vaibhavsagar's comments

vaibhavsagar | 1 year ago | on: MicroPython on Flipper Zero

I got one so that I could make copies of my apartment keyfob; I live alone and having a spare keycard that goes inside my phone case has saved me from locking myself out of my building multiple times. For me it's already paid for itself by ensuring my peace of mind. I've also used it to copy my gym tag (NFC), my parents' apartment keyfob (also NFC surprisingly), and multiple office access cards.

vaibhavsagar | 1 year ago | on: The Cult of the Haskell Programmer

This article doesn't touch on what I consider to be the central feature of Haskell: it is lazily (more precisely non-strictly) evaluated. A lot of the other aspects of it, such as monadic IO, follow from that decision.

vaibhavsagar | 1 year ago | on: I'm tired of makefiles

Have you worked with Nix much?

vaibhavsagar | 2 years ago | on: Git Worktrees and GitButler

Why not `git clone --bare`?

vaibhavsagar | 2 years ago | on: Roaring Bitmaps

I hope there's at least one chapter on compact data structures!

vaibhavsagar | 2 years ago | on: Grokking Hash Array Mapped Tries (HAMTs)

I wrote about these too: https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2018/07/29/hamts-from-scratch/! Unfortunately it's in Haskell which probably makes it less approachable than it would be otherwise.

vaibhavsagar | 2 years ago | on: Leaving Haskell behind

I personally use Vim, but Emacs alone is IMO the strongest counterexample to your claim about Lisp interpreters (followed by all the programs scriptable with Guile).

vaibhavsagar | 3 years ago | on: Git’s database internals I: packed object store

I also have my own implementation of packfiles [1], which I implemented as part of a toy Git implementation in Haskell [2]. I personally found the packfile format underdocumented, e.g. the official reference for the packfile generation strategy is an IRC transcript [3].

1: https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/duffer/blob/bad9c6c6cf09f717...

2: https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2017/08/13/i-haskell-a-git/

3: https://git-scm.com/docs/pack-heuristics/

vaibhavsagar | 3 years ago | on: How and why Haskell is better (than your favorite $LANGUAGE)

What if Haskell is my favourite language?

vaibhavsagar | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the interviewers

This is why I do all of mine in Haskell.

vaibhavsagar | 3 years ago | on: Understanding Bloom filters by building one

Doing a hashmap lookup is already very much like using a bloom filter: for any addressing scheme, if an element exists at a particular location, then either the key exists or it's a false positive. If no element exists, then there's no way the key exists. Adding an extra bloom filter would then come down to trading off space usage against a different probability of false positives, in addition to an extra lookup, and I think one would have to contrive an extremely unlikely scenario for it to make sense.

vaibhavsagar | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

At my last job, we had a Python codebase that had grown large and unwieldy. We wanted a language with stronger compile-time guarantees and better concurrency support. After evaluating several options the team at the time settled on Haskell and it's still used on all our kiosks to perform tasks including interfacing with the credit card reader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-z8hDXIQSg

vaibhavsagar | 4 years ago | on: I would like a job writing Haskell

I hope Mark gets the Haskell job he wants!

vaibhavsagar | 4 years ago | on: CyberChef – The Cyber Swiss Army Knife

I was hoping this might be about the Victorinox Cyber Tool, which is actually a Swiss Army Knife: https://www.victorinox.com/global/en/Products/Swiss-Army-Kni...

vaibhavsagar | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone working remotely for a US company internationally?

Yup, I'm doing this. I was living in the US when I interviewed in Feb 2020 but as an Australian citizen on an E-3 visa I had to leave the country to get a new one and then the pandemic happened. So far my employer has been happy to have me work remotely but the timezone offset has been pretty brutal and I'm only doing this because I hope to move back at some point early next year.

vaibhavsagar | 4 years ago | on: Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing

Aaron Levin did a very interesting talk about this at !!Con 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKRvEJrvvso

vaibhavsagar | 5 years ago | on: How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)

RC is not a YC company.

vaibhavsagar | 5 years ago | on: How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)

Why there aren't more places like Recurse Center: creating and sustaining a space for self-directed learning is a difficult and mostly thankless job. It also doesn't pay particularly well, the last job posting I found[1] mentions a $100,000 salary.

Why there aren't any workplaces like the Recurse Center: no company will give you the total freedom to pursue your own programming interests 100% of the time, especially if they conflict with the larger goals of the company.

1: https://www.recurse.com/blog/146-why-you-should-work-at-rc

vaibhavsagar | 5 years ago | on: How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)

I'm not sure what you mean by "internship", I don't think RC has ever offered those.

I was rejected the first time I applied to do a batch at RC. I applied again a few months later and was accepted.

vaibhavsagar | 6 years ago | on: The saddest script I ever wrote

I love Nix and NixOS, but having "a lotta gotchas" doesn't square with "no nasty surprises".