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pitchedon Cull your dependencies

How much time would it take to replace those thousand lines? A week (assuming well tested and production-ready is a requirement)? If keeping it costs a couple hours of debugging once a month, the return on that week would take years to turn positive.

pitchedon Cull your dependencies

I have written a matrix multiplication lib once because I had some a priori about the data and could remove half the operations.

Everything has a cost (usually in time) and everything comes with trade offs (usually a different set of bugs). Not-invented-here comes with a gigantic upfront time cost and a larger set of bugs. The best heuristic depends on what you’re optimizing for. There’s never an easy answer.

pitchedon uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.

pitchedon Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

This is the best explanation of proof-of-stake I've seen yet! Thank you! This does sound just like minimum karma limits to me though. Per-community karma though instead of the global kind that Reddit uses.

pitchedon Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

10c of crypto mining is about 30 minutes on an RTX 3090. It would have to be a much, much lower cost!

pitchedon Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

This is a really interesting use-case. I don’t think posting spam is really a zero-cost thing though. So we wouldn’t be adding a cost, we would be increasing it. So I guess the big question is, how much can we charge per post that spammers couldn’t afford but wouldn’t scare away actual community members?

pitchedon Books I’ve read

I agree and do read 3x more fiction than not but it is an interest axis to balance on. Like, how did it get to be that everyone is expected to read more fake stories than real ones?

The negative tense of the name “non-fiction” is interesting too. The original categorizers must also not have thought too highly of it.

pitchedon Success begets success: what are the basic heuristics of success?

1% _max_ per day might be a good rule of thumb to stop when you’re ahead. 1% _min_ per day would be a death march!

pitchedon Success begets success: what are the basic heuristics of success?

Peak performance is how you get a job. When someone can only see a couple hours of you, that’s what they should get. You boost this with a large dose of coffee.

Average performance is how you ship high-quality products. It’s the set of things you do every day consistently. You boost this with good sleep, diet and excersize.

pitchedon Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination

This description reminds me a lot of the fluid vs crystallized intelligence. The way that’s always been described to me is that younger people always have a faster brain but as we age, we can make up for our slowness in having a lot of experience to draw on.

pitchedon Ask HN: Is it ok to reject a job because I don’t like their software?

Scrum Master with capitals means that someone bought a course and that someone is probably in management, not product. All of Agile with capital comes from a distrust of management against their engineers, that management knows better how the engineers should be spending their time than they do.

To be fair, agile with lowercase does have some really good ideas in it. It’s the distrust that’s a problem, not the system that gets chosen.

pitchedon Bill Gates' Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit Basic

I think some of this was recently confirmed/debunked by Bill Gates himself: https://youtu.be/VjPAfdkBprk

pitchedon 717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch

I had the same experience with the Mona Lisa too. Even going in not expecting to get much out of the experience, it really popped, even on the other side of a crowded room.

I wonder if it has a bit to do with it being 3D too, where the edges of paint strokes might catch the light a bit differently than under a scanner.

pitchedon Charm – Tools to make the command line glamorous

I feel like this is kind of missing the main goal of command-line apps being string-in/string-out. With modal text dialogs, you can’t awk/grep/sed your way through automations anymore. And is it really easier to code than a real GUI?

The SSH angle is neat though. It works much better then vnc/parsec at lower bandwidths.

pitchedon Ask HN: How / where to learn practical electrical / electronics?

I think that building kits is about the equivalent to software tutorials. They might help with technique a bit but it’s a very passive way of learning and leads to the same kind of “tutorial hell” when you start your own projects.

For the more active form of learning, it’s the exact kind of just diving in that you’re worried about. Maybe, instead of worrying about breaking things though, order extra parts so you have spares to pop. That’s risk management but in the opposite direction you’re leaning towards.

pitchedon Alphabet's Calico has begun trials on a molecule for neurodegenerative diseases

The scariest (potential) downside to nootropics to me is an increased risk of cancer. Because if your normal cells are healthier, cancerous cells are also healthier. As a younger person, cancer is less of a risk so nootropics are less of a risk too.

So I was curious, with that in mind, where the free lunch drugs are? As in, which ones did you enjoy most and why stop taking them?

pitchedon An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering

I’m not sure this is a crypto-specific problem, like TFA implies. Using a currency you don’t control is giving up a lot of power over your own economy. Wasn’t there a similar issue like this a few years ago in Greece because they use the Euro and couldn’t adjust to inflation because of that?

pitchedon Ask HN: What websites do you use to find cutting edge information?

What are some sites you use for this? Curious for myself to check out, I don’t mean to be mean with the question.

I haven’t seen RSS feeds being advertised like this in a long time. I think people mostly use email newsletters instead now. Email is also easy to filter into groups like that though.

pitchedon Ask HN: Burned Out. What Now?

I’ve heard it said that burnout is: exhaustion, inefficacy and depersonalization. It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time on the second cause and maybe the third one. If you’re exhausted too on top of that, some time off before working back up efficacy is very helpful.

pitchedon Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

I have trouble with this too! Lately, I’ve been trying to use podcasts instead of YouTube videos. Audio-only means I can also close my eyes and feel a bit more rested afterwards too!

pitchedon The specs behind the specs – a deep-dive on ASN.1

Where EMV uses tags more like classes than types, I’m not really sure it actually counts as “abstract” syntax notation any more?

Because all tags are these custom things, some don’t strictly parse out to unique type codes too. So a non-EMV parser will have a few tags that map to the same integer code and cause some fun bugs.

That project was when I really understood deep-down why JSON won in the end!

pitchedon Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service

When I want all the details, I look for a full book. When I want the summary, I check Wikipedia. Articles are somewhere between. Either something is too new or obscure/niche or not quite worth the time investment of a book.

So I think you’re right but it isn’t the medium that’s dead. More like, it takes up a weird spot on the ROI curve to read through that’s rarely worth the time.

pitchedon YouTube and Twitter delete Joe Rogan interview with scientist

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

No need to downplay it by calling it “horse dewormer” now that we know where the correlations come from. “human dewormer” might be more accurate!

pitchedon Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2021?

I’ve yet to ever listen to a podcast episode twice, but this Akira the Done album is basically Naval’s podcast set to music and I’ve listened to it too many times now: https://open.spotify.com/album/4SGFW7Rig34Me2NPPA7Eur

pitchedon Italian Courts Find Open Source Software Terms Enforceable

At 100$/day (or 300 after the first 15 days), I wonder how large the app has to be before violating the GPL won’t bother them anymore? I can see a medium-sized business just treating this as a rent/cost-of-business instead of a fine.

pitchedon Microsoft forked MIT licensed repo and changed the copyright [fixed]

So the only part of the repo that is legitimately copyrighted by Microsoft is the Microsoft copyright notice? I love how meta this is.

pitchedon Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

I’m having a bit of trouble what “Auntie/Uncle problem” is in reference to. My Google search are just a bit too generic to narrow in. Any chance you know of an article on the subject I can read through?

pitchedon How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis [pdf]

They did point that out in the abstract. The data sources being school policy changes and school-age cutoffs does probably help a lot to prove the direction though.

pitchedon Carolina Gold was once the most popular rice grown in America (2019)

This one seems popular too: https://ansonmills.com/products/23

pitchedon Optimizing Your Wife

The whole thing is assuming you can only date/interview one person at a time. Taking time as finite, the question of N is more about how long it takes you to evaluate a candidate.

Brides.com says that most people date 1-3 years before proposing. Shortest I’ve ever broken up with someone is a few months so that should probably be shortened a bit. CDC.gov says the mean age or marriage is a touch under 30. If that is the first third, our dating age is about 20-50, which is probably a bit too wide if kids are on the table. So I’m going to say N is somewhere between 10-50, with the lower end of the range much more likely for.