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patrickmclaren

293 karma · joined September 9, 2009

http://www.patrickmclaren.com/
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patrickmclaren··on The “Lab Leak”: It’s Not Enough to Say Accidents Happen
Agree. In this regard, think about how procedures changed following Chernobyl, or consider how the various "Broken Arrow" events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...) have influence nuclear policy.
patrickmclaren··on Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors
Can you expand on how this would come to be, in practice?
patrickmclaren··on Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)
Valid. Different messaging for different markets perhaps!
patrickmclaren··on Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)
I think the best angle is the one given in the title: 90% less greenhouse emissions, 99% less water, and 93% less land.

This is an approach that provides compelling meal options in a manner that scales much better than our traditional livestock methods.

patrickmclaren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2019)
Privy | Boston, MA | ONSITE, Full-time | https://privy.com/careers

Privy enables over 300,000 e-commerce businesses to improve their on-site conversions and marketing campaigns. We're building the leading marketing automation platform for the e-commerce industry.

We have open positions for engineers with experience in Ruby and/or React:

- Software Engineer II: https://grnh.se/921b23f32

- Senior Software Engineer / Lead: https://grnh.se/979979f42

- Principal Software Engineer / Architect: https://grnh.se/181611fc2

Stack: React, Redux, Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Redis, Heroku, MongoDB

Apply via the links above, or get in touch with jen+hnfeb19(at)privy.com.

patrickmclaren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
Privy | Boston, MA | ONSITE, Full-time | https://privy.com/careers

Privy enables over 200,000 online stores and online publishers to improve their on-site conversions and marketing campaigns.

React + Ruby on Rails - Get in touch at engineering+applicants(aahht)privy.com

patrickmclaren··on I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Not OP, but I've gone through the E3 process a couple times. First as a change of status, second as a new applicant. You have to prove two things: 1) the job is a specialty occupation, and 2) that you possess the necessary skills and qualifications for the position. The rest of the application is a walk in the park.

Regarding the general perception of E3, I've found that very few people in the U.S. know about the E3 visa class. You may need to educate your employer a little.

patrickmclaren··on The art of over-engineering your side projects
IMO, there's room for both approaches, perhaps with the exclusion of the most the irrational situations as you describe. It's unreasonable to expect engineers to bring battle-tested solutions to the table 100% of the time.
patrickmclaren··on Tanzania becomes the latest country to use Zipline drones for medical deliveries
While drones are indeed still susceptible to a multitude of bad weather scenarios in the air, they do bypass several major scenarios on the ground that frequently interrupt supply lines like flooding, fires, avalanches, etc.
patrickmclaren··on Keep the Internet Open
The parent comment didn't make the case that the CEOs of these companies are Republicans - they were referring to the beneficiaries of the lobbying.
patrickmclaren··on Java 8: New features in ConcurrentHashMap
Definitely agree with that. Was looking for a page in the overview section, to drop a link, but that entire topic seems to be gone?
patrickmclaren··on Java 8: New features in ConcurrentHashMap
Scala still has several differences to Java including a stronger type system, traits, pattern matching, and implicits (love them or hate them.) Java is definitely closing the gap on some of the functional aspects though.

Edit: Where did the basic docs on type bounds in Scala go?

patrickmclaren··on An Introduction to Geometric Topology [pdf]
This construction makes for a nice undergrad talk. Back when I was in college, my math club held a "Brisk walk through Topology" lecture and was able to pull a fairly large audience from both the Math and CS colleges.
patrickmclaren··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas!
patrickmclaren··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
You may run into issues if the petitioner is the same as the beneficiary.
patrickmclaren··on Magic mushrooms found to lift severe depression in clinical trial
Agreed. One might say to take the conclusion with a grain of salt, but "next to useless" is being overly dismissive.
patrickmclaren··on “I must, sadly, withdraw my endorsement of Yubikey 4 devices”
Amazon comes to mind.
patrickmclaren··on Scala Native
Note that I am not concerned about the fact that the project was started by one person, nor am I dismissing it altogether.

The author of this project is most definitely a smart and capable individual. However, at some point this project will reach a point where it requires more work than one individual can achieve, hence the question regarding official support - is there any financing, plans for new contributors, etc.

patrickmclaren··on Scala Native
Will Lightbend be supporting this project in any way?

The reason I ask is that I see on GitHub that you are the only contributor so far. This project is quite a large commitment for a single person, I'm hesitant to play around with Scala Native without knowing more about future plans for support, milestones, etc.

Having said that, this project looks awesome. Nice work so far!

patrickmclaren··on SpaceX plans to debut Red Dragon with 2018 Mars mission
Indeed, new human colonies on other planets will not be immune to our existing problems.
patrickmclaren··on CV of Failures [pdf]
I wouldn't bother with a direct answer to that question.
patrickmclaren··on Show HN: I made a Hacker News for podcasts
Try thinking a long the lines of "get the ball rolling", when designing interfaces where some regions must start from a blank slate, e.g. use placeholders, prompts, etc.
patrickmclaren··on Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report
Keep in mind that canaries do not preclude false negatives, especially in larger organizations.
patrickmclaren··on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
Just upvote, in this case, no need for 'me too' or +1s.
patrickmclaren··on VNC Roulette
Huvudmeny: Main Menu

Frysrum: Freezer

Maskinrum: Engine

Fryshus: Cold Storage

patrickmclaren··on Morning seems to be the best time to post on Reddit
I wonder if there is any east coast bias in high-ranking submissions.
patrickmclaren··on How much is Spotify paying Google Cloud?
I agree that the current graphs from Spotify don't support this. They do seem to show a one-to-one mapping between events and messages emitted. Given the comparison in my GP, I think that client-side message collation/aggregation would be a natural next step.
patrickmclaren··on How much is Spotify paying Google Cloud?
Note by "queuing and batching" Spotify may be aggregating events client-side. Given that messages are priced in 64K increments, it would be most cost efficient to to get each message as close to 64K as possible.

i.e.

  # serialized: 1 message, 1 op
  publish("['foo', 'bar']")
  
  # instead of:
  
  # a) 2 messages, 2 ops
  publish("foo")
  publish("bar")
  
  # b) 2 messages, 1 call, 2 ops
  publish("foo", "bar")
patrickmclaren··on Show HN: Collapse Comments on Hacker News
These two approaches don't need to be exclusive. Community workarounds such as this can also function as building blocks for discussion.
patrickmclaren··on I analyzed 250 SaaS pricing pages
I wonder if withholding pricing information is simply a negotiation tactic that exploits the sunk cost fallacy. If not, funnel conversion rates should be invariant of the stage at which pricing is disclosed, right?
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