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mjpuser

154 karma · joined June 15, 2015

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mjpuser··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
I dunno I thought it was well done. This is an entertaining trend on social media and they applied it to their product well.
mjpuser··on Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
I think that programmers are quick to jump to concurrency when they want to make something performant as opposed to using other structures, like a cache, or researching other possible solutions, like the HN favorite bloom filter, or other algorithm.
mjpuser··on Make resilient Go servers using timeouts, deadlines and context cancellation
Nice intro to timeouts and context. Next step would be dealing with state changes that happen in a cancelled request.
mjpuser··on We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
We also have a mantra against optimization until you know that you need to. It seems too cost and time prohibitive to put these things on the programmer to maintain, and that we need to develop tools to help optimize our code. Maybe the next generation of optimization techniques will be runtime instead of compile time. We already have dbs with optimizers, so maybe there will be programming languages with optimizers?
mjpuser··on Products I Wish Existed
I would say reddit is a forum, and you can have good discourse on there, but can also have straight comfort internet trash. Basically I think its more nuanced than just having a forum...
mjpuser··on Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
* College will become less common, and focus on vocational jobs will increase.

* Autonomous cars will be available by the end of the decade

* First person will land on Mars

* 20-40% of wild animal populations will be gone

* Lab grown meats will be introduced and become the norm as meat prices skyrocket

* Taxes in the US will increase to 40% to "target climate change" even though those funds will be poorly handled

* Starlink becomes operational, disrupting mobile carriers

* New phone number system comes created as all systems will go though the internet

* precision medicine for cancer care improves but is too expensive

mjpuser··on Assembly Language Programming: Still Relevant Today (2015)
Not sure why you are sticking to your guns here. First, it's highly unlikely anyone would ever write wasm by hand. Second, the article rambles a bit but the most compelling argument for assembly is writing fast code for constrained hardware. At a high level, that's not what wasm is solving.
mjpuser··on The Economics of Building Knowledge Bases
This is a compelling article, but then when you try to see what the product is, you have to submit your email / request a demo. In my experience, hiding your product behind a demo is a bad sign that the product has flaws. It also puts you in contact with a salesman or account manager which is typically geared towards a high pressure sale event of the product. I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences with this model, though.
mjpuser··on Assembly Language Programming: Still Relevant Today (2015)
Wasm is different than assembly, so I don't think so.
mjpuser··on Assembly Language Programming: Still Relevant Today (2015)
Not sure why HN is saying it is obvious that assembly is relevant because compilers... The article's intent is around a programmer writing assembly. I'm sure there are niches but I can see web developers getting away without writing assembly in their professional career.
mjpuser··on Electric Cars Threaten the Heart of Germany’s Economy
I think one contributing factor slowing down progress is the cost of electricity in Italy. It's €0.24/kwh vs $0.06/kwh in the US (at least in PA). You dont see any electric cars in Italy, and it seems super expensive to them. I’m also not sure if there is a tax on top of that €0.24 from what I remember my cousin telling me. I’m hitting a language barrier confirming this.
mjpuser··on Go + Services = One Goliath Project
I think the real problem is that they didn't properly maintain their code. Rewriting it in Go won't prevent them from dealing with this in a few years for when this Go version reaches end of life. I would have liked to see an article on "introducing process" side of programming.
mjpuser··on 23andMe to share customer gene data with GlaxoSmithKline for $300M
The cheapest I could find in 2019 was $600 by Veritas Genetics for next-gen sequencing. 23andMe is SNP testing as OP said, which is cheaper.
mjpuser··on The Demise of Physical Comedy
I dunno, man. Delivery is a thing.
mjpuser··on Frustrations with React Hooks
I think the part that is hard to grasp is that React essentially has it's own runtime tangled with JS. With the introduction of hooks, there are non JS things going on, which is why React relies on the quirk of having the same order and number of hooks in your component. It also has Suspense which allows you to exit from the render function and return to that spot, which is definitely not a feature of JS. So yea, it's weird. I think the interesting question is trying to figure out what this means for the next version of React. I would like to see if it takes a page or two out of Svelte's book.
mjpuser··on Psytrance Guide
I am in agreement with you. It seems it is more work than it's worth to develop this taxonomy.
mjpuser··on Theories of Error Back-Propagation in the Brain
I have been on similar kicks for drawing similarities between the two, but it never pans out to anything useful. I.e how does this move the science forward?

I can play devil's advocate (aka classic hacker news' commenter) and say what about inhibiting neurons? Tonic neurons? What about the ability for the brain to do recall after hearing a name once? Procedural memory? Does the relationship you point out help you understand any of these things?

mjpuser··on Current State of Python Packaging
In the link below it says, “Pipenv is recommended for collaborative projects”

https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/managing-dependencies...

mjpuser··on JIRA is an antipattern
JIRA is meant to break up work. Atlassian has another product called confluence to let you write prose, like the author wants, and you can link all these things together. When you have a group of 3 people on your team, you need to coordinate different parts of the feature into separate tasks for each developer so that they can work in parallel. This guy/girl hasn't discovered anything we don't already know.
mjpuser··on Understanding contravariance
I found this difficult to follow since it requires you to learn Haskell, but luckily typeclasses.com is a paid service to learn Haskell.
mjpuser··on It ain't about the callbacks, it's about the flow control (2013)
I agree that not having a natural flow of control is more prone programming debugging. However, he does say things that are wrong, ex: "It's impossible to slow down the pace of accepting new incoming client connections." You can slow down the pace by doing the following:

     const http = require('http');
     let count = 0;
     const THRESHOLD = 1;
     const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
       if (count++ < THRESHOLD) {
         // do work
         res.write('success');
         res.end();
         setTimeout(() => count--, 10 * 1000);
       } else {
         res.write('limit');
         res.end();
         count--;
       }
     });
     server.listen(10000);
mjpuser··on UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
I would be interested to see a proposal for a standard for establishing planetary time with the feature that you can easily convert from one planet to the other, but I have no idea how you would do that. What happens when we move to Mars with Elon? UTC would not be practical.
mjpuser··on Please Stop Using Local Storage
I agree. The only reason I can think to justify this is that the author is implying you only should use the HttpOnly flag for security reasons. Still seems odd that they don’t know you can set cookies with JS.
mjpuser··on Europe’s central banks are starting to replace dollar reserves with the yuan
I need HN’s help... What benefits do countries/governments/politicians get when their currency becomes internationally accepted?
mjpuser··on Bee-friendly insecticides closer to reality after breakthrough development
I thought that colony collapse wasn't totally caused by pesticides, but mites [1]. I'm not 100% sure why bees have been more susceptible to mites now, though. Possibly because of some lack of diversity in the environment?

[1] https://www.livescience.com/20815-honeybee-collapse-mite-vir...

mjpuser··on Redefine statistical significance
This is an interesting point considering the World Wide Web was born from the need to share scientific info.
mjpuser··on Rod Vagg's statement on the request to be removed from the Node.js CTC
No, libreboot did as well: https://libreboot.org/news/unity.html
mjpuser··on Why Does the Neocortex Have Layers and Columns, Learning the World's 3D Structure
He isn't claiming that this is how the brain works, he is just proposing a model. He describes in some of his talks that his work isn't about replicating the brain, it's about distilling algorithms from brain function/anatomy.
mjpuser··on UglifyJS 3 Released
Here are the commits. Looks like the biggest backwards compatibility issue comes from the "Drop Angular" commit. He also changed the screw_ie8 option to be called ie8 now. A few bug fixes, too, but I'm definitely paraphrasing here.

https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/compare/v2.8.23...v3.0.0

mjpuser··on STON – Smalltalk Object Notation (2012)
I'd just stick with JSON. I think the reason why JSON is so popular is that it works with most languages. This would only be compatible with object oriented languages. Adding in code blocks would only make it easily compatible with one.
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