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robzyb

Re:Colorize on Monday January 18, 2021 @07:55PM (#25828701)
Depends on exactly what "average" means in this context.

The most naive of interpretations (e.g. averaging each of the R/G/B values) is generally not what we want.

Would be super cool to add some different averaging schemes to this.

Re:Primer on Go Assembly on Thursday March 08, 2018 @10:32PM (#16549616)
Yeah I tried to research Go Assembly ~12 months ago and came up with relatively little. It's great to see this!
For comparison, this is a calculator that was built by actuaries[1] for the Australian market:

https://supercalcs.com.au/ris9/mst

Some really important things that are built into it are:

- Everything is given in "today's dollars" and that's done by reference to a salary index, NOT a price index, to reflect increases in community living standards.

- It shows some indication of the income level you can expect during retirement given your lump-sum retirement benefit.

[1] I was one of the actuarial staff that contributed to it

Re:Tweeting Made Easier on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @09:33PM (#15649542)
> They are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase the character limit.

I think that's a bit hyperbolic.

But, that being said, it annoys me that they haven't even put enough effort into this change to update the documentation.

> Note that the current best definition of the algorithm for counting characters on Twitter is described in the page on the twitter-text Tweet parsing library. This documentation will be refreshed shortly to reflect the most recent changes.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/counting-charac...

Re:Urban design and mental health in Tokyo on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @05:03AM (#15070735)
I saw Layla (the director of UDMH) give an excellent presentation at PechaKucha Tokyo last month.

I look forward to flicking through this document.

This is not a product that I'm interested in, but may I provide some feedback on your website?

It took me a little while to understand what Clickrouter does. The very first line, "Monetize Outbound Clicks", contributed a lot to my confusion. It made me think that maybe you were just a frontend to e.g. Amazon's affiliate program.

It was only when I read Step 4 of "How's it work" that I understood what it did: "Watch ClickRouter route each click to your best (i.e. most profitable) merchant network every time !"

I would've been much happier if the very first line was something like "Maximise your revenue by automatically using the best affiliate links."

Straight away I know _why_ I should be interested in your product, and how it works.

Re:Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @01:38AM (#14600941)
I don't (yet) have an opinion on this, but it's important to note the other side of the coin...

> Hope everyone's paying attention to the identity of these investors behind this horrid behavior. Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.

He's been very well compensated for the value he's created. You don't keep a job because of what you've done in the past, you keep a job based on what you can do in the future.

I don't think this is a realistic concern.

There are many things in life which technically give a perversive incentive to murder or commit other crimes, yet the perverse incentives aren't a show stopper.

One example of this is "I want your Mercedes, I will murder you and steal it."

Another example is a will and testament. Sure, sometimes people murder because of these contracts, but as a society we've done a good job of mitigating this problem.

I come from the retirement industry, and attention to tontines has been increasing at a steady rate for a number of years.

Some of the drivers of this are:

1) Ageing populations.

2) The people currently pondering retirement have significant assets because they lived through a time of significant economic growth.

3) Increasingly cash-strapped governments and their social security worries

Care to expand on the potential perverse incentives?

Like everything, there are downsides, but there's nothing terribly crazy-bad about tontines.

Re:Analyzing Token Sale Models on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:41AM (#14574616)
I think that you raise some interesting considerations, but I don't think it paints a full picture, and some of the missing parts of the picture are important.

While there are some parallels between coins and penny stocks, there are also some fundamental differences which means they aren't so easy comparable.

Sure, penny stocks are very highly speculative, just like coins, however unlike coins they have very well defined "value". That is, they are fractional ownership of a legally defined entity.

The value of a coin is much more difficult to understand and/or appreciate.

You know, I wanted to same the same thing as you, but in actual fact I found it quite interesting and insightful.

Although, surely not as interesting and insightful as the talk itself would've been.

Re:Shitty url shortener, emoji and ai powered on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @12:17AM (#14450390)
I love it.

I was trying to think up an emoji project (especially with URLs) a little while ago, but didn't come up with anything. I wish I'd thought of this.

> Ironic that the "hub for open-source projects" could become a walled garden if the latter happens.

I would say that the irony occurred when the "hub for open-source projects" is a closed-source platform.

(And I would say that as a paying user of Github that rather loves it.)

Re:How can there be collisions in Hashing functions? on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @07:35AM (#14400380)
Well... the conversation piqued my interest partly from a pedagogical perspective, and partly from a philosophical perspective.

The pedagogical aspect relates to the fact that the thread's OP clearly isn't lacking in intelligence nor knowledge, and I would've expected that some of the explanations would be sufficient. I found it interesting as a case study in learning/teaching.

The philosophical perspective relates to the link between our perspective of the world and the actual truth underlying it. The thread's OP was quite certain about the fact they were claiming as true, and was actually making a good argument for it. At least, the argument was good insofar as it was logical and wasn't falling victim to any egregious logical fallacy. It's interesting to consider consider this debate in contrast to a political debate which doesn't necessarily have such a solid underlying truth

On a personal note, I'm also slightly envious of the "OH!" moment that the thread's OP is going to have when everything falls into place in their mental model of hash functions. I remember when differential calculus first "clicked" with me, and when statistical hypothesis testing "clicked" with me. I'm still waiting for monads to "click" with me.

TravisCI Pro Bootstrap direct is $69: https://travis-ci.com/plans

TravisCI Pro Bootstrap via Github is $89: https://github.com/marketplace/travis-ci/plan/MDIyOk1hcmtldH...

Wouldn't a copy of the DOM be even better than a screenshot?

I.e. DOM copy > screenshot > wget?

Re:How does Docker affect energy consumption? on Friday May 05, 2017 @04:41AM (#14271970)
Your criticism would make sense if the title of the article was "Does Docker affect energy consumption?".

However, the article is titled "How does Docker effect energy consumption."

It is about an experiment which aims to quantify the impact on performance, which is quite interesting.

Re:Sourcegraph now running on an in-browser VS Code on Thursday May 04, 2017 @12:52AM (#14262541)
This is really cool. I might need to build a IDE soon, and I briefly looked at using VS Code for a base, but determined that it was a bit of overkill for my purposes.

Out of curiosity, what was Sourcegraph running prior to this in-browser VS Code?

This is a criminal act, and of course I don't condone it, but at the same time I do hope that some good comes out of it - particularly with regards to the attention which all organisations given to IT security.

Most organisations wouldn't feel comfortable with:

a) Not having locks on their buildings

b) Having known-defective locks on their building

c) Not doing regular audits of the locks their using vs. what criminals can crack

d) Not having reasonable organisation-wide policies to make sure the locks are used properly and kept secure

Yet I don't think that there is quite enough attention given to IT security. It still seems like primarily a "box ticking" exercise, or a case of throwing rules and regulations at the problem which make sense at face value, but are inherently flawed.

Re:Understand Go pointers on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:38AM (#14203908)
I didn't know the answer, but I just did a bit of Googling to determine that one of the reasons that pass-by-value can be preferred is because it makes life easier for the garbage collector.

See golang escape analysis: http://www.agardner.me/golang/garbage/collection/gc/escape/a...

Re:Bonobo – A data processing toolkit for Python 3.5+ on Sunday April 23, 2017 @01:16AM (#14176644)
This is really cool!

Python is my usual language of choice, but recently I picked up Go for some data processing because there was a lot of benefits to parallelising the task - which Go made easy.

Re:Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @10:20AM (#14032854)
> This sort of intuition is seductive, because we're generally told "debt bad, equity good!" But it's not correct, for the very simple reason that debt and equity are, in many ways, fungible: each type of financing can be utilized to replace the other.

Debt can be viewed in many ways. I'm not saying that it's wrong to view debt as another form of financing - like you I studied Modigliani-Miller, just that there are other ways to view it.

My point is only that it's not right to disregard market cap entirely in preference to EV. EV is generally a "more comprehensive" measure of company value, but it doesn't supersede market cap.

EV, for example, is susceptible to distortion between leasing and buying capital assets. For example, a company with big capital assets financed via debt could note that the company would be more profitable if they sold them and leased them back. The company is now more profitable, and its reasonable to say its 'better', but its EV has gone down.

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