Hacker News Reader

udpon Yarn Plug'n'Play: Getting rid of node_modules

> A big "aha" moment for me with node_modules was figuring out that it's an entirely separate system from npm.

I wish this was true. My workflow from back in the early days of node has always been to `npm install` external dependencies, then `npm link` (symlink) the dependencies I'm working on. But npm >= v5 removes such symlinks if I `npm install` anything afterwards. I spend a significant amount of my time re-linking what npm install unlinked.

Usually when I hit a problem like this it's because I'm things have moved on and I'm doing something wrong. But when an npm developer says "consider npm as it is to be broken" and closes the issue [1], I'm not so sure.

[1] https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17287#issuecomment-4008339...

udpon Announcing TypeScript 3.0

You can use any regular JS library from typescript. You just won't get type checking in calls to it.

udpon Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

It's still the same in the UK as it always was, just plus this credit thing. If you're maverick enough you can dodge it by being a good enough researcher that they aren't going to kick you out for not attending workshops, but that's probably going to get harder. Most people cram enough workshops into one week at the end of each year to get the necessary credits to "progress".

You can also get credits for publications and attending conferences, but the credits you can get like that are capped at about 20% of what you need. So you can have 10 publications in a year and still need to attend workshops.

udpon Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

> What you're describing as what you didn't expect is how PhDs were done traditionally. It's the more recent US model to have classes and exams.

Classes and exams in a PhD programme? I've never heard of this anywhere - I had no idea that was a thing in the US.

There is an ugly trend in the UK to having "credits" for attending workshops as part of your "personal development". You basically have to go and sit in a workshop pretending to listen to someone talking about academic writing so that some admin can tick a box. Considering even postdocs and RAs have to write reports on how their "personal development" is progressing I don't think the powers that be will be happy until everyone can be placed into a spreadsheet.

udpon The Unleashed Operating System

Well, they’ve used CSS to do that. If they’d just left it alone it would have been fine.

udpon Thousands Say Kratom Cured Their Addiction, Government Says It’s Another Opioid

> Of course there are a lot of legal addictives - like a whole range of mood altering drugs like Xanax, Prozac, etc. - which are far worse long term.

Xanax is a benzo and is addictive, but Prozac is an SSRI. SSRIs are not addictive, and aren't even interesting recreationally because they don't make you feel anything good.

udpon In MySQL, don’t use “utf8”, use “utf8mb4” (2016)

There’s nothing wrong with slicing at the byte level if you’re slicing with a delimiter like \n or “. UTF-8 sets high bits so continuation bytes never look like ASCII characters.

udpon Apple introduces macOS Mojave

You missed the joke.

udpon Data serialization

I used to think binary formats for network protocols were a really good idea until I found out how big the TCP header itself can be. Saving a few bytes from your payload by using binary representations of integers doesn't make a huge difference when the TCP header is 60 bytes.

udpon Data serialization

Regarding JSON, this page says:

> Performance is not good when dataset is huge. Program usually needs to load all data into memory first.

This is just downright false. There are plenty of SAX-style JSON parsers.

udpon Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease

We'll worry about that once ALL of the rescue hens are living in our backyards. Plenty to go around for now...

udpon Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease

Not even remotely similar. Goats (and cows) need to be pregnant to produce milk, which is why you inevitably end up with offspring as a by-product of milk production. Hens lay eggs regardless of whether a rooster is present, so if you get some rescue hens you can enjoy your eggs guilt-free.

udpon Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease

You need exactly zero roosters per flock if you're only after eggs.

udpon Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease

Totally agree, they're great fun. :-)

It's also why I don't agree with the moral argument for veganism - happy hens lay eggs too and eggs gotta be eaten!

udpon Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease

> The B vitamins in them come from supplementing their mothers with synthetics.

Nitpick: eggs don't have mothers because eggs are not offspring.

udpon Curated List of Privacy Respecting Services and Software

> I am open to ideas on how to improve the list.

You could start by making all of the entries link to some 'proof' on why the service is either privacy respecting or privacy breaching.

udpon Curated List of Privacy Respecting Services and Software

"You are the product" seems a bit strong for Dropbox. Pretty sure Dropbox is the product and I pay for it.

Same goes for Siri AFAIK - I don't personally have any use for it, but it's a feature of the iPhone that you pay for and isn't ad/targeted ad supported.

udpon German scientists harvest their first Antarctic salad

Yet another website asking my browser to allow push notifications. I respond to this request as so:

    echo "127.0.0.1 livescience.com www.livescience.com" >> /etc/hosts

(Apart from being annoying, it's a pretty good indicator that the website isn't worth bothering with.)

udpon Elephant 'smoking' footage baffles experts

I think everyone is in agreement about what "vegetarian" means apart from you.

Vegetarians don't eat the flesh of animals, and it's always been like that. Eggs and milk are animal products, not the flesh of animals - so vegetarians can still eat them. Vegans don't eat animal products at all, which rules out eggs and milk. Pescatarians eat fish, but they aren't vegetarians.

So if N is the number of distinct foods you can eat, N(pescatarians) > N(vegetarians) > N(vegans).

Is there anything in particular about this that you find difficult to understand? I can model it as an ontology for you, perhaps?

udpon Elephant 'smoking' footage baffles experts

A vegetarian diet has never included fish. You’re thinking of pescatarianism.

udpon Benchmarking OS primitives

IOCP is very complicated to code against, though. kqueue can do nearly all the same things and is both much cleaner and more portable.

udpon Why Can't Everyone Do the 'Asian Squat'?

There are two different kind of cross-legged being described here - the OP means sitting in a chair with your right leg on top of your left, while the reply mentions the floor which suggests the feet-under-thighs position.

I can confirm that the former is considered effeminate by some in the UK. The latter perhaps childish.

udpon China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab

> It's really N>>2.

N bitwise right shift 2 positions?

udpon The Making of Apple’s Emoji

> At least that is the case for Swype on iOS

The stock iOS keyboard also does this.

udpon Fish: A user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, etc

It would be great if Fish supported &&. I know it has its own syntax for this but it's not particularly fun going through a command you copy pasted from elsewhere and swapping out all the &&s (I usually just end up firing up bash).

udpon To Fight Revenge Porn, Facebook Is Asking to See Your Nudes

Even the source on the original article you linked to isn't from Facebook. I can't track down a single citation for anyone from Facebook saying "send pictures to yourself and flag them".

udpon To Fight Revenge Porn, Facebook Is Asking to See Your Nudes

Absolute clickbait. Facebook is allowing you to flag pictures you have already shared in messages as something that you don't want to be shared any further. They are not asking you to upload pictures they don't already have, even if according to the article you can do this by starting a messenger conversation with yourself. No idea why this is being upvoted.

udpon Show HN: /usr/bin/htop

> Seashells isn't currently open-source (the goal was to have a hosted version to make it easy for people to pipe non-sensitive data). In the next version, I'm planning on adding end-to-end password-based encryption.

Obviously it's your decision, but any particular reason it's not open source? I can't imagine it being commercially viable.

udpon Interactive Vim tutorial

The single thing you need to do to learn vim is to download the ViEmu cheatsheet[0], print it out, and stick it on the wall where you can see it. Printing it out is mandatory - you need to be able to see it without switching windows.

Putting things up on the wall is like a free, albeit static, extra monitor. :-)

[0] http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif

udpon Sublime Text 3.0

Just because it's a GUI doesn't mean you have to use the mouse. I find gvim much faster than vim in the terminal because it doesn't have to print a screen full of glyphs for each update.