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shurane

187 karma · joined June 5, 2010

New York City
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shurane··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Sounds a lot like vim/emacs modelines. This is neat for standalone scripts.
shurane··on The new calculus of AI-based coding
Man hearing that depresses me. Some people really overcomplicate things.
shurane··on How to Do Great Work
> And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies.

Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit.

Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc.

Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.

shurane··on The technology behind GitHub’s new code search
This is pretty neat. Feels like real time full text search. The user interface really reminds me of https://hn.algolia.com as well.
shurane··on Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)
I guess there is a lost art of writing for optimal code/memory/execution time, especially as our resources increase.

I think the idea here is to write code quickly that's inefficient, and re-write it to be efficient if the performance is required down the line. For companies where there's bigger fish to fry, i.e. customer acquisition, it's more useful to pump out more features (even at the expense of bugs) because that draws customers.

But in places where performance is important, you do see developers squeeze out more cycles/memory. I.e. kernel/OS development, database servers, video games. It's just that most developers aren't in those areas of specialty anymore.

Btw, have you heard of https://handmade.network/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene ? Wondering what your thoughts are in those areas. There are probably more communities like the ones I mentioned, where developers are interested in writing the kind of code that you are talking about.

shurane··on Amazon Pip Horror Story
Makes it sound like working in Amazon builds character, so you can know how good you have it elsewhere.

Which is a good idea in itself, but seems like it's best to just skip on that experience. Kind of like a type 2 kind of fun.

I've also heard of good experiences at Amazon, so maybe it's just particular organizations inside it that suffer a lot from this problem?

shurane··on OpenLGTV: Legal reverse engineering and research of LG TVs firmware
This is like the Kindle with Ads model from Amazon. You can pay Amazon an extra $20 (or request via support) to not have advertisements on the device forever. Or save a few bucks and deal with the occasional ad. And from what I can tell, the Kindle with Ads is still a pretty popular product.
shurane··on How to learn mathematics: the asterisk method
Have you ever tried learning a spoken language by doing this? Like another commenter mentioned, it sounds a lot like Anki Spaced Repetition. It's very cool that you just rediscovered it, though.
shurane··on Leaving Google
I think there's a point to make on good PMs. Those are totally worth their weight.

The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.

shurane··on Manim – an animation engine for explanatory math videos
Is this a previewer for manim? Really reminds me of https://bl.ocks.org/, https://observablehq.com/, https://asciinema.org/, and https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/.

Really enjoy these kinds of tools. Though I wish you didn't need an account to preview or upload content to manim.

shurane··on Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense.

I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.

shurane··on macOS unable to open any non-Apple application
Are you talking about the Superfish vulnerability? It's never affected the business class Thinkpad lines [1], but it has affected a lot of the other laptops that Lenovo has shipped.

[1]: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/ps500035-s...

shurane··on Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
Is python the worst for package management?

I thought C and C++ might have similar issues since there's no unified package management there either.

shurane··on Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
Is it 1GB of text + source code? I can't imagine that much plaintext from one person unless binaries, images music, or video is involved. Github Pages is probably fine for most people even with the 1GB limit.

Btw, cool website. I didn't realize there's an N64 homebrew game development scene until looking at your blog.

shurane··on Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
This is pretty nice. It's effectively working as a blocklist from top domains.

It would be interesting to see a curated version with an allowlist of domains as well, like how Angelfire and friends in the 90s used to be with a "web ring" of peer websites.

shurane··on Writing Is Thinking (2014)
This makes me think about how Yahoo Groups is shutting down in December 2020. Or Geocities in the past. All the content on both platforms is user generated.

The companies that offered those services have the right to shut it down. It's not really a public utility that's funded by the people using it or tax payers or anything like that.

It's up to each individual to archive what is important for them. But a lot of what we publish online is across different devices and on different platforms. It's not as easy to manage all that data as it could be.

shurane··on Apple surpasses Saudi Aramco to become the most valuable company
I think for some search terms, SEO and AMP support make a difference on how high your website ranks against other search results. I think it encourages a certain kind of website (referral links, modest length article with buzzwords, lists with not a lot of depth).

These aren't advertisements, but I think they feel a lot like an advertisement in terms of what Google encourages others to post on their website.

shurane··on How Did Vim Become So Popular?
So I am a fan of vim and have used it on and off for 15 years at this point. I generally use IDEs or VSCode these days instead for writing code. Here's my take.

I think the popularity of learning vim might be similar to what jiggawatts mentions as the 'perception of speed', especially for tools in the UNIX world, as well as being 'the hard way' like you mention. But I think there is value in learning how to use vim. I see the advantages of learning vim are programming language agnostic. Vim is focused around words and text, treating them as objects, and creating a mental map of keystrokes to modify those objects. I think it's somewhat analogous to typists that hunt-and-peck vs touch typists. Opens up a lot of productivity, but it's definitely not needed to be a writer.

I agree vim has many limitations. It has a not so great language for scripting, no out of the box setup for stuff like refactoring or renaming symbols in your codebase, GUI feels like a second class citizen (IMO, compared to the terminal version). In a lot of ways, it might not hold a candle to the likes of VSCode, Atom, Visual Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.

The nice thing is that you could add a vim-like plugin to any of those IDEs/editors to match the spirit of vim, at least in terms of navigation. It's not like you need to stay in vim to reap the benefits of the mental model.

I think that's where a lot of the power and appeal of vim is. Vim is still drawing a new generation of programmers, artists, and hobbyists to learn this strange text editor, with its unique but powerful way of interacting with text.

shurane··on The End of the Redis Adventure
I think video games fit in the area of 'completed software'. Most video games today rarely see updates a few years after they're released. And older video games were on read only mediums, so you would hope whatever you release is very stable and feature complete.
shurane··on Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers
Are there many different styles for teaching Linear Algebra, though?

I'd definitely be interested in seeing how different resources teach it.

shurane··on Thank You, Guido
Wow,surprised to see this at a local meetup in Seattle. Thought it would be a kind of event for a much bigger venue.
shurane··on TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free
Link to a preview of the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1U2Eyep_4
shurane··on Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
This is going to be one of those threads that I'll upvote and bookmark and then not revisit till years later.

Any idea on how to start setting aside time to take a MOOC? For those of you taking a MOOC, how do you structure your week? It's been years since I've been in college.

shurane··on Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
Sounds a lot like what http://www.rubymotion.com/ was doing for iOS apps.
shurane··on Cycling to work can cut cancer and heart disease, says study
Any thoughts on soft shell pants? http://snarkynomad.com/soft-shell-jeans-the-worlds-greatest-...

I definitely miss not having chain guard and fenders with Seattle weather, but have switched over to a raincoat and boots for biking. Waterproofing the commute is totally worth it.

shurane··on Div Turakhia has sold his seventh business, Media.net, for $900M
This sounds like a plug piece about this person's life. Great, he sold a company for a large sum of money, he's stood on the top of a moving plane, he's played some video games. This article very flagrantly displays his wealth, and goes into so little detail on the business. And the staged photos alongside this are equally ridiculous.

unfortunately, this is more a "rich kids of Silicon Valley" than anything else.

shurane··on Introducing Instagram Stories
It's funny you mention that, because I know more people who use Instagram than Snapchat. Could be an age demographic? What I do know is my friends who use Snapchat don't use the stories mode, relying on sending direct snaps to the people they want to send it to. Not the case with Instagram.
shurane··on Creating Shakespearean n-grams with just the command-line and regexes
This is pretty cool. I found the chapter from Norvig pretty useful, didn't realize word segmentation was so approachable.

Have you heard of "Unix for Poets"? It also focuses on command line programs to pick up n-grams. There is also a segment on C.

Link: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/kwc-unix-for-poets.pdf

shurane··on People Call Me Aaron
Is there really that much celebrity status thumping for programmers in SF? Maybe in particular circles, but I want to believe that SF has more diversity in tech than that.
shurane··on The future of news is not an article
Doesn't trust factor into this? I have friends that I would trust with asking for fitness related information/suggestions. I may end up doing more research on my own, but I trust those friends to leave out doing a lot of the work myself, even if their agendas don't align with my own.

And when I don't have friends to ask about a particular subject, I might end up going to an online community like HN or a subreddit to ask individuals or groups of individuals those questions.

I tend to trust people who don't have a profit motive more than I do a big company which has an incentive on pushing their product.

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