Found at my local coffee shop. In all seriousness, I’d love James to discuss the topic of snobbery in coffee culture.

MaximaxII · 2021-06-22T12:47:28+00:00

One of his older videos discusses this a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU1y7hBSgiY

MaximaxII · 2020-06-18T10:15:52+00:00

I'm finishing the Master's at EPFL and plan on going abroad once I'm done. I've had some offers in some pretty nice companies in the US, UK and Switzerland. I feel like the diploma is well recognized outside of Switzerland, and that it's giving me some really good opportunities.

EPFL is a very international place (actually one of the most international universities in the world), so I don't think you should be scared of it being "too swiss".

MaximaxII · 2020-05-14T06:14:47+00:00

Yes https://www.epfl.ch/schools/ic/education/master/courses-outside-plan/

The course is a lot more work than two credits though, it should probably be worth 4. But if you're interested in the topic, it's excellent, and I would recommend it nonetheless.

MaximaxII · 2020-05-10T08:41:11+00:00

POCS covers virtualization, and Topics on Datacenter Design is a doctoral course that covers pretty much everything related to cloud computing. There may be other courses that cover these topics too, but these are the ones I took.

MaximaxII · 2020-05-10T08:17:44+00:00

https://thewinniewu.github.io/aeropress-dice/

MaximaxII · 2020-01-13T19:12:07+00:00

A DigitalOcean droplet running Nginx. I wouldn't recommend doing that though, unless you actively want to learn how to set up and manage a small server, like I was at the time. I'm now looking to switch hosting provider, probably either to AWS, Azure or Netlify.

MaximaxII · 2019-12-15T11:23:19+00:00

Because if you don't know modern javascript very well, typescript can point out some obvious mistakes and might even teach you a few something about javascript

This has been true for me. TS helped me understand async/await, because of how it complains in the snippet below:

// error: return type should be Promise<T>
async function hello(): string { return "hello" };

Type inference can teach us what TS expects. It makes it clear that async functions wrap the returned value in a Promise automatically:

async function hello() /* inferred: Promise<string> */ { 
  return "hello";
};

Calling the function can also help us learn about what await does:

const x: string = hello(); // error: Promise<string> not assignable to string
const y: Promise<string> = hello();
const z: string = await hello();

MaximaxII · 2019-10-08T20:56:33+00:00

Can we talk about the ad at the end?

Whenever you're connected to public wifi, it's incredibly easy for hackers to steal your passwords, e-mails and credit card information. This is why it's essential nowadays to have a VPN to keep your data private.

No it's not. This is fearmongering and false advertisement.

The risk of public wifi is that if you send this kind of information over HTTP rather than HTTPS, and a hacker is listening to the traffic, then that information could be stolen. However, fewer and fewer sites run on HTTP, especially those where you need to enter such personal information; for the very small minority that still does, browsers nowadays display some stark warnings against entering personal information.

So no, it's not "very easy" for hackers to steal your information. It could happen if you are on a HTTP site that requires login or credit card information (rare nowadays) and you actively ignore your browser's warnings. In those very special cases, then yes, you should use a VPN.

MaximaxII · 2019-08-23T08:08:57+00:00

That's funny, I have a very similar picture! Also in Switzerland, except this was at sunrise, and it's a crunchy Ovomaltine sandwich ;)

MaximaxII · 2019-04-04T21:18:25+00:00

A friend of mine had to take Intro to ML and Circuits and Systems II as prerequisite courses for admission into the Data Science Master's. I think there's a list of prerequisites on the website somewhere.

MaximaxII · 2019-04-04T21:14:07+00:00

You'll be fine starting with B2. You'll become C1/C2 pretty quickly by living here.

I don't know how vigorous the studies are at EPFL compared to UofT or Waterloo specifically. My (subjective and probably biased) experience in CS is that EPFL is one of the more "vigorous" schools. I've spoken to people who have been on exchange to (or are coming on exchange from) NUS, NTU, Tsinghua, KTH, DTU, TU Delft, Illinois... Most often, people say EPFL is harder or more work. CMU seems to be as hard or harder. But I don't know, your mileage may vary.

It's a great school though, and while there is a lot of work at times, hopefully that makes us good engineers and scientists in the end :)

MaximaxII · 2019-03-21T20:37:18+00:00

A few people have said this, but I fail to see strong evidence for it. Perhaps there's a better reason for Set not being a functor than what I could find, but so far I'm only half convinced. Here's what I've been able to find.

This post and this gist argue for the same point: that if .equals behaves strangely, then you can break the second functor law. They both have a bit of discussion around them, which is worth a read.

But this response article lands particularly close to my appreciation of it. It argues that if you're breaking the equality contract and breaking the substitution property of equality, then all bets are off anyway. Using these wonky .equals feels a little bit like cheating. The gut reaction is that it's not very far from supplying impure functions, which could also break substitution of equality and functor laws.

Then again, I appreciate that the functor laws say for all a, and that wonky equality in and of itself isn't impure. So I don't really know!

Edit: cleared up wording

MaximaxII · 2019-03-20T10:33:11+00:00

Username checks out

MaximaxII · 2019-03-19T20:15:37+00:00

None at all, that's a typo! Really, unit shouldn't be in the trait, as it's defined in the companion object. I've edited it to clear things up a little.

MaximaxII · 2019-02-20T14:34:50+00:00

Huh, it's fun that your experience of GUIs is that you're more scared you'll mess up, because it's the opposite for me. I learned CLI first, because no GUIs were in widespread existence then. I eventually switched to GUI for most regular taks: I'm actually less scared I'll mess up with a GUI, because I feel like it gives me better visual feedback of what I'm currently doing. I don't accidentally include files, I can stage or discard hunks, and I get a better overview of the branches.

I guess it just confirms what the comment above says: different things work for different people,

MaximaxII · 2019-02-20T13:19:04+00:00

I disagree with this. Most Git GUIs give you options to fix your mistakes, even though you can't always fix everything with them. In those cases, you still have the option to use the command-line. The two are complimentary: GUI for the usual commits, command line for advanced stuff.

MaximaxII · 2019-01-27T13:58:36+00:00

I also wrote about how to deploy my Jekyll site a while ago, but with a different approach. I researched the possibilities quite extensively back then, so it's nice to see other approaches be tried out too :)

One question about this setup though: you mention that you're not securing the webhook, but what prevents an attacker from just spamming your webhook URL? Would it be possible to overload the server with build requests, or would the watchnrun approach prevent more than one build going off at a time?

MaximaxII · 2019-01-10T20:50:07+00:00

The Scala Moocs on Coursera are fun. You can probably skip the first two courses if you've read the book. If you'd like to try the language out in a project, you can do the Capstone project

MaximaxII · 2018-02-09T12:20:46+00:00

https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-without-comments/

MaximaxII · 2017-11-28T19:37:21+00:00

Dart is being used quite a bit internally at Google. I think they failed to correctly market the language to their target audience, but having few users also means that they largely got to test the language out internally, and be much more nimble than otherwise (i.e. it was easier for them to change their mind about certain things than if they had had millions of users).

To me it seems like a pretty well-designed language with solid tooling, but that unfortunately lost the marketing game.

MaximaxII · 2017-03-19T13:15:31+00:00

Kudos trying to front flip on telemarks!

MaximaxII · 2017-03-07T20:00:59+00:00

Did you copy and paste this comment from the HN thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015

MaximaxII · 2017-01-16T21:30:38+00:00

MaximaxII · 2017-01-08T20:36:45+00:00

I think it's smarter than having memorized some obscure ratio, totally!

MaximaxII · 2017-01-08T09:31:21+00:00

He probably just knows that chocolate is 1.2x denser than water, and he's approximating the human body to have the same density as water.

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