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colvasaur

19 karma · joined May 12, 2018

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colvasaur··on uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari
That’s funny, I remember the only way to block ads on my Android phone back many years ago was to root it. I was thrilled how easy it was to block ads on the iPhone when I switched.
colvasaur··on New ‘past’ link on HN front page
Is there a public API for this?
colvasaur··on Ask HN: How would you sort HN users by quality of comments?
I don't think comment karma is publicly available through the site or API, but average comment karma could be calculated based on total karma of user minus sum of post karma divided by number of comments.
colvasaur··on Benchmarking AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Packet, and Vultr
> The virtualized nature of cloud hosting makes benchmarking over a period of time vital to getting the full picture.

It's so nice to see a benchmark of VPSs that takes this into account.

colvasaur··on Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute
Isn't everything client-side on the web inherently open-source?
colvasaur··on Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
An old statistics professor recommended I read The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. The book's voice has some ego and it's unnecessarily verbose at times, but it changed the way I think about modeling, forecasting, and day-to-day assumptions.
colvasaur··on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking
Their “April Fools” jokes made me realize the devs think my phone was just a toy and not a tool. Not that they owe me anything. Made me switch immediately to iOS.
colvasaur··on Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb
Don’t hate the player or the game; hate the scrubs on the sideline.
colvasaur··on So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
I used to be irritated by middle-click paste as well. That stopped when I had someone explain it to me as follows:

> It’s just another clipboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the keyboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the mouse.

Perhaps that’s common knowledge, but that understanding made me instantly fall in love with middle-click paste.

In most terminal emulators, Ctrl-C deviates from normal behavior in favor of sending SIGINT. However, some terminal emulators (e.g. the one in elementary OS) makes the simple decision that if text is highlighted, copy it. Otherwise, send SIGINT. That closes all loose ends for me.

colvasaur··on When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive
I feel a pull, so my reaction is to retreat rather than jump. Paradoxically, the desire to jump results in placing myself at a safer distance.
colvasaur··on Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
PDE constrained optimization. I was optimizing for many hundreds of thousands of parameters. I only needed the diagonal of the Jacobian by the end of the calculation, however it was necessary to build the full dense matrix first without rewriting massive parts of the logic.
colvasaur··on Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?
3.5 years if you consider my MSc a personal project. There were three hallmark technical failures that are summarized as follows: (a) a computational failure -- at one point I needed to iteratively generate a 3 TB matrix, (b) a mathematical failure -- I made a math mistake, and (c) a software failure -- I tried to use a falsely advertised library to solve the above two problems.

By the end I was knee deep in source code written by mathematicians (read: an absolute mess) trying to fix bugs in code that was not even used in the library, not sleeping, and not eating. I had completely lost my mind.

The taste of failure was bitter on my tongue after the first two failures, but by the last I was truly a shadow of myself. The only lesson I learned from the last failure is that my mind has a breaking point, which is very valuable to know and sense.

My two cents: learn from your failures even if the only lesson to be learned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment.

colvasaur··on ‘Emerging’ as a Writer After 40
I'm at a transition point in my career and have been really thinking about doing this. Salary and career trajectory are my primary concerns. Do you feel comfortable with your pay and future opportunities? The only portfolio I have is documentation for my GitHub projects. Any advice on building it up if necessary?