designed to be an EXTREMELY easy question, answerable by anyone with even a basic knowledge of programming. It's not a game. It's a way to weed out people that don't know anything.

If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.

bvinc··on Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods
My wife and I have been studying nutrition for several years. Processed unnatural "foods" having bad effects on humans is an undeniable pattern that shows up over and over again.

The reason for this is simply because of evolution. Our bodies evolved eating natural plants and animals. Our bodies have never before been exposed to the huge number of food additives that have been invented in recent years.

You probably hate that we have to talk in generalities. But food studies are expensive and hard to get right, and there's a LOT that we don't fully understand about nutrition. We're nowhere close to understanding all the different ways that all the different food additives are affecting our bodies.

bvinc··on How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)
I once simply forgot to put some income on my taxes. I only leaned about it a year or two later. I not only owed about a thousand dollars, but also I owed back interest. I wish they informed me after 2 weeks.
bvinc··on V Programming Language
This seems pretty amazing. I'm really curious how it manages to avoid data races. It doesn't seem to mention anything complicated like rust lifetimes.

Also, what happens when unsafe C++ is converted to v, for example, code with iterator invalidation?

There are so many unanswered questions.

bvinc··on Handbrewing Coffee
I will back you up. I visited a coffee plantation in Guatemala and they said they sort all of their beans by size before selling them. I asked if people paid different prices, but they said no. The reason was that the roasters want consistent sizes.

And this was just some small coffee plantation.

bvinc··on What is it like working at a company after releasing a negatively-received game?
That's probably what I would say if I worked at Facebook. The uncomfortable line of questioning would be if you asked me WHY I don't have a Facebook. And I would explain why I don't like giving my attention to an AI driven news feed and how I don't think Facebook is having a positive effect on most user's lives. Then I'll start wondering what I'm doing with my career.
bvinc··on Let an algorithm tell you how to eat
I have to disagree. Everyone knows that they should eat a salad instead of a cake. But what does healthy eating look like normally, when it gets more nuanced, and when you might actually enjoy eating it? Does a healthy meal look like a steak with a fried egg on top and a side of vegetables? Or does it look like fat free yogurt and a Coke Zero?

You'll get a lot of different opinions.

bvinc··on LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve
I'll share my story. I used to work at a popular Linux website hosting control panel company. Back in the early 2000's "frontpage extensions" were a thing that people used to upload their websites.

Unfortunately, frontpage extensions required files to exist in people Linux home directories, and people would often mess them up or delete them. People would need their frontpage extension files "reset" to fix the problem. Fortunately, Microsoft provided a Linux binary to reset a users frontpage extension files.

Unfortunately, it required root access to run. Also unfortunately, I discovered that a user could set up symlinks in their home directory to trick the binary into overwriting files like /etc/passwd.

We ended up actually releasing a code change that would overwrite getuid with LD_PRELOAD so that the Microsoft binary would think it was running as root, just to prevent it from being a security hazard.

bvinc··on They Thrive on All-Meat Diet (1929)
You'll love my story. I'll keep it short.

Basically, one day, I started getting pressure and pain and ringing in my ear. It was really bad about every other day. I went to an ENT and he diagnosed me with meniere's disease and told me that I had permanent hearing loss. I kept going to doctors. One of them diagnosed me with endolymphatic hydrops.

I spent a month or so obsessively reading research papers, and internet sites seemed to basically be support groups for people whose lives are ruined and can never think straight again.

I had good reason to suspect it was an autoimmune disease, because steroids cured my symptoms. I also had my personal suspicions that wheat was involved but I couldn't correlate anything.

So I started eliminating foods and keeping a food diary. Long story short, about a year later, I was very confident that wheat was my biggest trigger. If I eat a large amount of wheat, my symptoms come back 36 hours later, and last for at least 2 days.

I struggled with the fact that I have no doctor suggestions, or diagnosis, or study of what problem I have, what it is, or any way to prove to anyone else that wheat is causing my problem. Most people think that I'm just jumping on a gluten free fad bandwagon. Oh well. I've tested it about 8 times, including blind tests where I accidentally ate wheat. I've been almost symptom free for like 2 years now.

bvinc··on Is There a Fourth Neutrino Out There in the Universe?
I've switched all of my mobile browsing to Firefox with ublock origin. I've got the "annoyance" filters enabled. It's a game changer.
bvinc··on Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet
You're downvoted. Maybe because of your snarky tone, but I think you have a point. Twitter is a cesspool with all of the same problems as Facebook.
bvinc··on The Sounds That Haunted US Diplomats in Cuba? Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say
There was an article a year ago or so that I thought was pretty convincing. It talked about how multiple high frequency spying devices could be interfering with each other and creating the effect. What happened to that theory? No one seemed to think it was solved after that article came out.
bvinc··on Our Cellphones Aren't Safe
I've always wondered this. When encryption algorithms are broken, we phase them out for new ones. When cell tower protocols have weak encryption we don't seem to do anything about it. I hear that edge and 2g protocols are completely unsafe but there's not even an option in my phone to disable them. What gives?
bvinc··on A New Connection Between the Gut and Brain
Man, Rhonda Patrick is awesome. With so much disinformation in the field of nutrition, everything she says is well thought out and researched.
bvinc··on Rust 2018 is here, but what is it?
I use vscode with the rust (rls) extension. It's not perfect. Sometimes when I edit cargo files it gets stuck and isn't recompiling my code. When that happens, I just ctrl-shift-p and select "reload window" and it's fixed in a couple seconds. It's not ideal, but it gets the job done and it's better than manually compiling my code.
bvinc··on Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
My daughter at 12 got sucked into Tumblr and developed an eating disorder. She was in this gigantic web of pro-ana tumblrs with crazy diet plans that tell you to eat like 100 calories a day. Then the app would just keep suggesting more, "skin and bones", "thinspo", "meanspo". Holy crap there are some scary corners of Tumblr.

I of course am more mindful of what she looks at, but she was hiding it and I can't monitor everything.

It's hard to balance my love of free speech with the responsibilities of myself, these bs Tumblr pages, and the app suggestions.

From what I've seen, Tumblr can be a very toxic place and I could understand why advertisers would have problems with the content that ends up next to their ads.

I wish them luck trying to figure out this mess.

bvinc··on HTTP-over-QUIC will officially become HTTP/3
What happened to QUIC as a non-HTTP-specific layer that any protocol could use? Even the QUIC Wikipedia page has been changed to a HTTP/3 page.
bvinc··on Systemd is bad parsing
Those are all things that could fix the problem. But let me ask this another way. Imagine that you travel into the future a decade or three and a computer scientist tells you "pretty much no one gets buffer overflows anymore because of X".

It seems unlikely to me that the answer is going to be ATS, or "we burned down x86".

bvinc··on Systemd is bad parsing
He talks like the way he writes code has been established as best practice for decades, and if he can just write enough blog posts and convince enough people, maybe we can solve this problem once and for all.

I think the only way to have high assurances is to program under a system that doesn't have these classes of errors. I don't care if it's a c static checker or a new language or what.

Unfortunately the long term solution to these problems in system programming seems to be rust. But it's going to take decades for it to be established and I'm going to look like a language hipster member of the rust evangelism strike force every time I bring it up.

But seriously, it's been decades and decades and we're still writing buffer overflows. What is the long term final nail in the coffin for buffer overflows?

bvinc··on Log driven programming (2013)
I find it best to put a TODO file in the project that I'm working on. Sometimes I commit it, sometimes I hide it from git. I think it's a big advantage to have it all in one place, not very far from the code, and it won't get lost.

TODOs in comments end up getting forgotten about. Bug ticketing systems are too much work for the kind of notes I write to myself. I've tried using paper, but as I turn pages, notes on previous pages get lost forever. Staying in the text editor helps me not lose my flow.

bvinc··on Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy”
The only time I ever hear it is from SJWs talking about how we shouldn't value open source contributors on their merit, but we should instead somehow ascertain their race and treat them differently according to it.
← PreviousPage 3 of 6Next →