mabbo

8 ms·

1.
by mabbo 7mo ago
Many years ago, as an undergrad, I had a conversation with a grad student friend about the Selection algorithm (which will find the kth largest item in an unsorted list in O(n) time). I loved it, but when I tested it in practice it was slow
2.
by mabbo 11mo ago
Not all time spent interacting with a screen is "screen time". The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff . It culminates in kids (and adults) who cannot
3.
by mabbo 2y ago
I got a sleep study at the age of 24 because my then-girlfriend (now wife) said "I got used to the snoring, but that thing where you stop breathing really freaks me out". The what now? In hindsight, I'd had signs of sleep apn
4.
by mabbo 2y ago
I learned about the median-of-medians quickselect algorithm when I was an undergrad and was really impressed by it. I implemented it, and it was terribly slow. It's runtime grew linearly, but that only really mattered if you had at lea
5.
by mabbo 3y ago
Sorry Dang. I hadn't realized it was coming off that way, but I'll be my best to check myself in the future. I can see how what I said would be construed that way.
6.
by mabbo 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you. This was a very bad idea. But I was a few hours away from becoming a parent, hadn't slept much in days, and was not thinking very well. Sub-optimal decisions were made.
7.
by mabbo 3y ago
What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do. Because we have a public hea
8.
by mabbo 3y ago
> My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.
9.
by mabbo 3y ago
When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were consistently asking for updates. I made a website called "is<wife's name>stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal website there. It was literally just rout
10.
by mabbo 3y ago
At $110/h, 70 h/week, that's $7,700/week, so $23k for 3 weeks of hell. That's about 1/3 of the median US household income in 3 weeks. If I didn't have a family, had the skills, and lived in the area this w
11.
by mabbo 3y ago
It worked, FYI. Thanks!
12.
by mabbo 3y ago
There is a need for runtime configurations, yes, but it's important to put them behind an interface intended for that, and not one intended for something else.
13.
by mabbo 3y ago
> Make feature flags short-lived. Do not confuse flags with application configuration. This is my current battle. I introduced feature flags to the team as a means to separate deployment from launch of new features. For the sake of getti
14.
by mabbo 3y ago
No no don't tell me this. I had things I wanted to get done this weekend!
15.
by mabbo 3y ago
I saw a cool looking indie game the other day on steam and excitedly bought it. Then realized it doesn't support Linux. I can't install it. I was shocked. And then I realized how crazy it is that I had presumed a game would run
16.
by mabbo 3y ago
Many years ago when I was a junior dev at Amazon, there was a massive project internally to split up every internal system into regional versions with limited gateways allowing calls between regions. The reason? We had run out of internal I
17.
by mabbo 3y ago
The moment that generative AI became something crazy for me was when I said "holy shit, maybe Blake Lemoine was right". Lemoine was the Google engineer who made a big fuss saying that Google had a sentient AI in development and he
18.
by mabbo 3y ago
Ontario built highway 407 in the early 2000s (late 90s?) with tolls that use license plate readers - no slowing down or stopping at all. Still a bit controversial, that, and especially controversial when the Conservative government sold it
19.
by mabbo 3y ago
I think the above means (if I do get the point) that databases scale in terms of both requests per second and number of active connections. Having 1000 connections doing 1 request per second isn't the same as having 1 connection doin
20.
by mabbo 3y ago
No, they both matter. The database can handle X shops per partition, and the rails host can handle Y shops per partition. If rails were half as fast, you'd need twice as many rails hosts (but no more databases).
21.
by mabbo 3y ago
This is secretly about Types and misuse of values. "NV" is a valid value for a plate. The officers were using that value to indicate an error, thus the chaos of error handling for a non-error. When programming error cases, you sho
22.
by mabbo 3y ago
That's not on a per-host basis. Shopify's design is, quite fortunately, one that partitions really well, as each store is completely independent of each other. Each store can be assigned to one pod, each pod can have as many hos
23.
by mabbo 3y ago
Really, Khadr? The guy was brainwashed as a child by his lunatic father and dragged to Afghanistan to resist American's invasion. There was some kind of firefight, he nearly died, and the Americans decided that since he survived he w
24.
by mabbo 3y ago
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was 7 years old at the time of that attack. Are you suggesting that he was involved? Or are you suggesting that all Sikhs who believe in an independent nation for their people are guilty of that crime? Should we also ho
25.
by mabbo 3y ago
And I think they're just as wrong for it. But if you'll consult a world map and look just above the United States, you'll notice that Canada is, in fact, a separate country.
26.
by mabbo 3y ago
To those saying "But Bill C-18" - it's not the Canadian government taking things down. It's the Indian government, taking down articles and posts that accuse them of assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. C-1
27.
by mabbo 3y ago
> A famous English name in expat in China circles is Rainy. Funny that. A friend of mine since high school - who is white and has never been to Asia - has the first name Rainey. Not a nickname. I've never met anyone else with the na
28.
by mabbo 3y ago
Since you know more about this subject, I have a question on this topic that I've wondered for over two decades. In 2001, I did a month long exchange program to Thailand. A group of eight Canadians stayed with eight Thais, and the year
29.
by mabbo 3y ago
And this is why we need to really rethink the typical patterns on form inputs, which today usually presume a western style name pattern. Just ask people for their full name, and what they would prefer to be called. (Unless you literally can
30.
by mabbo 3y ago
This is better for everyone. Either someone is safe to release pending trial, or they aren't. Either they're a flight risk, or they aren't. How much money someone can afford to put up does not change those things.

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