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kovrik

603 karma · joined April 2, 2012

https://github.com/kovrik/
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kovrik··on Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama
Then use oMLX or MTPLX or Rapid MLX.
kovrik··on Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
They don't support port forwarding anymore though.
kovrik··on The Efficiency of Vim
I love Vim and use Vim bindings everywhere I can (Emacs, Firefox, Intellij etc.).

But I don't think it is actually more efficient than traditional editing, but rather just a different way of editing which may be (or may be not) more convenient to _some_ people (myself included).

Especially nowadays with modern IDEs and auto-completions and AI code helpers, it's not really about text editing anymore, it's not the bottleneck.

kovrik··on React 19
Not sure if those are the same though?

Async, await, iterators, futures etc. are pretty much standard constructs in almost all programming languages / concurrency frameworks.

Whereas Actions, Transitions, Pending State, Reducers etc. are React-specific idiosyncrasies.

I guess that's the main issue people have with React, when you learn it you have to spend so much time to learn all these React-specific constructs and idiosyncrasies that are not transferable anywhere else.

kovrik··on But what is a GPT? Visual intro to Transformers [video]
Could you please share what other learning materials you used?
kovrik··on Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2022?
Alzabo Soup (https://www.alzabosoup.com/)
kovrik··on Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
Gene Wolfe.

The whole Solar Cycle (The Book of the New Sun, Urth of The New Sun, The Book of The Long Sun, The Book of The Short Sun), Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, There Are Doors, The Sorcerer's House ... .

Wolfe is a genius.

Before that I also finished Malazan.

kovrik··on Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?
Really? I have the opposite experience. I _want_ to love CL but Clojure wins when it comes to IDE support and libs and documentation.

Maybe it's just me but I find (SB)CL tooling to be very obscure: ASDF, QuickLisp, Roswell etc. My main issue with it is that it's all written in CL itself and doesn't provide handy CLI tools to execute common tasks (compile app, build package, run tests, deploy etc.). Not to mention that documentation is horrendous.

Basically, I want it to have something like Maven/Gradle/Leiningen to manage dependencies, run tasks and so on. Am I missing something?

kovrik··on SEC charges Netflix insider trading ring
How did this pass code review though?
kovrik··on French watchdog rejects request to suspend Apple's App Tracking Transparency
Same popups for all apps (at least for me).
kovrik··on Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook
Because principle of least surprise is a good thing for almost any application?
kovrik··on Google Chrome Keystone is modifying /var symlink on non SIP Macs causing k-panic
How come SIP didn't catch it? Is Chrome asking for a root access during installation?
kovrik··on Google Chrome Keystone is modifying /var symlink on non SIP Macs causing k-panic
Where can I find a manual on how to uninstall Keystone, Chrome etc. on Mac properly? Has anyone done it?
kovrik··on The Gravitational-Wave “Revolution” Is Underway
Yep, gravity is 39 orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetic force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem

kovrik··on Where Quantum Probability Comes From
I was always wondering about MWI and couldn't find the answer to one question. AFAIK Everett never mentioned Many Worlds in his paper. What he was talking about was a Universal Wave Function. In that sense, 'world' is just a 'quantum system', not 'Universe'. At what stage we started calling it Many Worlds?

When scientists say Many Worlds, do they actually mean Worlds as physical 'parallel universes' that pop up into existence?

Or they only mean that those are probable outcomes of our measurement (probable histories) that never actually happened (only one of them happened - the one we end up being it)?

kovrik··on Are We Wrong About Black Holes?
But mass decreases which implies that event horizon shrinks, right?

Also, I thought never-increasing entropy was only applicable to closed systems. In that sense, when particles leave black hole through Hawking radiation, total entropy of the Universe remains the same. Am I missing something?

kovrik··on Are We Wrong About Black Holes?
> Stephen Hawking proved that the area of a black hole’s event horizon — the surface that marks its boundary — cannot decrease.

I thought he proved the opposite: that black holes (slowly) evaporate through Hawking radiation, lose mass, hence their event horizon shrinks. Could anyone please elaborate?

Also, do scientists actually say that thermodynamics and black holes are the same thing? Never heard of that. I think they only mean that laws of thermodynamics are universal and should be applicable to black holes as well.

kovrik··on Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
Not OP, but I am currently on Reaper's Gale.

Malazan quickly became my favourite book series (and I am not even a fan of fantasy). It was hard initially. But it gets better.

However, I think that re-read is a must if you want to fully grasp the whole thing.

kovrik··on Fighting persistent Lyme disease symptoms
Why no coffee?
kovrik··on Ask HN: Client replaced me with offshore team – what could I have done?
Isn't it like a standard practice? Hire an expensive professional first that will do all the heavy-lifting, then outsource bugfixing and maintenance somewhere else where it is cheaper.
kovrik··on How to pick a random number from 1-10
My guess: it is all about culture. I guess asian people are more likely to choose 8 (lucky number) and avoid 4 (unlucky number).
kovrik··on The Mathematical Hacker (2012)
Yes.

Nowadays it is mostly about tools/frameworks. You don't even need to master the programming language that you are using.

I work mainly with Java stack and see so many devs with 10+ years of experience who know nothing about Java internals, who know nothing about how Java's hashmap works...heck, many of them can't even explain what some _keywords_ do: volatile, transient.

Nevertheless, they 'successfully' close their JIRA tickets and deliver.

kovrik··on Is it time to treat sugar like smoking?
My wife and I are doing IF (OMAD - One Meal A Day). And obviously don't eat junk food, sugar etc.

For me the biggest surprise was how little food we actually need. I remember myself few years ago eating a breakfast in the morning, then coffee with a muffin or donut first thing at work, then huge lunch, then another snack, then huge dinner at home (of course! just came from work - need to treat myself) and then maybe another snack before going to bed. Can't even imagine how many calories and sugars we were consuming each day. We were literally overeating every single day.

Now we eat only once a day, avoid junk food and sugars, feel awesome, look and feel much better. And it works for us even with quite intensive hiking trips and with gym/exercises.

kovrik··on Show HN: Risp – Lisp in Rust
`tokenize` function looks weird. Why use replace and then split? How would you extend this to stirngs (which might contain "()" chars)? It might be OK in a toy example, but it would have been better if the author wrote an actual Reader (not familiar with Rust, but I guess it should have some readers that allow peeking 1 char ahead OR something like Java's PushbackReader).

Then `parse_list_of_floats`, if I am reading it right, this function is fail-safe, not fail-fast, right? It won't panic upon the very first reading error?

Why eval makes environment lookups? Shouldn't environment itself know how to perform a lookup?

kovrik··on Show HN: Muon, a low-level programming language inspired by C, C# and Go
In the 'Glimpse of Muon' example, how does the Map::getOrDefault() function work? Shouldn't it accept 2 args: a key and a default value (if the value associated with the given key is not found)?
kovrik··on The Secret Rules For Getting Hired
Agree.

People often 'mispronounce' my first name (can't even pronounce last name). Honestly, I don't care. I don't blame them because they pronounce it from English point of view which is obvious as they are native speakers.

Some people ask me how would I say my name (I am Russian, but live in NZ), I tell them. Some people then try to say it that way, sometimes they 'forget' and fallback to English pronunciation. What's the big deal?

I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or what?). Same goes the other way: NZ is a diverse country, we have people from all around the globe here, and I bet I mispronounce every second name/last name.

kovrik··on Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
Same in NZ, but credit cards with cashback have monthly/annual fees.

For example, ASB (bank) asks ~$150 per year for a cashback credit card. How much do you get from cashback on average?

kovrik··on Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
What about fees?

Not sure about US, but I think in NZ all credit cards with cashback have fees. And I remember there was a research or something concluding that you had to spend at least ~$3000 (don't remember exactly) per month using cashback credit card to break even.

Also, credit cards are not accepted everywhere. And often there is a minimum transaction amount as well.

kovrik··on Eating more fruit and vegetables 'improves mental wellbeing'
Sugar is not bad per se. The issue of sugar in processed foods, candy etc. is that it absorbs quickly and causes blood sugar spikes. This is bad.

Fruits and vegetables have fiber, which slows sugar absorption, hence no blood sugar spikes. Of course, if you eat 10 bananas daily, then it is not healthy.

Also, some vegetables contain lots of sugar too.

kovrik··on Many popular iPhone apps are recording user sessions without asking
It is all good until you start sending credit card details and all other personal and sensitive information without even asking user about it.

As a user, I don't care at all if it makes dev's life easier. I bought the app and don't want my personal info to be leaked.

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