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simonbw

553 karma · joined March 9, 2016

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simonbw··on In Defense of Latin
Heck, you can do that in English sometimes if you pause correctly and don’t mind sounding Shakespearean.

> I love you.

> You, I love.

> You, love I.

> Love you, I do.

> Love I, you.

simonbw··on Power Plant Turns Waste into Energy and Doubles as a Ski Slope and Climbing Wall
It's covered in grass so maybe they meant literally "greenest" as a joke.
simonbw··on Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption
I believe end-to-end means that the message is encrypted on the sender’s device, remains encrypted in transit and on Facebook servers, and is then only decrypted on the receiver’s device. Facebook themselves would not be able to read user’s messages.
simonbw··on A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
It's not just the comparisons, it's the additions, multiplications and divisions too. When you enter 10,000, each iteration of the loop is working with numbers 10,000 digits long. When you enter 100,000, each iteration is working with numbers 100,000 digits long, which I imagine makes every operation slower.
simonbw··on User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment
This froze and then crashed my browser (Chrome on iOS) while I was trying to type in a password. I’m not sure if that was intended, but I would definitely consider it a “worst-practice”.
simonbw··on EU government websites have undisclosed adtech trackers from Google and others
Even if that were the case, the payment wouldn't be infinite. 1% + 1% of 1% + 1% of 1% of 1% ... doesn't converge to infinity, it converges to 1.0101010101...%.
simonbw··on I'm not convinced that this wasn't the second biggest mistake of my life
I just submitted a request. I’ll post an update here if I get a response.
simonbw··on Spanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians’ Group Says
I’m not a parent so I don’t think I have a super great understanding of which punishments are most effective, but ones I can think of:

- Taking away something that they like

- scolding them

- giving them a time-out

I’m not sure if they are as effective as spanking or not, but they can all be ways of turning long-term consequences into short-term ones, and I don’t think they are vilified the same way as spanking.

My point being that the violent part of spanking is what is frowned upon, not the making-consequences-immediate part.

simonbw··on Spanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians’ Group Says
I don’t think the turning long-term consequences into short-term ones is what’s vilified about spanking. There are other ways of doing this that don’t resort to violence.
simonbw··on Rails, still?
I've made a few multiplayer games where players need to keep a game state synchronized with the server. I used redux for state and game logic, and it's been really nice to be able to share the reducers between server and client. This made it so all I had to do to keep all clients in sync was share actions across clients as they happened.

I've also found it useful to have TypeScript on client and server to be able to share types between them.

Also, when using React, Node on your server makes server-side rendering a lot easier.

simonbw··on Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
I worked at a place that did something similar. If you walked away from your unlocked computer, when you came back you might find you'd sent an email to everyone in the office saying that you're buying lunch today.
simonbw··on Tesla is laying off ‘about 9%’ of its workforce as it ‘restructures’ the company
It really seems like you do mean to make this political. GP was talking about accusations of Tesla doing something illegal. You came in and brought up political parties and the value of unions, making the discussion much more political.

To answer your question, obviously there are both pros and cons to unions (as with basically all political issues). If unionization costs jobs, and the left considers unionization a victory, it must mean that they value the other benefits gained from unionization (e.g. improved working conditions) more than the jobs lost from it.

simonbw··on JavaScript Pattern Matching Proposal
I believe in es6 Object literals are guaranteed to keep their ordering, and Object.keys() will iterate through them in the order defined.
simonbw··on Guide to Slack import and export tools
I don't find that surprising. Most of the communications I have at work are with a specific person, not with a whole channel. It's not because I don't want other people to know what I'm saying to someone, it's that I don't want to bother them with stuff that isn't relevant to them.
simonbw··on DoorDash raises $535M, now valued at $1.4B
I'm surprised I've never heard of them before. Are they doing the same thing as Uber Eats, Postmates, Eat24, GrubHub, Amazon Restaurants, etc? That seems like a really tough market to succeed in. How is so much money being funneled into it?
simonbw··on Speed Without Wizardry
> At no point does it ever cost 2^n or any x^n.

That's only true if your n is referring to the number of iterations of each loop. If your n instead refers to the number of nested loops, you will indeed get a runtime of O(2^n).

Seeing as in this context we were talking about varying the number of nested loops, it makes sense that we would define our variable n = number of nested loops.

simonbw··on Making the Most of the JavaScript Language (2016)
Is there really much of a difference between "const" and "con"? I get that one is 66% longer than the other, but does it actually affect the readability of the code or the amount of time it takes to write it?
simonbw··on Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
I think he's saying use tabs on lines A, B, and C up until the indentation level (the "int"). Then on line B use spaces for all the whitespace from there until the text is aligned.

    /*t*/int f() {
    /*tabs*/int someVariableName = myFunctionCall(expr(5),          // <--- line A
    /*tabs*//*--------------spaces--------------*/somethingElse(9), // <--- line B
    /*tabs*//*--------------spaces--------------*/a_long * expression + involving(multiple.subExprs));
    /*tabs*/int d = somethingElse; // <-- line C
    /*t*/}
simonbw··on The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator
I had this too.
simonbw··on Naughty Strings: A list of strings likely to cause issues as user-input data
Probably a 4xx error not a 5xx.
simonbw··on Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
Would their new slogan be Artificial Artificial Artificial intelligence?
simonbw··on I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years
> Why not just use first and count variables?

I think he addressed that in the post:

The most common use for ring buffers is for it to be the intermediary between a concurrent reader and writer (be it two threads, to processes sharing memory, or a software process communicating with hardware). And for that, the index + size representation is kind of miserable. Both the reader and the writer will be writing to the length field, which is bad for caching. The read index and the length will also need to always be read and updated atomically, which would be awkward.

simonbw··on Latin America is set to become a leader in alternative energy
I hovered over Luxembourg and it told me they have -6.0% non-fossil-fuel electricity.
simonbw··on Vancouver plans to tax empty properties 1% of their assessed value
Patents and trademarks maybe, but copyright? You have copyright on basically anything you create. Should I pay taxes on everything I put on github? On essays I write? What if I'm a famous artist? If I make some artwork to go in my living room, should I really pay 1% of the assessed value of that every year? If I write a book, is it not enough to pay taxes on the income I get by selling my book? Should I really have to pay taxes on it to keep it out of the public domain?
simonbw··on How Lyft screwed me out of a $350 referral bonus
The competitors that came to fill in the gaps aren't following any of the newly passed regulations from what I've heard.
simonbw··on RethinkDB needs a new home
I'm pretty sure the parent comment was joking.
simonbw··on Randstad buys Monster for $429M as recruitment consolidation continues
In general indeed gets its listings by aggregating them from across the web. They also have a lot of people post directly on their site. They also have the Job Spotter app that gives rewards to people to find and upload pictures of "Help Wanted" signs.

https://jobspotter.indeed.com/

simonbw··on Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing
He mentioned that in the article: > What's interesting is that while the most representative songs for each band are mostly their own songs, occasionally other bands songs creep in. For example, "Wrathchild", is an Iron Maiden song, not a Diamondhead song.

I don't think it's a problem with the song data. When the algorithm picks a song it considers most lyrically representative of a band, it chooses from all the songs in the dataset, and it doesn't always pick a song by that band.

simonbw··on The FBI Is Classifying Its Tor Browser Exploit
If the FBI let people know what vulnerability is, the vulnerability could be fixed, which would result in fewer people understanding how to break tor.

The FBI doesn't want the vulnerability to be fixed though, which is why they classified it.

simonbw··on Apple launches coding camps for kids in its retail stores
The answer given by the article:

However, that app [Swift Playground] is aimed at slightly older children – those aged 12 and up.

But I have no idea if that's the real reason.

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