seepel's comments

seepel | 4 years ago | on: Nyxt 2.2.0

I’m pretty psyched to see the progress being made on this project, keep up the good work!

seepel | 5 years ago | on: Why I still Lisp

> What thing that violates a type check would be "perfectly fine to do"?

Here is an example limitation of typescript's type system that I routinely run into while developing real code [1].

I look at it like this. If you consider all possible programs, some are invalid, some are valid, and some are valid and useful. A type system's job is to reject as many invalid programs as possible while accepting as many valid programs as possible and trying to optimize for useful valid programs. Due to the halting problem this is impossible to do perfectly, so any given type system will likely accept some invalid programs and reject some useful valid programs. If the type system happens to reject your useful valid program, you'll likely have a bad day :)

[1] https://www.typescriptlang.org/play?#code/PTAEHUFNQCwQwG7TgO...

seepel | 5 years ago | on: A History of Clojure [pdf]

I’m not much of a clojure fan myself, but I think the observation is that by relaxing that last constraint of static typing (and given the other appropriate tools), that while you can’t solve The Expression Problem itself, it’s a bit easier to solve the real world problem that happened to manifest itself as the expression problem in your code.

By the way, I was also enticed by multi-methods in this area, but I ultimately don’t think multiple dispatch is necessary.

seepel | 5 years ago | on: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)

I agree, I managed to make it through a PhD in physics and I never had a problem. Neither do I recall any of my class mates having a problem with hand written notation.

seepel | 8 years ago | on: Many major websites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures

I honestly used to browse the web without an adblocker and bounce from the site if it was too bad. About a year ago I ended up getting so fed up with not being able to visit pretty much any site that I installed one. I’m totally fine with being served ads, and recognize that it will even come with some not so friendly user tracking. Surely it must be possible to both serve me your content and ads at the same time. My only explanation is that it is pure laziness on all sides. The content maker gets paid if they display ads, the ad network gets paid if they fill ad slots, and the advertiser somehow sells more product (this I’m more skeptical of). So no one in that chain ever bothers to think of the end user.

seepel | 8 years ago | on: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

It often breaks with different query parameters for example on YouTube videos, but I just created a couple of bookmarklets.

hn:

  javascript:window.location.href='https://hn.algolia.com?query='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%20+%20'&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story'
reddit:

  javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Durl%3A%22%20%2B%20encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)%7D)()

seepel | 8 years ago | on: Stop supporting old releases

I’ve noticed this problem in the npm ecosystem pertaining to typescript typings. Typescript is evolving really quickly, each new release allows you to be more expressive, and there are stricter and stricter settings to take advantage of. It’s fairly common for a third party library’s typings to be incompatible with new typescript settings. The problem is that maintainers are reluctant to add support in the name of backwards compatibility. The only solution I’ve found in some cases is to completely override the library’s typings myself locally.

seepel | 9 years ago | on: SQLITE: JSON1 Extension

On the other hand the same version supports indices on expressions that could be used to create an index on json values. Not exactly the same but could be used for similar use cases.

seepel | 9 years ago | on: The future of iOS is 64-bit only: Apple to stop support of 32-bit apps

I believe there are actually some cool things they do with the extra space in the Objective-C runtime. It's been a while so I may be mistaken but I think they store the reference count in the pointer to avoid a lookup to a separate table. There might also be some trickery in storing NSNumber values in the pointer itself as well.

EDIT: Grammar

seepel | 9 years ago | on: The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true

It's not just about beauty, but experience. Imagine you have a spreadsheet with infinite rows where each row contributes to the Higgs mass. It also turns out that by and large each row contributes less than the previous. You can't calculate all of them, but calculating the bigger ones you can do pretty well. Now imagine someone plops in infinity into one of the rows, sure the rest could all just happen to contribute a small amount and conspire to add up and cancel that out (because the mass isn't infinite), but it just doesn't seem like the world we live in. However, if you add another column to your spreadsheet for super symmetry and suddenly that column naturally cancels out the discrepancies from the first column. It's a simplistic example, but hopefully gives a better idea why Physicists were hopefull for some kind of new physics.

This is called the hierarchy problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#The_Higgs_ma...

seepel | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

I didn't see the benchmark code in the repo, so I didn't really think about a pull request. Next time I find time I'll poke around a bit more. They are trivial changes though.

seepel | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

I'm a little late to the party, but I ran the benchmark inserts with cached statements on both my Macbook Pro and my iPhone 5S. sqlite definitely fairs better under this scenario.

That being said I still find the speed of Realm pretty impressive. And it's hard to gauge real world performance from this test. In my experience the real bottle necks around insert are upsets and establishing maintaining relationships.

For reference here are the benchmarks without reusing sqlite statements.

  Macbook Pro - Realm: 0.780414 sqlite: 0.464804 FMDB: 0.654659 
  iPhone 5S   - Realm: 2.235381 sqlite: 2.786381 FMDB: 3.336679
And with statement reuse

  Macbook Pro - Realm: 0.766406 sqlite: 0.189747 FMDB: 0.683823 
  iPhone 5S   - Realm: 2.214847 sqlite: 0.991864 FMDB: 2.832800
Interesting side note: FMDB seems to be spending just as much time finding the cached statement as sqlite takes to prepare a new one. I didn't expect that. I haven't dug into it at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if this due to the fact that the insert statement is relatively simple.

EDIT: Just fixed up formatting for the results

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