grandiego (u/grandiego)

grandiego commented on In Defense of Matlab Code runmat.org/blog/in-defens... · Posted by u/finbarr1987

mNovak · 2 months ago

As an engineer, I use Matlab (or rather, Octave the free equivalent) all the time. It's really great for numerical computing and plotting. Most things 'just work', there's a sizeable collection of packages, and I personally like how flexible the function inputs are.

Biggest drawback though is that it's over-optimized for matrix math, that it forces you to think about everything as matrices, even if that's not how your data naturally lies. The first thing they teach about performant Matlab code is that simple for-loops will tank performance. And you feel it pretty quickly, I saw a case once of some image processing, with a 1000x speedup from Matlab-optimized syntax.

Other things issues I've run into are string handling (painful), and generally OOP is unnatural. Would love to see something with the convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS.

grandiego · 2 months ago

Yes, strings appear like an afterthought, and sadly the Octave version has slight incompatibilities which may be a PITA for any non trivial script which aims to be compatible.

grandiego commented on In Defense of Matlab Code runmat.org/blog/in-defens... · Posted by u/finbarr1987

doawoo · 2 months ago

I want to come out and say that a long time ago at a startup we needed to generate a very particular type of analysis graph for a human operator to review in our SaaS.

and I just straight up installed GNU Octave on the server and called out to it from python, using the exact code the mathematician had devised.

grandiego · 2 months ago

For my thesis I did something similar: bash scripts to extract raw data from a Subversion repository, to be preprocessed with PHP scripts (now I would prefer Python but had more experience with PHP) for text extraction and csv output, and finally Octave did the math magic, generating tables and saving graphics in png format, ready for import into my Lyx document.

grandiego commented on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price finance.yahoo.com/news/or... · Posted by u/pera

deepriverfish · 2 months ago

I've never heard good things about Oracle, I don't understand how people keep using their products.

grandiego · 2 months ago

In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors. While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited. Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.

grandiego commented on Why Startups Die techfounderstack.com/p/wh... · Posted by u/makle

grandiego · 2 months ago

Of course almost all startups expect a long live, but strategically it may be better (for the founders) to close when the fundamental assumptions are no longer valid, in order to do a future clean restart in a brand new endeavor (usually after a detox period).

grandiego commented on The rise of async AI programming braintrust.dev/blog/async... · Posted by u/mooreds

sirwhinesalot · 5 months ago

Before I read the article I thought this meant programming with "async".

Just call it Agent-based programming or somesuch, otherwise it's really confusing!

grandiego · 5 months ago

Same here. I've read the author's braintrust.dev as "brain - Rust - Dev", so I was expecting a discussion on Rust Async development.

grandiego commented on ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video] bbc.com/news/videos/cy8k8... · Posted by u/nathanyz

dismalaf · 6 months ago

Criticizing Israel is in vogue but what's the solution?

Gazans still hold Israeli hostages, Hamas has publicly stated that more civilian deaths helps their cause [1], they're still fighting, the UN refused to distribute aid because they were getting attacked [2], and Israel unilaterally pulling out of Gaza and leaving them to govern themselves is literally what led to October 7th...

1 - https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/11/middleeast/sinwar-hamas-israe...

2 - https://www.wfp.org/news/un-food-agency-pauses-deliveries-no...

Edit - I love it. Down votes instead of responding to this comment's question. Again, what's your solution people?

Edit 2 - is this really a good use of the flagging tool? Is this what HN is about?

grandiego · 6 months ago

Hope some day Muslims (in all Arab countries) just accept the right of Israel to exist. Else, this attack/retaliation dynamic will continue for ever, with people taking sides from a blob of propaganda channels disguised in news platforms.

grandiego commented on Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin jacob.gold/posts/serving-... · Posted by u/feep

whartung · 7 months ago

The other issue with Tomcat is that a single bad actor can more easily compromise the server.

Not saying that can't happen with CGI, but since Tomcat is a shared environment, it's much more susceptible to it.

This is why shared, public Tomcat hosting never became popular compared to shared CGI hosting. A rogue CGI program can be managed by the host accounting subsystem (say, it runs too long, takes up too much memory, etc.), plus all of the other guards that can be put on processes.

The efficiency of CGI, specifically for compiled executables, is that the code segments are shared in virtual memory, so forking a new one can be quite cheap. While forking a new Perl or PHP process shares that, they still need to repeatedly go through the parsing phase.

The middle ground of "p-code" can work well, as those files are also shared in the buffer cache. The underlying runtime can map the p-code files into the process, and those are shared across instances also.

So, the fork startup time, while certainly not zero, can be quite efficient.

grandiego · 7 months ago

I believe even today there's no way to control/isolate memory leaks on a per-war basis.

grandiego commented on YouTube's new anti-adblock measures iter.ca/post/yt-adblock/... · Posted by u/smitop

ttyyzz · 8 months ago

Having to pay for something so that's "less annoying" is the worst business model. YouTube Premium is very expensive. I had it for a while when I got a Pixel smartphone with a few months of YouTube Premium included. It was great. I also understand that streaming on this scale must entail incredibly high operating costs; the money has to come from somewhere. It's simply a dilemma. But there has to be a better way. Any ideas?

grandiego · 8 months ago

At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.

grandiego commented on Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014) tim.dierks.org/2014/05/se... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

Timothycquinn · 8 months ago

Considering that Microsoft was a completely different beast in that time, I'm not surprised it does not seem that silly.

M$ (appropriate name for that time) of the day was doing its best to own everything and the did not let up on trying to hold back the open source internet technologies until the early 2010's I believe. Its my opinion that they were successful in killing Java Applets, which were never able to improve past the first versions and JavaScript and CSS in general was held back many years.

I still recall my corporate overloards trying to push me to support IE's latest 'technologies' but I resisted and instead started supporting Mozilla 3.0 as soon as they fixed some core JS bugs for our custom built enterprise JavaScript SPA tools in the early 2000's. It turned out to be a great decision as the fortune 500 company started using Mozilla / Firefox in other internal apps in later years long before it became common place.

grandiego · 8 months ago

Applets died because of many reasons, like absurd startup time for the JRE (often just for silly animations), absurd memory requirements (for the time) and associated crashes, weird compatibility issues in the initial releases of the Java platform, a silly security model based on the assumption that only good actors will be able to get a CA certificate in order to do whatever they want in your PC, an immature sandboxing technology in browsers (not only IE), etc.

grandiego commented on A receipt printer cured my procrastination laurieherault.com/article... · Posted by u/laurieherault

uncircle · 8 months ago

I was about to be a little snarky but your comment reminded me to be kind. Thanks.

I don't have a receipt printer, what helps me is an A4-sized whiteboard with marker when I feel like I'm falling behind my tasks. Also, to use todos sparingly, so they retain their effectiveness. It's actually quite underrated to forget and let go of tasks; what's important tends to stick around in your head and keep you up at night.

The snark was from my personal experience that serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money for something that hopefully solves their issues. It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast. This is why there is tons of posts about "here's how I solved my procrastination issue" when they've only used the supposed panacea for a couple of days. What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years. Then one can claim to have found a cure, albeit one that probably only works for them.

In any case, keep writing. It helps a lot if you too suffer from squirrel brain.

grandiego · 8 months ago

> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.

From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.