WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

gpa's comments

gpa | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Best ways to brush up JavaScript knowledge

Perhaps this MDN article, which used to be called "A re-introduction to JavaScript" and is now called "JavaScript language overview": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Lang...

Also, if you search for "A re-introduction to JavaScript" in HN Search, you will find previous posts of the same article with comments pointing to other similar sources.

The book Eloquent JavaScript is also available online, but is longer: https://eloquentjavascript.net/

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: General chemistry book recommendations

I would like to suggest Nikolai Glinka's "Problems in General Chemistry," of which I have the original Russian edition but I see that it's been translated in English (https://www.amazon.com/Problems-General-Chemistry-Nikolai-Gl...). Reasons for my recommendation is that first, it's interesting, and second, every time I have used this book, all chemistry concepts made sense, unlike in the manuals we had to use in school. To rephrase MiB, this would be the final chemistry book I ever read if I decided not to pursue my studies in the subject further.

Also, I did not know much about the Glinka himself, but from what I've found from a quick web search was quite interesting: a representative of an ancient noble family, honored scientist, largest teacher-methodist, whose books for decades, determined the level of chemical education in non-chemical and chemical technical institutes of the USSR...

gpa | 3 years ago | on: TreeTalk London – Tree Map

I like how they protect their trees in the United Kingdom. This approach to environmental preservation should be adopted globally.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Breaking the silence around academic bullying

I don't know if the Publisher would believe as if they don't see that the ideas are the same that they have to send the proof to the people I am complaining about. I don't know if the court will believe, as they are not domain specialists and will judge by the letter of the law.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Breaking the silence around academic bullying

Not exactly a horror story, but here it one. I decided to send proofs to a well-known academic publisher in order to report colleagues who had used findings from my lesser-known research papers (published in lower-profile journals) and my PhD thesis as their key conclusions. The Publisher started an investigation, but I was told that my colleagues would need to see the evidence first. The Publisher would not disclose my identity, I was certain that my "colleagues" would have figured it out. So, I made the decision to call them first and ask for clarification. They requested me to send them their text and works for which I was claiming authorship while acting as though they had no idea what I was talking about. After I sent the email, they called back, berated me, and threatened me with a lawsuit for defamation for using the words "Below is the text from the paper, which contains ideas taken from my publications.". They explicitly used the words "by all possible means". Then asked for apology. I did apologize and urge the Publisher to halt the investigation, but was this the proper course of action? Back then I was scared, but I am angry now. My sin is that my papers and Ph.D. results are not published in the big academic publishing companies (so they cannot find the plagiarism), except for one in Elsevier.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: ESA – Climate from Space

Perfect data visualization of the current environmental and climate challenges that is open to anyone. The current environmental issues we face are portrayed with "Data layers" and discussed with "Stories" beneath. Stories like this should reach mass media to raise public awareness. Before we can focus on the (final) outer space (frontier), we must first fix our inner (terrestrial) space (ship) with a priority. Or not?

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which programming games helped you become a better programmer?

Yes, I can see that it's realistic and fun by reading some of the user reviews, like this one:

> Wow, this was so much fun! I work as a DevOps engineer, studied computer science, and have 20 years of work experience. This game creates several virtual machines when starting, with real operating system on them, real web servers, databases, web applications, and shows you multiple ways of hacking around networks, linux, web, php, passwords, authentication, privilege escalation, SQL injection, and MySQL in general. Everything I did in this game came up during my career in work in some form, and I had to protect systems against attacks like this too.

...there were a few things I learned, for example `sudo -l`, I'm going to use that all the time from now on.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which programming games helped you become a better programmer?

I've already mentioned it in another comment, but (being unable to edit my question already) this is what I was thinking when I asked the question: an addictive game with progressive complexity and (possibly) time-limited challenges that make you feel like you didn't waste (hours of) time because of the knowledge (skills) you've gained.

I guess, I have to try some of the games that everyone has mentioned.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which programming games helped you become a better programmer?

It seems that it counts by reading the description: "small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other." But since I haven't used it, you or someone else can have the final say. I was thinking of an addictive game with progressive complexity and time-limited challenges that make you feel like you didn't waste time because of the knowledge you've gained.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Bitwarden: Generate a Username

I'm not a security expert, but possibly being able to change my username in addition to changing my password due to safety concerns gives an extra layer of security.

gpa | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to extract information from mutiple (unstructured text) documents?

Sounds reasonable. And yes, I am a one-man team. But then, after collecting all this information, how do you organize and store all this information for on-demand availability? For tables extracted from the publication, you can create a new table withing a relational database. But how do you organize single data points extracted from the text? Where do you store them?

gpa | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

You say you are using AWK on a daily basis, including web scraping. Most programmers use Python libraries Scrapy and BeautifulSoup, and R libraries like rvest and RCurl. How do you parse HTML with AWK - as part of a pipeline including wget, hxselect, and lynx, or just by using the AWK regular expressions? I couldn't find many examples, except for some basic Rosetta code script and random blog posts. Can you share some example script?
page 1
more