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diatoneon Ask HN: How do I fix what I didn't learn during undergrad?

edit: worked for me. Went from working as a Mech Eng with degrees in mechanical engineering & econometrics to software engineering. Also very similar to yourself re: startup experience.

Good luck!

diatoneon Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?

Pretty close with the JS, just change testClass.callHoHe to testClass.prototype.callHoHe and you're good to go. Agreed about btoa and atob, since they're globally scoped and I'm not sure if they can be overwritten...

diatoneon The Programmers, like the Poets

Constrained by, yes. Defined by, no.

diatoneon Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

GP wasn’t stating that a larger stock of cash is definitively not a parameter of inflation, but that it is not the only parameter.

As to your question about the other factors, here’s a thought experiment: if I printed cash daily but locked it up in a chest and sunk it to the bottom of the sea, will there be inflation? Going one step further: does inflation depend on the distribution of liquidity in the economy?

diatoneon Senior developers are leading the great resignation movement

As someone who enjoys sharing a similar sense of humour and outlook as the people I work with, I'm personally more than happy to spend 15 minutes goofing around before a day of knuckling down and getting shit done. YMMV

diatoneon Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

Speaking from experience, last year we had an outbreak in Melbourne, Australia. The local government's response was guided by modelling from epidemiologists (and others), and went on to match the peak and length of the outbreak to the model's estimations almost down to the day[0].

[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-29/coronavirus-melbourne...

diatoneon How to Ride a Motorcycle – 1942 British Military Training Film [video]

As a counterpoint, and as someone who was hospitalised after a motorcycle accident, it's not the probability of a crash that's the worry, but the severity. With that said, I agree with GP: riding in the open air is liberating. Sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze.

diatoneon Deno 1.14

> Doesn't it introduce a weird (stateful!) computation that's hard to reason about?

Yes and no. For example, maybe you want to initialise a temporary directory on the filesystem for writing files to, for some caching mechanism. The pointer to the cache directory (maybe a const x = {}) can exist anywhere, but spinning up the directory itself in the static class block ensures that it's set up once and only once for all instances of the class. So, any instances get to reuse the directory without worrying about checking for initialisation first.

Just another tool in the toolbox, best evaluated on a case-by-case basis

diatoneon Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

You may want to check out the Flux party, they've been around for a number of years now: https://voteflux.org/about/faq/

diatoneon Ask HN: What math equations and properties should engineers be more aware of?

+1 to statistics and linear algebra.

Beyond practical uses, I'd say calculus is essential for having a robust understanding of rates of change in different contexts. I remember when my thesis supervisor gave me an intro to three-dimensional fluid flow so elegantly with calculus, then worked statistical mechanics into the equation without compromising its structure or elegance. All the snobbery in the world around mathematics being beautiful made sense in that moment.

Since then I've completely lost my ability to explain the del operator. I'd probably fuck up a lot of working techniques solving calculus problems (integration by parts with trig, etc). But the intuition for quantities changing and moving in different dimensions, and often in higher orders, sometimes randomly, has been immensely useful for understanding abstract systems and the world around me. Great carryover to grok office politics, the flow of football plays, networked systems, power transfer in biomechanics, etc.

Unfortunately it's a real pain in the ass to explain the intuition, so it tends to serve primarily as foundational knowledge. The key is though, the foundation is rock solid.

diatoneon Dutch entrepreneurs avoiding negative interest by opening multiple bank accounts

Just confirming I’m on the right page here, what about supply and demand? Doesn’t inflation increase the quantity of cash in existence, reducing its value relative to other units of exchange, and vice versa for deflation?

So for example, a 500% deflation just means that one dollar today buys $6 worth of whatever it could have bought in the past (my math might be off)?

diatoneon Ask HN: Why Should I Learn Lisp?

Ever wanted to serialize a closure?

https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

diatoneon Code Smell of the Day: Type Keys

Agreed. Another situation where type keys aren’t the grinch is de/serialisation. A contrived example: it’s somewhat simple to imagine the first example as half of a request handler, taking in some string input, asserting it’s within the set of type keys, then acting on it. Later examples, not so much. IMO a great example of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”

diatoneon Software Dev Can't Be Automated – It’s a Creative Process with an Unknown Goal

If I understand correctly, GP wasn't necessarily stating that Clojure guarantees an absence of boilerplate for every use case, but instead that it doesn't require boilerplate to be written every time you use it.

I'd encourage looking through the documentation for Luminus[1], one framework for writing web apps Clojure, to help you figure out if it suits your personal tolerance for boilerplate. IMO the example for gating API endpoints by authentication[2] is remarkably simple, but you might prefer something more opinionated a la Rails to completely abstract the auth boilerplate away.

For what it's worth, being a lisp, Clojure could certainly support a framework for writing web apps that's highly opinionated, and takes in config for tweaking some defaults (e.g.: auth), thanks to macros.

[1]: https://luminusweb.com/ [2]: https://luminusweb.com/docs/services.html#authentication

diatoneon Software Dev Can't Be Automated – It’s a Creative Process with an Unknown Goal

It’s also worth considering the scope of intended and realised meanings in a work, and whether or not we’d consider that dynamic as one worth pursuing in the future.

Kind of like the old joke about English teachers looking too deeply into classic literature, isn’t it? I might not intend to relate and extend layers of context with the line, “John sat squarely on the desk,” but a reader observing that line as part of a surrounding text could infer meaning and purpose beyond what I originally intended.

With AI-generated text, that dance of writers filling (or deliberately avoiding) their work with meaning, and readers lifting the meaning out of the work, becomes much less human in and of itself. Or does it? Will schools of the future choose AI-written stories and film for students to learn from, over material written by people?

diatoneon Telescope.nvim: Find, Filter, Preview, Pick

If you're happy to ignore that initial part of entering the fuzzy search, "fuzzy search" or "fuzzy find" would have instantly registered in my mind those same examples you brought up. Maybe a qualifier, "on demand" or "by hotkey"?

diatoneon Show HN: Emojicons

Having no experience in this area, I think it might have to do with text en/decoding - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

I'd recommend using another tool for this while I investigate, sorry.

diatoneon Show HN: Emojicons

Can't edit this comment, but, "SVG emojis" -> "emojis as SVG favicons"

diatoneon Show HN: Emojicons

Hey HN,

If you're like me and was unaware you could have SVG emojis, here's a client-side tool to make a simple one. Just open your emoji picker, save the SVG, and use / modify as you please.

(I'm aware there are equivalents of this hanging around, this was just a day project. I'd recommend https://emojifav.com/ for this, but slicker. Only downside with that one is you have to unescape the data/svg it gives you if you want to edit it, e.g.: if you want to use media queries)

diatoneon Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

Agreed.

To add something useful to the conversation & giving the benefit of the doubt: maybe the parent was describing a situation where an org didn't have a cohesive security plan. If half your people are using one service, and the other half are using another, you've got a problem. I suppose this can blow out in complexity, and maybe risk(?), once you're stacking services (IdP, MFA, ...).

diatoneon Ask HN: Do you listen to music while working/programming?

Headphones in is a great signal for “I’m trying to get things done, think twice before talking to me”.

To answer your question: always instrumental. Ambient soundscapes for exploratory work, or to take a breather and think laterally. Then some jazzy house to crack down and get some work in.

This week that pair’s looking like Rhubarb[1] and Emotional Intelligence[2].

[1] https://open.spotify.com/track/2Bc4llhjJBW77I552RgA3L [2] https://open.spotify.com/track/3yMYs3jJdAPxMgqb0CYZUG