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kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Underground

It's a common game of cat and mice, still "played" to this day. When they can be bothered enough, authorities will fill a section of a gallery with concrete. And, in turn, when cataphiles can be bothered enough, they tear down a piece of an adjacent wall and dig through the dirt on the other side to go around the blocked section. I've also seen crawl holes dug under 1m-or-2m-thick rubble walls.

Amazing to see the length people will go to :')

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Underground

Never heard of such an incident in the catacombs before.

In my uninformed opinion, this seems unlikely: gas pipes in Paris are buried less than 1m deep, whereas the catacombs are 10 to 30m underground, below service galleries for utilities, sewers, and even the subway.

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Underground

Nothing gets scrutinized - it's illegal to go down there anyway. Folks down there are not always safety conscious or very responsible :o)

Sometimes there are parties with tens or over a hundred people in a big room that only has two crawl holes to exit it.

About fire safety, well it's pretty damp down there, mostly with rocks and dirt. Can't picture a whole room catching fire... But I'm no expert in fire safety.

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Have I lost my skills in programming?

If you have trouble picking a project, code katas are really fun to try.

The instructions are broad enough that you can solve them in different ways. Take a crack at one, solve it. Reflect on what was easy and what was hard or painful. Come back some time later, re-do differently - maybe this time optimising for what was hard the first time.

Also you can take a look at classic data structures and reimplement them from scratch. Don't look at the current implementation, just at how it's supposed to work, and try implementing a List (array or link based ?), a Map (hash, tree?), etc. Then you can compare with the existing implementation.

Or play those coding games you're talking about ! Start easy, work your way up. When it gets too hard, take a break, try another game. Let it rest a bit, come back to it when you have fresher ideas in 2 weeks time.

In general, flex your muscles where you think you're lacking. E.g.: think you overcomplicate ? Do a kata, finish it. Then look at it and try to simplify what you've done.

Good luck in your practice, I hope you enjoy it :)

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi

I've had numerous failures on older RPi models due to SD card corruption, even in non-write intensive contexts. Not sure this is good enough when you want reliability...

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: Bloated

Lighthouse (now the Chrome dev tools "audits" tab) makes it really easy to trim down your site to the bare minimum. I've using on my personal blog, it's actually quite fun to work within constraints :)

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: The Case of the Broken Lambda

Batteries included, except when it's not :)

Cross platform Python is tough, especially when you use dynamically linked C libs on a platform that can change versions without warning.

kehrlann | 7 years ago | on: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

I believe classifying libs/frameworks by number of stars is not enough ; "when" these frameworks got stars, or how many stars they got in the past 6 month, is probably important. Not sure jQuery or angular 1 got many stars lately...

kehrlann | 8 years ago | on: Floating Point Visually Explained

I guess I'm not math-y enough so that I intuitively understand the simple math formula.

On the other hand, I like his window image : e.g. I understand better how, the further you get from 0, the more your precision goes down, because "bigger windows, divided in the same number of buckets".

kehrlann | 8 years ago | on: Floating Point Visually Explained

Best simple explanation I've seen so far.

I highly recommend Fabien's Game Engine Black Book. I'm halfway through it, and it's really fun. I've only been a software dev for 6 years, so looking at how things could be hacked around in the 90s to squeeze every drop of performance out of very constrained devices is fascinating.

kehrlann | 9 years ago | on: Machine Learning for Everyday Tasks

Agreed. Also, they don't discuss how they chose their features... It seems the problem was already solved before even applying ML to it. Maybe the example is too naive ?
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