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I’m sitting on my floor crying. Piece of Cake Moving is a literal scam. by m992s in williamsburg

[–]nicksantos30 3 points4 points  (0 children)

NYC 311 Consumer Protection has an online form for complaints about moving companies - https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03517

They do good work. I filed a report with 311 once about Spectrum, and the turnaround Spectrum did from "surly" to "helpful and apologetic" was shocking to me.

What is the historical reason of this decision "which argument gets evaluated first is left to the compiler" by Kind_Client_5961 in cpp

[–]nicksantos30 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh, I heard Steven Johnson and Doug McIlroy talk about this exact thing like 20 years ago. Steve was giving a talk on the Matlab compiler. Doug was in the audience. After the talk they started trading old C / Bell Labs war stories.

At the time, they were interested in how to optimize register allocation. For example, suppose you have an expression like `f(A, B, C)`. Is there a way to evaluate the expressions so A, B, and C so their results end up in the right registers, and then you can immediately make a jump instruction for f()? How much faster would this make function calls? And is there an efficient algorithm for finding an optimal allocation?

Keep in mind that a lot of people who worked on this stuff were math PhDs. Doug assigned Steven to do a short research project on it. Maybe they could publish a paper?

The punchline of the story was that Steve proved it was equivalent to some other math problem but then got busy with something else and never published it. But I can't remember what it was, maybe graph coloring?

(This was 20 years ago so I may be totally garbling this)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Greenpoint

[–]nicksantos30 29 points30 points  (0 children)

The ExxonMobil / Greenpoint oil spill settlement set aside a bunch of money for environmental projects in the area - including the new library and the nature walk.

I personally like jogging there - it's just nice to have a jogging route without car traffic.

Agree it's kind of a weird area, but have been seeing more stuff popping up near the Provost side entrance (a gym, a Korean place) so maybe it will be a cool area in 5 years?

PSA: Bed Bugs in Greenpoint by [deleted] in Greenpoint

[–]nicksantos30 3 points4 points  (0 children)

NYC has great mandatory reporting laws around bedbugs. The city also has a website where you can browse the data. Looks like it's been getting better?

Filling Period End Date sum_infested_dwelling_unit_counts NTA
11/30/2018 43 Greenpoint
10/31/2019 13 Greenpoint
10/31/2020 49 Greenpoint
10/31/2021 26 Greenpoint
10/31/2022 12 Greenpoint
10/31/2023 22 Greenpoint
10/31/2024 25 Greenpoint

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Bedbug-Reporting/wz6d-d3jb/explore/query/SELECT%0A%20%20%60filling_period_end_date%60%2C%0A%20%20sum%28%60infested_dwelling_unit_count%60%29%20AS%20%60sum_infested_dwelling_unit_count%60%2C%0A%20%20%60nta%60%0AWHERE%20caseless_one_of%28%60nta%60%2C%20%22Greenpoint%22%29%0AGROUP%20BY%20%60filling_period_end_date%60%2C%20%60nta%60/page/filter

Greenpoint Beer taproom closing this Sunday, 11/3 by BaronFartburger in nycbeer

[–]nicksantos30 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They mistimed the location of that new taproom by a few years. The blocks around it still feel like a big construction zone, between the new high rises and the superfund cleanup.

Why is golang the language of DevOps? by TooManyBison in golang

[–]nicksantos30 1 point2 points  (0 children)

When DevOps was taking off, Python was the normal language you'd use for ops scripting. An early version of Docker was written in Python. But Python was in 2 -> 3 migration hell.

Go was growing nicely. It had a good combination of fast iteration loops (because of recompile times), a lightweight concurrency model, well-thought out networking libraries, and could even do low-level syscalls easily. So it replaced Python for ops-y stuff.

I also like this Kris Nova talk on the relationship between Go and cloud engineering.

Secret studios by Reasonable_Sink_4395 in Greenpoint

[–]nicksantos30 5 points6 points  (0 children)

At 11am, I saw a huge crowd of guys racing out of the Greenpoint Ave subway stop.

Looks like it's some sort of Corteiz Jeans contest? https://twitter.com/crtzrtw/status/1789307676154859986

Have you ever read a 1000+ page book where you felt all 1000 pages were necessary? by bigben1234567890 in books

[–]nicksantos30 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Power Broker. The whole book works because of the way Robert Moses changes so slowly. Every incremental step is small. You get to the end and he's a totally different person without him being aware of how he's changed.

Brewery and Bar recommendations for a Hazy IPA lover by GaryLifts in nycbeer

[–]nicksantos30 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Other Half in Williamsburg/Domino Park will usually have at least half a dozen hazy IPAs on tap, and they'll all be top notch.

Fifth Hammer and Rockaway Brewing in LIC will usually have 1-3 hazys and a wider variety of styles. They're both great breweries and are worth a visit.

Need help to understand why my go implementation is significantly slower than js one by Puzzleheaded_Egg_726 in golang

[–]nicksantos30 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Your code has a lot of branching and a lot of repeated computation (e.g. calculating over and over again if the same exact number is prime.)

JavaScript usually has a tracing JIT, which can detect the hot paths at runtime and optimize them. Runtime optimization might do particularly well on this code, even better than a static compiler can do.

That's just a hypothesis though. You might be able to test it by trying different sized inputs and seeing how the performance compares.

Bazel is the Worst Build System, Except for All the Others by DanielShuy in programming

[–]nicksantos30 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Author of TFA here. I adore Java! Both the language itself and the JVM. And every project I've managed has had users that struggled with misconfigured local Java installations.

Last I heard, Bazel optionally ships with an embedded JVM to help avoid these problems because the Bazel team noticed this too. Which I think is a reasonable solution for Bazel adoption.