drderidder

Including your future self.

An oldie but a goodie. The site has been around since 2011. What’s great about this site is the general idea that you don’t necessarily need a framework (ie React) for everything.

“Never rewrite” is a popular cargo-cult that sprang from a well known blog article that made the rounds some years ago. The urge to rewrite can be a naive impulse for sure, but there are LOTS of cases where new and better technology can result in tremendous gains, or where a code base is simply too far gone to redeem. The biggest successes of my career have almost all been ground up rewrites of existing products using new technology or techniques that resulted in orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and ROI. If you can make incremental improvements that’s great, but sometimes it’s just not possible to rewrite “a piece at a time” because there are no pieces, just one big ball of mud. To the original author: If you don’t rewrite this mess, your competitors will. I’d say: lay out the case for an overhaul, stand your ground, don’t implement any new features until you’ve got a clear path to reducing technical debt, and if you can’t get buy-in to an overhaul just leave. What you’re describing sounds like a textbook scenario for burnout and there are lots of other opportunities where you can work on things in ways that you’ll actually enjoy.

Sorry, but it’s not out of date. Based on very recent extensive travel and living there. But yes of course there are additional places to get cash (yubinkyoku etc) and various rail passes. The JR pass really is a nobrainer though.

Basically no. But if your company has a Japanese branch and is willing to transfer you there, then maybe. But be aware that visiting Japan as a tourist vs living and working there are very different experiences, and plenty of expats burn out within a year. Visit first, maybe do the digital nomad thing for a bit.

SevenEleven ATMs generally take foreign interac debit cards if you need cash (yen). Most places accept credit cards. When given the option on the debit card machine to pay in yen or convert to USD / CAD etc always choose yen, to avoid high conversion rates charged by the processor. Allow your credit card company to convert to your home currency at a much better rate. Get a Japan Rail pass. Pack lightly and hit a Uniqlo on arrival. Call hotels to book rather than using western-based online booking platforms whose prices are a lot higher, or use Jalan.net. Remember you’re a guest in a foreign country, stay humble and be polite, it’ll get you further. Seriously, get a Japan rail pass. Get an esim for your phone upon arrival using an app like Ubigi or similar (1 month with 10gb for ~$20). Be prepared for reverse culture shock when you return home.

Of course. Foreign keys are elementary. Try recursive CTEs. You can get ridiculous performance gains by not having to marshal data into the application space. It’s all about using the right tool for the job. If you’ve done solid system-level design then running migrations probably shouldn’t be the primary driver of your schema.

This may not be a popular comment, but if you have to ask, then no. In Canada at least, engineering is a regulated profession. No one can legally call themselves an engineer without a four-year Bachelor of Engineering degree from an accredited University and membership in the professional engineering body of the Province in which they practice. Doctors and lawyers are other regulated professions; one cannot simply call themselves a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

My first ever mobile app was an experimental bit of Android Malware. It got demo'd by my colleague at Blackhat [1]. I'm definitely not a hacker, but with a few basic tricks I was able to create a pretty effective trojan which we then injected into a popular game (again only for experimental purposes, it was never released in the wild). In our lab we had literally millions of samples of Android malware, but for iOS we had only two (which only worked on jailbroken phones). Fun times.

1. https://www.softwaretalks.io/v/4047/black-hat-usa-2013-how-t...

Excellent post, if only for the fact that its a great way to share "what works for me" at a time when most of our local JS/Web meetup groups have been put on hold due to the pandemic, or gone onto Twitch / Zoom, so its harder to have those casual "I'm really loving such-and-such" conversations now. Thanks for sharing. FWIW I also like the general keep-it-simple / YAGNI approach. I switched from TypeScript to straight up JSDoc and with the right IDE setup it works beautifully.

Nobody seems to be talking much about favipiravir, which seems a bit like not-invented-here syndrome. If it stood to make a lot of money for some US big pharma company I suspect we'd be hearing more about it.

New motto: "Don't get caught being evil".

After using TypeScript for the past couple of years, I've come to see it as simply another "embrace and extend" maneuver by Microsoft carve off a chunk of JavaScript mindshare, preying upon the naïveté of less-experienced developers who've fallen for the "static typing is safer" myth. TypeScript's decision to disallow JSDoc within .ts files [1] for example doesn't contribute anything positive to my impression of this syntactic pocket-protector. While the type hinting it provides is useful, the tradeoffs of added complexity, tool dependencies, and cross-compiling phase have made it more trouble than its worth in my opinion, particularly since tooling to provide code introspection and type hinting has already existed for a long time [2]. For new projects, I've begun using straight JSDoc, which is working beautifully with minimal setup [3] and provides all of the benefits I ever found useful about TypeScript, while remaining completely unobtrusive otherwise[4].

1. https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/20774

2. https://ternjs.net/

3. https://medium.com/@trukrs/type-safe-javascript-with-jsdoc-7...

4. https://fettblog.eu/typescript-jsdoc-superpowers/

It matters a bunch. All kinds of noise can get picked up over cables and bleed into your audio path on a digital rig. It happens all the time just with power cables which is why every musician carries a handful of "ground lifts" even though they're technically illegal in a lot of places. That said, MIDI over USB is kind of necessary in this day and age. Hopefully instrument manufacturers will be rigorous about isolating any interference it could pick up.

Lack of soil accumulation does not mean the soil evaporates into thin air; it is taken up by the watershed and redistributed downstream. The same carbon cycle is in effect; accumulation in any particular terrain has really nothing to do with it.

From experience, and supported by the Sqlite docs, I can tell you that trying to run sqlite on files on an NFS mounted filesystem will not work. See section 2.1 of this document [1] and the related discussion HN discussion [2]

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098832

It doesn't get more than a passing mention, but section 2.1 is worth noting. Don't try to use sqlite files on an NFS mounted drive.

That's basically, well, not true. When trees break down they contribute to soil organic matter. Approx 58% of SOM is carbon (SOC) making soil one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter

That's a fair and valid point. I should have expanded on the list of possible factors to include living in a "bad" environment in general, where "bad" can be defined by a huge number of things, including poverty, hopelessness, and a million other things to numerous to mention... other than the one single factor of "air pollution" that this article suggests is the reason for depression and suicide. That was, after all, the point of my comment, in case you missed it; that idea which the article seems to promote - that air pollution causes suicide - is highly questionable.

All I can say is he must be a really good programmer if he needed to deliberately install logic bombs to make his software malfunction after a period of time. I've got my hands full just making things work properly in the first place!

No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.

Don't confuse a US-centric view of medical technology development, western medical journals, US trials etc with something developed in Japan. This is Toshiba, working with the (Japanese) National Cancer Center Research Institute and you can be sure there's extensive research behind it, even if it's in Japanese.

They're slides intended for a live presentation. You can use space bar or arrow keys to flip through as well. We've found this format to work well for our 2000+ member meetup group, but I might follow your suggestion to write it out long-form sometime. The more technical documentation is at: https://github.com/73rhodes/dclassify

This simple intro to machine learning with node.js has been one of the more popular talks I've given: http://73rhodes.github.io/talks/MachineLearning/#/

Somebody needs to tell this guy about a thing called a "database".

It became much more common knowledge after the Canadian government issued an official apology [1]. I recall seeing a documentary about it[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Canadia...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8TQTuMqM9g

I think this is also known as the fallacy of the fungible engineer / myth of the interchangeable programmer.

End users should be the ones grading Siri's responses anyway.

It seems they are simply assigning patients to the top risk decile (more accurately than before). Telling someone they are at a high risk is different than a flat-out diagnosis. Better efficacy of the predictive model (fewer false positives and fewer false negatives than before) is a good thing.

TLDR but 95% correct does not necessarily equate to 5% false positives: you can also have false negatives. The bottom line is the new algorithm increases the efficacy of the prediction.