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mdemare

2,368 karma · joined May 18, 2007

Michiel de Mare

Freelance Clojure and Ruby developer, location The Hague.

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mdemare··on Ask HN: What service do you use for human translations of your website?
CTO of tolq.com here. We support a variety of formats, including json, yaml, xlsx, and various xml formats, and we have a fully automated api that will ping you when our translators are done. Translation memory support is built-in - we'll only translate the diff.

We also have github support. Check in a yaml file in github, and we'll automatically translate the changes in the target languages you choose. When we're done, we create a pull request.

mdemare··on We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
Use Safari Reader, or a bookmarklet with similar functionality.
mdemare··on Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator
Apple said they're bigger than Rolex in revenue.
mdemare··on Too much fructose can damage your liver, just like too much alcohol
It's very hard to ingest too much fructose by eating oranges. Drinking orange juice on the other hand...
mdemare··on AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch
Nobody was saying that before AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. So this feels like moving the goalposts.
mdemare··on Tax Plan Punts on a Loophole for the Wealthy
No, actually this is not investment. It’s returning money to shareholders who may decide to invest, or they may not.
mdemare··on Tax Plan Punts on a Loophole for the Wealthy
So you need to keep receipts for every hot dog you buy?
mdemare··on Tax Plan Punts on a Loophole for the Wealthy
The Netherlands has a wealth tax of about 1.2% per annum; property you live in is not taxed (via the wealth tax)
mdemare··on The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error
The strategy is fine - the problem is that people don't use a random number generator. This is how you get a 3-word password with 54-bits of complexity (on a mac with a recent ruby):

  ruby -e 'puts File.read("/usr/share/dict/words").lines.sample(3).map(&:chomp).join(" ")'
"applewife holographic intercommonage"

Easier to remember than `rand(254)` => 16495714355860079

mdemare··on Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies
Crypto is Greek, actually.
mdemare··on The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011)
Yeah, your level 5 wizard would try to take on a vampire on his own, and quickly expire, instead of leveling up on rats like he ought to. Loved that game, and loved the voices. Don't buy the iOS version though.
mdemare··on Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business
The writer is a Professor of Anthropology. Don't jump to conclusions.
mdemare··on Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business
Hmm. We're "Great Apes" (hominids), but not "Apes"? That seems to violate common sense, in my opinion.
mdemare··on Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)
A tree is a pair of a value and a list of trees.

The "list of trees" part is what's constant about trees; the value is what makes it hard. What's a value? A name? A string? A text? Either a text, or a name and a map of strings to strings (simplified HTML)? A General Purpose Tree Editor would have to handle all those cases, and a whole lot more.

mdemare··on Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
Nothing in the Second Law of Thermodynamics prevents your body from turning some of your heart muscle into fuel, as bad of a plan as that may be.
mdemare··on I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
That's nonsense. Spain under Franco wasn't considered part of the "free world". To a first approximation, it referred to countries in NATO, plus a few allied countries like Sweden and Japan.
mdemare··on I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
Have nots? Trump voters were richer than Clinton voters.
mdemare··on I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
Exactly. People look at their government and give it 1/5 stars, then vote for anyone promising change, because they think they have nothing to lose. But the range doesn't start at 1 star. It goes down to minus infinity.
mdemare··on Should gifted students go to a separate school?
But they do. I went to a Dutch gymnasium at age 12. The smartest 5% of the population is admitted there. Did the concept of faster-learning kids and slower-learning kids disappear there? Hardly! There were huge differences in aptitude.
mdemare··on Ask HN: Where is AI/ML actually adding value at your company?
> A basic k-means or naive Bayes approach will show up in ML textbooks, but those aren't clearly different from "use some statistics to make a prediction".

Ha, sounds like a classification problem! Let's use ML to find the boundary.

mdemare··on How “Black Mirror” Gets Its Barely Sci-Fi Tech Just Right
I started with S1E1, quit watching it halfway, and have written it off. Should I reconsider?
mdemare··on Realistic alternatives to Apple computers
No, 13" MBPs can get 16GB too.
mdemare··on This year we can end the death penalty in California
So if somebody sets off a nuclear bomb, the feds are fine with it as long as it does not hurt interstate commerce?

I know, constitution and all. But still, that sounds a bit mercantile.

mdemare··on New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore
There are several built-in ways to get from insert mode to normal mode in vim, only one of which has now been removed.

Vim users that use escape to leave insert mode are not exactly a majority of Mac users. Also, many people have been complaining about the location of Escape for such an important command. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4416512/why-use-esc-in-vi...

Having said that, I use Escape myself in Vim - you know what? I'll adapt.

This has nothing to do with the new MBP being unsuitable for developers. This is about power users being forced to abandon ingrained habits.

mdemare··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
Plenty of nations with high federal government spending do fine, plenty of nations with low federal spending do badly. On the whole, high spending is correlated to better outcomes.
mdemare··on The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel
It depends on which benchmark you look at - I looked ak Geekbench 4. https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...
mdemare··on The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel
Both the iPhone 7 and the next next iPad Pro will be significantly faster than the current Macbook (and Macbook Air) and that's probably also the case for the next iteration, if it sticks with Intel. That alone is reason to switch to ARM. Compiling to ARM will be relatively easy, but still emulation will be needed for many applications, and that might be harder than emulating PowerPC.

I wonder where the performance ceiling is going to be for the Apple processor line. Looking at Intel, I'd have expected them to have hit it already, but given the huge increases in single threaded performance so far year on year, it's hard to believe that it'll peter down to <15% per year from now on.

If performance is going to keep improving at the current rate, then the A11X will be significantly faster than Intel's 2017 Cannonlake mobile lineup. Switching away from Intel would give Macs another big leg-up relative to Windows laptops.

Macs will never switch to iOS though. Processes on macOS have a freedom that's incomparable to that on iOS, and once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in again. But Apple will keep working to make iOS sufficient for increasingly more people, and Macs will keep getting more niche. Apple could even introduce a laptop-like form factor like the Surface Book with iOS on it (the iBook Pro?).

Interesting times...

mdemare··on Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250k to Give a Speech?
They already received their positive return. By paying Hillary for her speeches, they blocked her from credibly moving to the left on financial reform to fend off Sanders.
mdemare··on Lenin was a mushroom
Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.

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

mdemare··on Why I have finally taken off the Apple Watch
Killer app for me: alarm clock. I wear the Apple Watch at night, and it'll wake me (vibrations) without waking my girlfriend.
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