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dvirsky

Re:SOML – A Config Format for Humans on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:26PM (#50344007)
The sole contributor has tons of repos and has been creating stuff on github for 15 years.
Re:Do dentists know what they're doing? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:22PM (#50095516)
A couple of years ago I had a bit of a complicated and rare condition that required dental surgery (a tooth I broke as a kid caused some inflammation that basically dug a big hole in my skull over years) . The surgeon was so excited, especially when I opted for a more challenging and less destructive solution to the situation, I knew I was in good hands.

He was like "Ooh! we're going to have so much fun together! A case like this is soooo rare!" and I joked that it's not something you want to hear from a surgeon but it really assured me that he's good and passionate about his job. And he did indeed do a great job.

Re:GenChess on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @06:08PM (#42251134)
You can set it to not be diagonal.
Re:Museum of Bad Art – art too bad to be ignored on Monday November 18, 2024 @11:46AM (#42174166)
I knew a guy who was selling his art online, he was making tongue-in-cheek, technically bad art but it was very deliberate as part of what he was trying to get at, he had a real artistic vision to his work.

His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.

Re:Quincy Jones, music titan, dies at 91 on Monday November 04, 2024 @01:40PM (#42044707)
Dua Lipa has amazing arrangements for example.

There is a great podcast called Switched on Pop, which delves into music theory behind pop hits and their songwriting and arrangements, and analyzes them to show what makes them great. It will give you fresh perspective on how much thought and talent goes into some of these songs. https://switchedonpop.com/

Re:There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018) on Tuesday August 13, 2024 @12:30AM (#41232257)
> Antimemetics remains a top 10 all-time though.

It's good, but didn't leave that big of an impression on me, maybe because I didn't know all the SCP stuff beforehand, I just liked qntm's other works so I read it.

Re:There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018) on Monday August 12, 2024 @02:09PM (#41227538)
I actually think the ending of it really prevented it from being that (at least for me). It started good, then the second act was like "Whoah, this is the most amazing sci-fi I've ever read", then the third act was just all over the place and completely lost me. And that's the revised ending, I didn't read the original one.
That is the first programming environment I ever used. It was an amazing starting point.
Re:Poets' Odd Jobs on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @06:07PM (#40579458)
I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.
Re:Poets' Odd Jobs on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @06:04PM (#40579417)
IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to make a living.
These are the same trees known as Cum Trees, right?

My neighbors have a couple, I didn't know these before moving to the US, and the first time I smelled them was... something.

Re:Introducing GNOME 46, "Kathmandu" on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @01:25PM (#39769567)
I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.
How is it charging as fast as a charger 3 times more powerful?
Re:Forum reactions to Satoshi's Bitcoin paper on Friday February 23, 2024 @03:09PM (#39485486)
Same here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.
Re:A Visual Interactive Guide to Bloom Filters on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @04:42PM (#39447334)
Bloom Filters are already lossy compression, so depending on how sparse they are I'm not sure you'll get too much benefit out of it, but maybe I'm just thinking of much, much smaller filters.

BTW we ended up open sourcing that BF library that encodes and decodes filters in multiple languages, the company has been out of business for nearly a decade but the project is still out there https://github.com/EverythingMe/inbloom

Re:A Visual Interactive Guide to Bloom Filters on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @01:59PM (#39445346)
One example: I personally used it to deduplicate recently viewed ads in an app, to avoid spamming users with the same ad too much. One interesting challenge there was that we needed to make sure that the client and server encode and decode the filter exactly the same, despite being implemented in different languages.
Re:NASA's Wild Plan to "Swarm" Proxima Centauri with Tiny Probes on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @06:34PM (#38945159)
What would happen if a 1g probe traveling at 10% of the speed of light hits an inhabited planet with an atmosphere? The kinetic energy is insane, but will it just burn out in the atmosphere or will it manage to hit the surface and go boom, assuming earth like atmosphere?
Re:Lode Runner (HTML5 Remake) on Thursday December 28, 2023 @02:39PM (#38797616)
This is pretty great, I used to love this game as a kid. I played it on a PC in the late 80s. Besides being a fun game, it was probably the first game I've played where you could design your own levels, which was awesome, we used to challenge each other to custom levels in our school's computer lab.
> It looks like Critque is a branch of Gerrit

IIRC Gerrit is an open source re-implementation from scratch of Critique.

Re:Reflecting on 18 Years at Google on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @02:08PM (#38383650)
Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )

Re:Redis as a Database on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @01:44PM (#38002589)
This needs 2021 in the title, but it's actually really out of date and might as well have 2011 in the title. Redis has modules which can provide a bunch of extra capabilities that do allow querying, indexing, etc. [Full disclosure: I used to work on Redis and created much of the basis of those modules, but haven't been involved in the past 5 years]
* When RSS was a thing but in my country a lot of news/content websites hadn't adopted yet, I wrote a service to quickly define scrapers that turn those sites into RSS feeds.

* In one of my former workplaces I wrote (alongside another person) a gamified shared playlist app that allowed everyone to participate in being a DJ for our company hackathon (people getting more upvotes getting more playtime, songs getting many downvoted being skipped in the middle, etc). That was a lot of fun and surprisingly a very emotionally engaging experience for everyone.

Probably, this conversation took place about 10-15 years ago but I'm guessing these myths persist for years so it might be a relic of the 90s.
This is totally ridiculous, but a lot of time there is a grain of truth behind some of these myths, that is just diluted by retelling from non technical people. I had a serious musician once tell me that if I rip a recording from a DAT tape to my disk it won't sound as good. It sounded about as stupid as this this claim, but the basis of it was conversion between 48khz and 44.1khz sample rates.

I also remember a friend of mine learning graphic design many years ago, who told me that their teacher told the class Photoshop on Mac produces higher quality images than on a PC. I don't remember what the basis of that was.

This has to be the most annoying thing in MacOS. My laptop, soundly sleeping in my backpack, takes over my bluetooth headphones all the time.
Not using a water flosser as well. It always looked to me like some novelty shopping channel thing. Then I got one and OMG this thing cleans so well, way better than normal flossing (which I was usually to lazy to do anyway).
Re:Obsolete Technology: Amber Monitors (2020) on Monday January 09, 2023 @07:14PM (#34318467)
Pretty sure the first monitor on my first PC (~1988) was amber, later replaced by black and white that did not "smear" as much so was better for games, and later replaced by a color one (that might have been on a newer PC).
Re:I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books on Monday January 09, 2023 @02:44PM (#34314983)
I feel the same way about a lot of non fiction, but not all.

First, there's entertaining/pop non-fiction, like, say, Malcom Gladwell's stuff, which has a lot of fluff but at least you enjoy the reading.

There are history books and memoirs that are just interesting - for example I've recently went through the entire series of Churchill's WWII memoirs, they're mostly awesome, though I did skip a couple of less interesting chapters. For these I prefer audiobooks while driving, which make it easier for me to focus.

Then there are CS books where you can pick and choose chapters and don't have to read the entire thing; they just go way deeper than blog posts, so if you want to REALLY know a subject, you better buy a book or two. I don't mean books like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer, etc which I almost never read in their entirety and can be summarized in 10% of their length, but more deep guides to things like Information Retrieval, NLP, Database Internals, etc.

Re:Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022 on Friday January 06, 2023 @02:45PM (#34279906)
Waterpik water flosser! I can't believe I didn't get something like that earlier. It's so effective and useful. Best purchase of the year for sure.
Re:Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2022? on Monday December 19, 2022 @04:03PM (#34057690)
It's exclusive to Spotify, sadly (didn't use to be) https://open.spotify.com/show/5c26B28vZMN8PG0Nppmn5G

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