News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lumpypua

Re:Two years of Rust on Monday May 15, 2017 @08:02PM (#14346300)
https://michaelfairley.com/blog/i-made-a-game-in-rust/

> It consists of ~7700 lines of Rust

...

> Compile times with Rust are Not Great. This is easily my single biggest gripe about Rust right now. The build for A Snake’s Tale takes 15+ seconds, which makes iterating rather tedious. The current incremental compiler work also doesn’t seem to make the build for A Snake’s Tale’s codebase any faster.

That's fine, it's:

> terrible "wilderness years" of server templates and jQuery

where things go off the rails.

While we're talking about python caching libraries, I'd like to recommend https://github.com/codeinthehole/django-cacheback

"It's an extensible caching library that refreshes stale cache items asynchronously using a Celery or rq task. The key idea being that it's better to serve a stale item (and populate the cache asynchronously) than block the response process in order to populate the cache synchronously."

Re:MP3 for Image Compression (2006) on Monday April 17, 2017 @04:03PM (#14133952)
JPEG uses this path for its blocks, rather than anything fancy and Hilbert-ish: http://www.johnloomis.org/ece563/notes/compression/jpeg/tuto...

I think this alone would be an improvement for the mp3 encoder.

I've seen people use rebase like a patch queue a few times, and it always comes off as awkward and painful. This app seems to make that pattern of use a little less painful -- but patch queues are better. I wish more people knew about them as a source control tool.

mercurial queues - far and away the my favorite patch queue implementation - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mercurial/Q...

stacked git - a solid git patch queue - http://procode.org/stgit/doc/tutorial.html

Re:Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers on Friday March 24, 2017 @02:00AM (#13946999)
The trouble is that yarn is legitimately better than npm. My life is better as a developer because of yarn.

I'm not claiming that all those transitions were for the best, far from it, but the real question for any language community to answer is: "how much churn is acceptable in the pursuit of better?" JS is an ongoing cultural experiment in seeing what happens when you turn that dial to 11.

Just signed up and discovered a vulnerability. Thanks!

A quick suggestion, consider adding a full sample configuration along with your config docs: https://pyup.io/docs/configuration/

It's a lot easier to see how it all sits together with a sample.

CircleCI has a great example: https://circleci.com/docs/1.0/config-sample/

Re:The myth of using Scala as a better Java on Thursday March 02, 2017 @02:14AM (#13772179)
To counter with an alternative tool comparison: drills and impact drivers look very similar. I'd bet that most of my friends don't really know the difference. But for some situations, an impact driver is an entirely more capable tool.

If you use a drill all day, professionally, you'd be a fool not to take a serious look at an impact driver and see if it makes your life easier.

pandas is the standard now for most python data munging I've come across. numpy is "low level".
Re:New Study Finds Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Chess on Friday January 27, 2017 @05:14PM (#13503204)
I did't mean anything special about it in conjunction with magnesium, just that glycine itself is inhibitory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#As_a_neurotransmitter

> Glycine accomplishes several functions as a transmitter in the central nervous system (CNS). As an inhibitory neurotransmitter, it participates in the processing of motor and sensory information that permits movement, vision, and audition. This action of glycine is mediated by the strychnine-sensitive glycine receptor, whose activation produces inhibitory post-synaptic potentials. In some areas of the CNS, glycine seems to be co-released with GABA, the main inhibitory amino acid neurotransmitter. In addition, glycine modulates excitatory neurotransmission by potentiating the action of glutamate at N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11396606

Re:New Study Finds Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Chess on Friday January 27, 2017 @02:19AM (#13498290)
You might find this interesting wrt magnesium supplementation: https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#magnesium

Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if the glycine along with the magnesium had neuro-inhibitory effect. Supplementation with gelatin might be worth trying for you. https://www.google.com/search?q=glycine%20in%20gelatin I put collagen hydrolysate in my coffee and I think it's pretty great.

Re:New Study Finds Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Chess on Friday January 27, 2017 @01:23AM (#13498127)
It would be very interesting to see a computer analysis of position strength in the discarded games and seeing, where possible, if the ratios of "likely win" and "likely loss" match the games that were finished.
Why would that be a consideration?

We'd all hope so, but in practice it only depends on the board of Rubin's company and their goals.

Re:Snapchat Has Been Faking Growth Numbers, Ex-Employee Alleges on Thursday January 05, 2017 @01:37AM (#13325219)
> There is definitely smoke here in my opinion. You have to be grossly incompetent to get fired within three weeks.

Agreed. grossly incompetent

Re:Apple’s 2016 in review on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @04:25AM (#13307968)
Clayton Christensen (guy who wrote Innovator's Dilemma) has a pretty good debunking of the "target user" approach, telling us to instead focus on what job users intend to do with your product. Tells it through the story of trying to figure out the idealized milkshake buyer: https://youtu.be/f84LymEs67Y?t=27s

This whole idea goes by the name Jobs to be Done. Intercom has a sick PDF book on applying the concepts to product development: https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done

Re:Jid – Drill down JSON data incrementally on Saturday December 03, 2016 @07:28PM (#13098187)
`keys|sort` in jq.
And ultimately, writes resulting from those reads. I imagine yelp has pretty stout analytics/metrics pipeline fed off views and conversion tracking.
Re:Five Years of Drought on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:44PM (#12097044)
This guy has some other great maps worth checking out as well. I think his sharknado one is awesome: https://adventuresinmapping.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/how-to-...
Re:Stop saying learning to code is easy on Sunday June 19, 2016 @03:27PM (#11934301)
I agree, you can do awesome things without too much coding knowledge—but a big part of the current push to teach people how to code is to give them access to the coding job market.

If I'm going to hire you as a "software engineer" at an engineering salary, I expect you to know all those things.

Of my friends learning to code for masters degrees now, the ones with a natural coding mindset and studying it hard are taking about 2 years to hit a production engineering level. Most seem to be on a 3-4 year trajectory. That's pretty reasonable for a complex skillset.

Re:Whiskey Can’t Hide Its Age on Thursday May 19, 2016 @12:23AM (#11727943)
Whiskey fresh out of the still ("white dog") is pretty rough. Whiskey with 30 days of attentive oaking isn't awful (I'll happily get fucked up on it), 90 days will be pretty decent.
Re:This Biology Book Blew Me Away on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @04:45PM (#11725782)
They're not looking at things like antibiotic resistance, they're looking at genes core to biological function like cell membrane proteins and ribosomes—and those look like they came from a common ancestor. So, your options:

1. Common ancestor.

2. Not common ancestors, but with enough random chance common biochemistry that this core function gene could be usefully used by the new microbe, and is functional enough in the new host that it isn't ejected immediately, and managed to stay functional and evolve past the original core function gene in terms of fitness so that original core function gene could be ejected, and the original core function gene did get ejected and the microbes with the new core function gene managed to outcompete all the microbes with dual core-function genes.

The latter is highly, highly unlikely.

Re:This Biology Book Blew Me Away on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @04:33PM (#11725670)
I'd also like to recommend Power, Sex, Suicide by the same guy, Nick Lane.

It's an absolutely amazing book that explains the origins of mitochondria, why they're necessary for complex life (and this means that complex life is exceedingly rare in the universe), and all sorts of effects the differing genomes of mitochondria and cells have: fertility, aging, and a bunch of other ones.

If you're interested in cellular biology, read this guy.

Re:This Biology Book Blew Me Away on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @04:27PM (#11725605)
My chemistry background is pretty weak so I don't know if it touches the specific points you're curious about, but there's a pretty extensive discussion of electron transport and what all the mechanisms we see in the world today tell us about how life began to harness it. He ends up using the discussion to make the argument that all life in the universe likely uses redox chemistry for energy. Made sense to me anyway.
Re:This Biology Book Blew Me Away on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @03:32PM (#11725072)
Yes, this book and the author's previous books cover exactly those topics among others. Nick Lane is a fucking awesome writer.
Re:Ketamine and Depression: A Breakthrough? on Sunday May 08, 2016 @05:46AM (#11653376)
0.5 mg/kg. 5 mg/kg will be a hell of a ride.
Re:Ketamine and Depression: A Breakthrough? on Saturday May 07, 2016 @10:29PM (#11652341)
I've used ketamine to self-medicate depression. I decided to out of desperation. It was extremely effective for me.

Several provisos for potential users:

- Read the papers. If you can't read the papers on K as a depression treatment and come up with your own dosing protocol, you probably shouldn't try K.

- Probably don't try it if you have an addictive personality.

- Make sure you're aware of potential side effects such as memory and urinary issues. That said, doses used in treatment protocols shouldn't come anywhere near that.

I waited forever to just get some goddamn K and treat myself, because everybody on the internet is like "don't do it, you'll fuck yourself up". I'm smart and do my homework, and I regret not trusting myself and suffering for longer than needed.

Re:About rel=noopener on Saturday April 23, 2016 @12:47AM (#11554204)
I have no idea what this submission is about. Why would I want rel=noopener?

Older »