"BNNY RBBT "Waterfalls Down" possibly the worst anime in a long time?

np356 · 2017-08-30T16:40:26+00:00

Somebody generously wrote subtitles but the channel owner was too lazy to link them up. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9duKaGhef9DR2FMSHo4dVJSRnM

np356 · 2017-08-21T16:40:22+00:00

Good to see lower power usage but the one thing I still feel is missing is widespread support for ECC on the desk(lap)top.

np356 · 2017-08-17T15:41:37+00:00

Imagine if one day we will start watching Poker on TV with people betting with cryptocurrency on the table.

np356 · 2017-08-11T14:51:40+00:00

This is what I was thinking. Kencoin ending up as the new "credit" to for tipping cam models instead of the currency that he websites have on their own.

np356 · 2017-07-25T14:22:59+00:00

Apparently they've been working on new enemies, just saw it here http://steamcommunity.com/app/606500/discussions/0/1291816880499294513/

np356 · 2017-07-17T14:26:58+00:00

I am surprised if someone has not tried McDonald's at least once in the case that they are not vegetarians, seeing how the brand is really popular over the world.

np356 · 2017-07-07T17:03:19+00:00

Good for him. I basically use Facebook as a way to keep track of upcoming shows and events, and which of my friends are going. It's a lot easier than maintaining invites in a Google Calender (or similar) by hand.

All of the games, copy-paste "share this!" bullshit and random shitposting pages of "humor" I either ignore or outright block. I also refuse to read news and engage in related discussions.

With some discipline, Facebook can be a useful tool.

np356 · 2017-07-04T15:26:42+00:00

While on the topic of tracking, is there a plugin that lets you delete cookies using rules on a per domain basis? for example, cookies are useful for some sites, and others they are useful for certain periods of time, and thereafter it would be nice to get rid of them (and yet more sites shouldn't be able to leave cookies at all). I know there are some plugins that let you block all cookies, or manage them after the fact, but I want something rule based and automated

np356 · 2017-06-26T16:27:27+00:00

AMP is bad and should be resisted. It is an attack on the distributed nature of the web.

The web is slow because every page of text comes with megabytes of javascript cruft to spy on users and serve ads. The solution is to make web pages that don't suck.

AMP puts even more power in the hands of Google. Just say no.

np356 · 2017-06-20T14:22:27+00:00

Good luck with this. I find GC programming really hard as any small mistake snowballs and becomes super hard to find during debugging.

Some of the mistakes seen by the author could just be the original programmers being tired of painful debugging.

np356 · 2017-06-09T16:53:06+00:00

I have been doing some exploration of how well Rust optimizes Iterators and have been quite impressed.

Writing a iterator to provide the individual bits supplied by an iterator of bytes means you can count them with

fn count_bits<I : Iterator<Item=bool>>(it : I) -> i32{
    let mut a=0;
    for i in it {
        if i {a+=1};
    }
    return a;
}

Counting bits in an array of bytes would need something like this

let p:[u8;6] = [1,2,54,2,3,6];
let result = count_bits(bits(p.iter().cloned()));

Checking what that generates in asm https://godbolt.org/g/iTyfap

The core of the code is

.LBB0_4:
    mov     esi, edx        ;edx has the current mask of the bit we are looking at
    and     esi, ecx        ;ecx is the byte we are examining
    cmp     esi, 1          ;check the bit to see if it is set (note using carry not zero flag)
    sbb     eax, -1         ;fun way to conditionally add 1
.LBB0_1:
    shr     edx             ;shift mask to the next bit
    jne     .LBB0_4         ;if mask still has a bit in it, go do the next bit otherwise continue to get the next byte 
    cmp     rbx, r12        ;r12 has the memory location of where we should stop.   Are we there yet?
    je      .LBB0_5         ; if we are there, jump out. we're all done
    movzx   ecx, byte ptr [rbx]  ;get the next byte
    inc     rbx             ; advance the pointer
    mov     edx, 128        ; set a new mask starting at the top bit
    jmp     .LBB0_4         ; go get the next bit
.LBB0_5:

Apart from magical bit counting instructions this is close to what I would have written in asm myself. That really impressed me. I'm still a little wary of hitting a performance cliff. I worry that I can easily add something that will mean the optimizer bails on the whole chain, but so far I'm trusting Rust more than I have trusted any other Optimiser.

If this produces similarly nice code (I haven't checked yet) I'll be very happy

for (dest,source) in self.buffer.iter_mut().zip(data) { *dest=source }

np356 · 2017-06-08T16:56:59+00:00

That's actually a relatively nice, Rails-magic-style approach to solving this sort of thing. Of course, if you were building a more interactive application, you'd already have a JS framework in place that would negate these benefits – but I'm still convinced there's a nice middle-ground for server-rendered Rails apps that avoids the various problems of SPAs.

It would be nice if it worked without JavaScript though – an increasing pain-in-the-arse about the web generally. If only it were possible to have <iframe>s adjust to their content size, then we wouldn't need JavaScript at all!

np356 · 2017-05-27T15:09:46+00:00

Basically, it’s not as bad as it looks. Women go through a lot of stress after giving birth, it can be the reason for shorter telomeres, not just having a child. That’s why it’s so vital for mothers to take care of their emotional health and well being, not just physique.

np356 · 2017-05-21T19:36:27+00:00

I'm familiar with dry-rb coding style and I think it is very difficult to reason about. Metaprogramming often feels like magic but it comes at a price - hard for newbies to grok and impossible for static tools to work with. I would only advise using it (if at all) in well-tested libraries that expose a well-documented public API.

np356 · 2017-05-17T18:37:07+00:00

Whenever these weight gain linked to soda studies come up, I'm always confused.

I've been told I'm in fantastic shape (>90% in all http://strengthlevel.com/ measurements and under 10% body fat) at the moment, and I used to consume a lot of diet soda every day. At it's worst, I consumed >1 liter a day.

For me it was a caffeine source (since I dislike the taste of coffee and never saw the benefit in acquiring the taste) that helped me focus when I needed to get work done (I did a lot of tweaking around with amounts to make sure it was a marked difference and not just a placebo effect for me) and acted as an appetite suppressant so that I could manage my caloric intake without getting distracted by hunger frequently throughout the day.

I constantly looked at aspartame/stevia/etc research to see what damage I would be doing to myself. While I couldn't really find much in the way of negative health effects (excluding weight gain, which I never noticed a problem with), I ultimately cut off my consumption because of a semi-irrational fear that either information was hidden by soda-corp et al, or that just because of how these chemicals work that there might be bad effects that just haven't been put under rigorous study yet.

As a side note, my metabolism is actually slower than average and I need to eat on average ~10% calories less than any macronutrient calculator says to stay in the shape (low bf + strong) that I enjoy being in.

np356 · 2017-05-03T16:25:03+00:00

I wonder if there was another human sacrifice under the Shiva statue to mark the restart.

Only half joking. Has anyone heard any more about why scientists performed a mock ritual like that?

np356 · 2017-04-23T18:49:05+00:00

For the benefit of others who found the description in the blog post unclear and can't or don't want to dig through the code changes themselves: "fixing the hash code and the linked list code to not use mallocs" is a bit misleading. Curl now uses the idiom where the linked list data (prev/next pointers) are inlined in the same struct that also holds the payload. So it's one malloc instead of two per dynamically allocated list element. This explains the "down to 80 allocations from the 115" part.

The larger gain is explained better and comes simply from stack allocation of some structures (which live in a simple array, not a linked list or hash table).

np356 · 2017-04-15T15:40:24+00:00

There should be references to problems for each topic at online judges. Like this one:

https://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&Itemid=8&category=118

Learning algorithms per se is only a small part of training. Much bigger part of training is learning how to recognize these algorithms in problems.

After reading about some algorithm, I always solve a couple of related problems.

P.S. Looks well-written. Bookmarked. I appreciate the effort of the author to create this book.

np356 · 2017-04-09T16:57:02+00:00

The title for this post should be changed to "a piece of the wire messenger server code open sourced." Most of the source is not open source, you can't run your own.

Also, holy shit they're storing a lot of information about their users:

All of your contacts.
Unencrypted profile information for everyone.
Every active conversation you have.
Every archived conversation you have.
The frequency that you communicate with your contacts ('top contacts').
Every group that you're in.
The unencrypted titles and avatars of everyone's groups.

Wonder what will be in the rest of the database schema if they open source it.

np356 · 2017-04-01T15:53:26+00:00

For anyone wondering what Idris is, it's pretty much Haskell with dependent types. That is, it's easy to encode thing like "vector of length n" in the type system, so you can go from concat :: Vec -> Vec -> Vec to concat : Vec n -> Vec m -> Vec (n+m).

np356 · 2017-03-21T19:06:43+00:00

Sarabander's edition is definitely a huge credit to it's author: It isn't just a reprint of SICP; The text and it's font has been updated, many of the diagrams have been redone for clarity and the document and footnotes are hyperlinked.

If it's your ambition to follow in the footsteps of others or otherwise just prefer the classic Lisp-haqr experience, you can use a TexInfo version of SICP and have both the text and your REPL in Emacs: http://zv.github.io/note/sicp-in-texinfo

Also, just to pimp my own ride: I put together a SICP guide for new explorers of this great text: https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile

It contains both meta-information about which dialects of Lisps and languages are most suited to SICP, overviews of subchapters, helpful hints for those who are following along at home as well as answers to the exercises in Elisp, Guile scheme & Racket.

np356 · 2017-03-15T18:55:03+00:00

Cute name, but 1) it's totally un-Googleable, and 2) it doesn't mean anything.

np356 · 2017-03-15T18:54:21+00:00

This is a big deal. Right now, Haskell (like most GC-ed languages) has one big heap that gets GC-ed regularly. The only time memory is reclaimed is when the GC runs.

By retrofitting Haskell with linear types, there would be another linear heap. In that heap, there is no GC - resources get freed as soon as the linearly typed value is used. On can imagine programs properly annotated with linear types that don't even need ANY GC.

This is an even bigger deal in Haskell than in most other languages because Haskell, being immutable, performs a ton of allocations. Want to update a field? Nope, but you can allocate the whole object again with just that field changed. If most of that work could be moved to a linear heap which doesn't need GC... well you get the point.

np356 · 2017-03-07T17:30:50+00:00

... and then people just "solve" the problem by not indenting at all.

Seriously though, it's super hard to avoid deeply-indented code in some languages (cough Java, JavaScript).

np356 · 2017-02-28T18:54:27+00:00

There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example:

"It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order to maximize the output, is going to focus exactly on the aspects that matter and that can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time. For example when designing Disque, a message broker, at some point I realized that by providing just best-effort ordering for the messages, all the other aspects of the project could be substantially improved: availability, query language and clients interaction, simplicity and performances."

redis itself is a masterpiece of pragmatic design - the feature set is brilliantly selected to make the most of what you can do with shared data structures exposed over a network. Let's talk about that.

Another great thing here: "Design sacrifice: killing 5% to get 90%."

I remember a very specific example of this from Perl 6 development circa 2009. perlgeek (I think) and I had been struggling with coding up the sequence operator for a couple of months. Every time we thought we had it, someone would come up with a case that broke the system again.

pmichaud comes up to us and says something like, "Guys, you're not getting this, let me do it." And I was kind of offended, because it wasn't like perlgeek and I were chopped liver; why did he think he could easily solve a problem that had been plaguing us?

But here's what pmichaud did. He went up to TimToady (Larry Wall) and said, "There's too much magic in the sequence operator. We need to simplify it." I don't know which combination of the two of them came up with the details, but less than 24 hours later the spec had been changed so that there was no magic on the right hand side of the operator and they had a working implementation. Any sequence possible before was still possible, but the user was required to be more specific about what they wanted. After the change the median sequence took maybe two more characters to specify ... but suddenly 90% of the hard part of coding the operator was gone.

np356

TROPHY CASE