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cecilplon Show HN: JavaScript as a Database – Serverless Platform

Why should I use this instead of appwrite or firebase?

cecilplon Podcast Interview with Marcus Aurelius

I wish I had discovered Marcus Aurelius years ago. I would have had a much different life. "Meditations" has definitely changed my life. I have learned to be more patient and to not let the small things bother me. I have also learned to be more mindful and to live in the present. And also how to effectively rule a global empire.

cecilplon Show HN: Let's Block It – Custom uBlock Origin Filters Made Easy

uBlock is starting to become a one-stop shop unicorn!

cecilplon The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021

I'm surprised that it's only MacMillan and List for organocatalysis. There's plenty of others that come to mind, like Jacobsen.

Regarding MacMillan, his student used proline (which opened the whole proline organocatalysis area) and he said he had "no idea why she did that experiment". He definitely guides his students well.

cecilplon Tools for Thinking

I can't help myself but to write that Chef Kinopio is a yellow Toad who works at the restaurant in Overlook Tower in Paper Mario: The Origami King. :D

cecilplon A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight (2016)

To be honest this is one of the more real proposals I've seen for an Interstellar probe, and there are still many problems to be worked out as both the paper and the comments here point out.

I admire the optimism in the paper though, even if its misplaced. Maybe pooling together resources in the scientific and engineering communities to develop an interstellar probe system could give a working result, but there are some significant hurdles to overcome first. It would be a big project, taking many years to see fruition, but at the same time it could also be a game-changing development and a hugely inspiring feat.

Could we see probes in other star systems by 2075? I think its not an unreasonable suggestion.

cecilplon The Great Roadside Motel Comeback

Today’s new motels are often branded as “boutiques” and charge four-star rates to match that kind of exclusive service and local experience.

This is ridiculous... The idea of a "motel" is to be cheap. I'm not too fond of this article. It wasn't well written. Nothing great about it. Some chain hotels purchasing old motels and rebrand them. Whatever.

cecilplon An Oral History of Disney's 'The Emperor's New Groove'

I love this:

David Spade (Kuzco): It was me and Owen Wilson. We were going to switch jobs. I was an emperor and he was a peasant, and Carla Gugino was a princess. The first time I did my voice, I was naïvely saying, “What do you want? This kind of guy? A deep voice? Or an emperor like, ‘Ooh,’ a highfalutin guy?” And they said, “No, just your nasally, normal, annoying, sarcastic voice.”

cecilplon [dead]

I've used a bunch of these tools in the past as part of tools like Wordstream and Opteo. While basic, they seemed to work well enough. What would make me use our service which doesn't have the other ad management tools built into it just to do simple ab testing?

cecilplon Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp Outage

The subject of the antitrust suits filed against Facebook came up in a Facebook comment thread for me yesterday.

Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.

cecilplon Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

Every time Facebook is buying something I feel sad and imagine Facebook like the black plague that will swallow that normal organism.

cecilplon A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News

Buzzfeed News is actually a very respectable investigative journalism team led by a Pulitzer-winning journalist. It's funded by their clickbait site.

cecilplon Just how smart is an octopus?

Isn't Godfrey-Smith's belief in fact also "just a byproduct of neural activity"?

cecilplon A number of great composers were fond of the bottle, but can you hear it?

I hear he once drank himself to pieces, and when he woke up in the morning and pulled himself together, he had inadvertently made a copy of himself.

cecilplon Why do we all still use Qwerty keyboards?

I have used Dvorak everywhere for about 15 years, including at work (with a hardware-switchable keyboard so others can drive too).

I was around 90wpm on qwerty when I switched and am similar on dvorak. The big advantage in my mind is not speed, but comfort. The times when I've had to type on a qwerty board all day, my wrists and hands ache at the end of the day. Whenever I use a coworker's computer I feel like I'm doing finger gymnastics.

Would you suggest I learn Colemak? How does it compare, comfort-wise, to dvorak?

cecilplon Post Virtual Reality Sadness

> selective voluntary amnesia

I'm lucky (?) enough to have the involuntary form of this to some degree for media. I will often forget the plot points of a movie I've watched within days to weeks, and in many cases after a year I have completely forgotten ever even having watched it. I'll pick a movie, my wife will say "we've already seen that", I'll say "I don't think so", she lovingly puts up with me because she luckily likes re-watching movies, and even by the end of the show I'll have nothing but a vague sense of deja-vu the whole time.

I have on multiple occasions, rewatched movies with twist endings like The Usual Suspects and still been surprised on the second or third viewing.

I'd rather have my wife's photographic (videographic) movie recall though...

cecilplon Vancouver plans to tax empty properties 1% of their assessed value

The headline assumes a $1m house. From the article:

> The empty-home tax will take effect by Jan. 1 and will be calculated at 1 percent of the property’s assessed value.

cecilplon Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

I agree with you. As a teenager, I seemed to have an intuitive ability to understand concepts that others struggled with. I tend to grok concepts very quickly and once I do, I don't forget them.

I would sit in class and play games (which I'd programmed) on my TI-83, or read books. I would drift my attention to the teacher's lecture occasionally, just enough to convince myself I understood what was being taught, then back to my game.

I never took notes, nor did I study for tests, even through my undergrad in computer science. I got an A+ in multivariable calculus just by listening to the prof talk, and piecing together my comprehension on the fly.

As far as focus goes, often my focus is laser guided but I'm not in control of the laser. When something catches my interest, it becomes all I can think about for weeks. I'll obsess over it and learn everything I can about it, until my interest wanes.

I'm left with really deep knowledge of really obscure topics, and shallow-to-nonexistent knowledge of many common topics, which makes me a surprising conversation partner.

cecilplon An insomniac's guide to the group theory of mattress flipping (2005)

This post was interesting, though less interesting than I expected based on the title.

cecilplon Buybacks at $46B a Month Dwarf Everything in U.S. Market (2015)

Right. The remaining shareholders own a larger percentage of a company that now owns less cash.

Say the only thing my company owns is a bank account with $100 in it. There are 5 shares outstanding worth $20 each. The company buys back one share for $20, so now there are 4 shares outstanding in a company that owns $80.

cecilplon A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers

I wrote a program to count the pairs of adjacent last-digit occurrences in all bases up to 30, for the first 100 million primes, and found this property nearly always holds.

Quite interestingly, in all of the few cases where this doesn't hold, primes ending in the digit D are least-frequently succeeded by a prime ending in the digit D-2.

cecilplon Unexpected evidence of a new particle at LHC

It's a fad. They are trendy right now, and they work because they are new, but in 5 years that style will stop attracting people, and "clickbait headlines" will be another entry on the "10 things you remember about the '10s" lists.

cecilplon SpaceX Falcon 9 debris from failed CRS-7 launch found in sea off Scilly

It's actually CRS-4 (which launched in September 2014), not CRS-7.

See the /r/spacex investigation thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falco...

cecilplon Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?

Isn't this simply an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias?

The only brick buildings you can still look at from the 1800s are the ones that were built very well - all the shoddily-constructed buildings from that era have since disappeared.

cecilplon The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

Applesoft BASIC (for the Apple ][e) was like this too.

cecilplon The XY Problem

The problem is that they don't know that you actually know what you want.

You present identically to the kind of person who is completely non-technical and was mis-advised by a friend of theirs, and who will come back in a week complaining about how Photoshop doesn't run well enough and their hard drive is full.

Apple has decided that they want to ensure that you are happy with your purchase, and part of that process involves the salesperson being convinced that you are buying the right thing.

cecilplon The XY Problem

See this classic blog post for a counterpoint: Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:weblogs...

cecilplon Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake

Well, they also announced earnings after market close yesterday and lowered their forward guidance.

cecilplon Java: Real or Not?

Don't forget you can't test the ConfigClassesAndProfileResolverWithCustomDefaultsMetaConfig without a set of ConfigClassesAndProfileResolverWithCustomDefaultsMetaConfigTests.

And of course, what about testing the custom overrides of that config?

Well just use the ConfigClassesAndProfileResolverWithCustomDefaultsMetaConfigWithOverridesTests!

Seriously.

cecilplon Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

The reason they need permission to change your contact list is because Airdroid can change your contact list from your phone.