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fredcy

102 karma · joined April 28, 2008

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fredcy··on How Mandelbrot set images are affected by floating point precision
The popular Mandelbrot zoom-in videos all seem to develop rotational symmetry before long, and the order of that symmetry only increases over time. I've assumed that this is artifact of precision errors compounding.
fredcy··on Don't fuck with paste
Our PCI-compliance audit dings us for not disabling autocomplete on the login form fields. That's not the same as disabling paste, but heading that direction.

For personal use I just abandon any site that won't let me use my password manager (Bitwarden).

fredcy··on Functional Core, Imperative Shell (2012)
This is much like the Elm Architecture [1], a pattern that I enjoy using. That structure gives me problems though when I want to speed things up by caching frequent calculations and lookups in the View functions. In Elm, at least, this is only possible by keeping the cache explicitly in the Model and maintaining it in the Update function. So it feels like considerations specific to generating a particular view end up explicitly in the more general update of the application-global Model. And for the Update to avoid doing lots of such view-value computations not needed by the current view, the Update function has to know a lot about view-only state.

[1]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/

fredcy··on The last Howard Johnson's restaurant closes in Lake George, N.Y.
Going to the Howard Johnson's (in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) in the late 60's was a big treat for my family. Their fried clams were exotic fare.
fredcy··on Ask HN: Web frameworks – which less popular frameworks are you using and why?
Elm, with Typescript and Vite.

Working with Elm code is satisfying to me. It's generally easy to revisit code I last worked with months ago and get immediately fluent with it again. The "Elm Architecture" (model / update / view) with all external interaction done over "ports" is so clean (albeit with boilerplate). Integrating with JS libraries has to be done over ports (async one-way messaging) but it works well enough in practice. Vite provides a decent dev/build toolchain with hot-reloading of all Elm, JS, and CSS code. The Elm framework is very opinionated and has stopped evolving, but it's mostly a joy to work with.

fredcy··on Poll: How are you doing currently?
Kind of okay. I came down with COVID on May 10. Took Paxlovid (I'm 64) and felt recovered in a few days (but I continued the 5 days of Paxlovid, of course). Then on May 23 a bad cough started up and it's been bothering me ever since. My family doc could not see me so I went to a clinic in a CVS where she diagnosed bronchitis and said it's likely a lingering effect of the COVID. Damn. And now I read this in Nature: "Long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination, huge study shows", <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0>
fredcy··on Winnebiko
His "Behemoth" bike had such low gearing for hill-climbing that, as I recall it, the bike had two retractable small wheels, one on each side, that worked like training-wheels to stabilize the bike at very low speeds.
fredcy··on Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?
I have a Herman Miller Aeron that works great, bought at a reasonable price off Craigslist.

Along with the Aeron I often use an inflatable cushion, the "Gymnic Disc 'o' Sit". Sitting on it keeps me alert and greatly improves my sitting posture.

fredcy··on Ask HN: Why aren't one-time sign in links more popular for authentication?
We ran into this, where the Outlook client would scan one-time login links from SalesForce (iirc). Huge pain to work around.
fredcy··on Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?
Don't believe everything you think.
fredcy··on Gitlab Support is no longer processing MFA resets for free users
Far too many sites don't allow more than one hardware key for 2FA. I set up 3 yubikeys on those sites that allow it.
fredcy··on Muscular Bonding: The power of dance and drill
Prior to the stay-home order my wife and I would go out line dancing three nights each week. Dancing in unison with dozens of other people is surprisingly invigorating. I miss it deeply.
fredcy··on Google's Abandoned Android Authenticator App
I save each OTP config on three separate Yubikeys using Yubico Authenticator. I also screen-shot the QR code and save that and any recovery codes to a veracrypt volume.

If the site allows for UTF I register each key for that too, but only if I can also use OTP since I can't yet use UTF with my android phone.

fredcy··on WTF? I cannot cancel my NYTimes subscription online?
It's the same with the WSJ. Just last week I wanted to cancel the paper delivery and get online access only. Even to do only that required a phone call; not even a chat option was available.
fredcy··on Sunsetting Mercurial Support in Bitbucket
Damn, this is disappointing. I've long preferred hg over git but developer preference has clearly moved to favor git. I like using mercurial queues for managing local config changes but I guess I'll have to get better using `git stash`. I hope bitbucket provides some tools to easily convert repos from hg to git. Frankly, though, I'll likely just move from bitbucket now.
fredcy··on Riot.im: The Big 1.0
I've been using Riot daily for several years, and this 1.0 version seems to work really well. Like any major UI change it's going to take me a while to get used to the slightly different mechanics. Overall it looks more modern than the prior versions.
fredcy··on Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?
I'm 60 and doing a combination of IT and app development work. I totally agree about the exercise part of this. Not so much to look younger (although it might help), but rather to have the energy and mobility of a younger person.
fredcy··on Robinhood Checking Moved Fast and Broke
Matt Levine is a treasure. His Money Stuff column/email has taught me, a programmer not versed in fintech, a lot about the intricacies of the financial world. In particular, his clearheaded view of blockchain tech is useful counterpoint to the hype.
fredcy··on Introduction to Functional Programming in OCaml
The Tezos project uses OCaml to build the core network and protocol features (but not the smart contracts). Companies are starting to build products based around Tezos and OCaml knowledge will be valuable for some aspects of that. See https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos for the code.
fredcy··on Show HN: JQBX – Social Listening Web/Mobile App
I've been playing JQBX over Sonos as Jason described. It works pretty well. It does seem that the app player is needed for this as the web player will play one song over Sonos and then revert to playing on the device where the web app is running.
fredcy··on Decentralization Dilemma
With Matrix, switching to another server is painful because one's identity is tied to the particular server. I've done such a move and it requires rejoining all rooms and re-establishing any elevated privileges on each. Also, other people will still seen any People (one-to-one / direct message) rooms associated with the old account and may try to use them.
fredcy··on Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
Tezos will use Proof of Stake. They have a development version working now and there is good reason to expect a production version within a year.
fredcy··on Cloudflare and FastMail: Your info is safe
https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html

- happy FM subscriber for 3 years

fredcy··on A Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language
"The importance of data and speed to information can't be understated in the capital markets ..."

That says, it's less important than you could possibly state.

fredcy··on Rreverrse Debugging
Elm has a "time traveling debugger", http://debug.elm-lang.org/

I'm eager to give it a try in a real project.

fredcy··on Researchers discovered the perfect password that’s easy to remember
Just this week I found that Wordpress cannot handle passwords with ' or " because of bogus "escaping" posted data.
fredcy··on Kindle MatchBook
I would use this with cookbooks. I like to refer to the printed copy in the kitchen but while shopping I could check ingredient lists from a reader.
fredcy··on Ask YC: What is your take on web2py?
I've been experimenting with web2py over the last week and I like it. Simple web apps are easy to create with very little work. I'm not keen on through-the-web code development but that's not essential to web2py -- everything can be edited directly as simple files. The code of the 'gluon' library seems fine to me. It's a very compact style of coding that (IMO) could use a few more comments, but it's at least as good as what I've seen in Zope and Plone. (Of course, web2py has not been around long enough to accumulate the kind of cruft that happens in more aged software). The documentation is pretty good, particularly in its examples and tutorials. The new "manual" is good. The one thing is miss is an API manual such as can be found for the PHP and Python libraries.