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johnc1231

67 karma · joined February 16, 2018

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johnc1231··on State Farm says 105 Kia, Hyundai models ‘ineligible’ for new insurance in LA
Even if you have the immobilizer on your new car, if a potential thief thinks your car is one of the stealable ones, you may still end up with a broken window.
johnc1231··on Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as a crawler somehow?
johnc1231··on Slack is down
I find Zulip to be a nice balance. Threads are much more prominent than they are in Slack, but aren't clunky.
johnc1231··on Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?
Odyssey is closer to 64 than Galaxy. You don't repeatedly enter the level for different stars, you just enter the level once and there's different objectives that reward you with stars. Definitely not on rails at all.
johnc1231··on Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
Another plus one for Zulip, huge improvement over Slack for me.
johnc1231··on “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”
We do this for our project (https://hail.is) and it's a game changer. Saves so much time and so many bug reports.
johnc1231··on Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
Zulip has been great for our team
johnc1231··on Tribuo, a Machine Learning Library for Java
I don't think netlib-java is LGPL. Where does it say that it is?
johnc1231··on JDK 15
Having Apache Spark as a dependency kept us locked into JDK 8 for ages. They've finally got things updated now, but I don't know what their hold up was.
johnc1231··on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) Book
I'd also recommend "How to Design Programs", newest version is here: https://htdp.org/2020-8-1/Book/index.html. It's a much more accessible version of SICP.
johnc1231··on TileDB closes $15M Series A for universal data engine
Hail team member here. I'd be curious to hear what the things you don't like about hail are. Hopefully they're things that are already on our road map
johnc1231··on Oxidizing the Technical Interview
Can you explain that line? I think I am missing something obvious.
johnc1231··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
In what was does the Nintendo Switch break the standard?
johnc1231··on We use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80%
I suspect doing that will break down in the case of large Spark shuffles though?
johnc1231··on What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
I haven't dug into it myself, but Netflix makes something called Polynote that is supposed to add some awareness of the sequence of the cells to combat this
johnc1231··on An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
It might vary from field to field, but in genetics Excel is a complete nonstarter, and even numpy is not going to work on sufficiently large datasets. The project I work on, http://hail.is, was started to help deal with this.
johnc1231··on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
Seconded, Zulip is awesome.
johnc1231··on When your data doesn’t fit in memory: the basic techniques
Yeah, I think the above poster said O(logn) space because that's the size of the line count in bits
johnc1231··on Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet
I've never had this happen personally. What OS is this? I use Firefox on OSX installed through Homebrew, so I have to manually update it with brew. Firefox has never asked me to update.
johnc1231··on Infinite loop in macOS Night Shift in the summer near the Arctic Circle
The Turtle Moves
johnc1231··on Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class
Northeastern University started doing this a few years ago as well. It definitely helps.
johnc1231··on Writing an OS in Rust: Introduction to Paging
Is there any video somewhere of the actual game the handmade hero series builds up to? I would want to know the goal before jumping in
johnc1231··on In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states
I don't believe there's any better reason than wanting the small population states to sign the Constitution in the 1780s. And maybe also an attempt to protect the needs of people like farmers from being ignored, since they would live in low population states compared to urban professionals. Not saying it's a good idea.
johnc1231··on Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly (2006) [pdf]
I always liked the prisoner box question, but I prefer the phrasing where the prisoners are assigned a number and the boxes are numbered. I feel like the "prisoners have to come up with a name to number mapping" step just gets in the way of the interesting part.
johnc1231··on Jack Kirby: The comic book artist finally gets the recognition he deserves
Agreed. I mean, the article literally uses his nickname ("the King") to refer to him. How could anyone who isn't being properly recognized have the well known nickname "King"?
johnc1231··on Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
johnc1231··on How to Design Programs, second edition
What I also like about this book is that it manages to get to "exciting" programs fairly quickly. Like, for a first time programmer, it can be boring to spend all your time writing things that convert Fahrenheit to Celsius or print staircases out of asterisks with double for loops. In this book, it's very easy to work with images, allowing things to move towards things like basic game development very quickly.
johnc1231··on Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch (2017)
I've been interested in checking out Handmade Hero, but haven't yet found the time to start looking at it. One thing I would like to know though is what game they're actually making. Now that it's been going on for some time, is there a video somewhere of what kind of game is being made?