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ovis

615 karma · joined February 21, 2013

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ovis··on We Can Terraform the American West
From a map I found[0], it looks like Sweden has an average annual temperature of around +5⁰C, and northern Ontario and Quebec are closer to -5⁰C?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...

ovis··on Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart
Do you consider implementing an interface to be subclassing? And if so, what's the OO alternative? Prototypes?
ovis··on West Coast Trail – The 75km/48 mile hike in Vancouver Island (2021)
It's rugged! 6-8 days is typical, according to Parks Canada: https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/bc/pacificrim/activ/SCO-WCT
ovis··on Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
At least according to Amazon,

"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."

(From the announcement.)

ovis··on Tesla stopped reporting its Autopilot safety numbers online. Why?
It's not necessarily unrealistic. It only takes one terrible driver to drag down the mean and make everyone else better than average!
ovis··on The case for dynamic, functional programming
"This website" referred to Hacker News itself, which is written in a Lisp (Arc).
ovis··on Ask HN: Functional vs. Imperative Implementation of Algorithms
> But they don't mutate data and hence every function call creates a new data in memory taking up space.

Well, only if you mutate the data. And even then, most functional languages provide persistent data structures that allow efficient sharing of the unchanged parts of the data structure.

> Now my question is where do I learn about these nitty gritty's? Should I read about compilers more? Or systems? Or what?

I'd recommend choosing a functional language and an imperative language and learning both.

ovis··on Processing billions of events in real time
For some reason I'm kind of sad seeing Twitter's (very cool) homegrown technologies in the "Old" diagram with the "New" architecture basically Google Cloud. I'm sure it makes sense internally, but it feels like the loss of an innovation center in the streaming space.
ovis··on Weird Languages
From the article,

> [Lisp macros] by their nature would be hard to implement properly in a language without turning it into a dialect of Lisp

Other candidates that come to mind (because I recently learned about them) are effect systems, like in Koka.

ovis··on Sorbet Compiler: An experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby
To clear up a possible misunderstanding, CPython != Cython.
ovis··on Thread Pools on the JVM
What benefits does loom provide vs using something like cats-effect fibres?
ovis··on Scala 3.0
Do you think IDEs would have grown support for them before they were a language feature?
ovis··on Kafka without ZooKeeper
One advantage of Kafka is the ecosystem effect. There are many systems (Flink, Kafka Streams, Pinot, Druid, Presto, etc) that connect to Kafka. I'm not sure about the extent of Pulsar support here, although I'd love to learn more!
ovis··on Kafka without ZooKeeper
1. That's untrue. Partitions are limited to what a machine may handle, but topics may be scaled across many ordered partitions.

2. This is generally handled by the client library transparently. Have you ever needed to manage this state manually?

ovis··on A “Better C” Benchmark
How would you structure it (in broad strokes)?
ovis··on Dire wolves were not wolves, new genetic clues reveal
They may be using the term "dog" to refer to Caninae (or Canidae?) rather than wolf-derived pets, judging by the description of the phylogeny.
ovis··on Rust: The Error Handling Project Group
It's interesting that I could write your last sentence, but replacing "exceptions" with "monadic error handling."

Ultimately, both are equally expressive and it's reasonable to personally prefer either. The "Result" type approach maps better to the concept of a program as a series of inputs and outputs (functions).

ovis··on Classes are a way of writing higher order functions
> In the functional example, where does Person store the fName and lName variables?

With a closure? And you get state hiding too.

> If functions persist data, are they really classified as functions anymore?

Sure, since otherwise returning a function from a function wouldn't be very interesting.

ovis··on World's oldest fossil trees uncovered in New York
Perhaps they know the stratigraphic relationship between the sites and can estimate that way? (If one fossil is above another and you can rule out faulting or overturning, then you know which is younger.)
ovis··on Grise Fiord, Canada's most northerly community
We do! Sometimes. A lot of places in Nunavut use that spelling - just a historical oddity I suppose.
ovis··on Texas Is Latest State to Pump the Brakes on Red-Light Cameras
Doesn't the fellow who sees the camera footage and issues a ticket qualify?
ovis··on New Taxes and Higher Density Aren't Fixing Vancouver's Housing Problem
The common refrain that Vancouver is experiencing an exodus due to housing costs is a bit contentious: https://biv.com/article/2019/02/housing-related-brain-drain-...

I'd be interested to learn about other objective studies on this.

ovis··on Show HN: Snowy – a new image library for Python
Given than a numpy array could contain lots of different kinds of data, how do you tell whether you're passing something image-like? Seems like even a thin wrapper could prevent some stupid mistakes.
ovis··on Structural engineers are unsung heroes
In some places, yes. Ontario, for example, imposes hefty fines on individuals who use the an engineering title without accreditation.
ovis··on US Electric Car Sales Report
Reliable might be an open question, and something 2-3 times the price of a Corolla or Civic is affordable to a very particular demographic.
ovis··on From Markdown to remote code execution in Atom
The title was changed after the original post.
ovis··on Planet Explorer Beta
There are a few (including USGS Earth Explorer and Astro Digital), but https://remotepixel.ca/projects/satellitesearch.html has one of the nicer interfaces.
ovis··on Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'
I was chatting with a colleague last summer, and asking him for more details about a method he had published that I was having trouble reproducing. After pointing me to a few papers that didn't include the relevant details, hefinally told me that "if we told everyone about how it was done, anyone could do it."

While at the time I was pretty upset with him, perhaps it's the competitive nature of science and funding that also gives people a mild incentive to be secretive.

In this case, simply publishing code would have resolved the questions.

ovis··on Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?
My favorite would be https://www.remotepixel.ca, which is both beautiful and full of high quality and useful work.
ovis··on An Introduction to Machine Learning in Julia
I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't much detail given about the problem being attacked, and no information about the results other than some timings. Sure, Julia's nice, but what are we looking at here?

Also, there's talk about how slick this is when using IJulia notebooks. It would be cool to provide a link to an actual notebook.

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