tsuyoshi · HackerTrans

6 jaar geledendiscuss

I tried to do this not too long ago, but (at least in the US) all of the mobile networks are switching to LTE, and shutting down their 2G and 3G networks. I was unable to find any "dumb" phones with LTE support. The closest thing I found was some overpriced Android phone with most of the smartphone features stripped out.

tsuyoshi

6 jaar geledendiscuss

The decision I most regret was moving to a city without many tech jobs (Philadelphia). The difference in number of available jobs, salaries, working conditions, and even the intelligence of coworkers is kind of mind-blowing, now that I've moved back to a city with a lot of tech jobs (Seattle). The cost of living is higher here, but it's worth it.

tsuyoshi

6 jaar geledendiscuss

In Cambodia, I got what I assume must have been a less serious case, because I didn't have any vomiting or diarrhea, only the worst headache I've ever had in my life. Luckily the lack of air conditioning wasn't a big problem, because it was close to the coldest part of the year.

It permanently reset my pain scale. When I later had a pulmonary embolism and appendicitis, the doctors were confused that I said my pain was only 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

The drug I took for it (mefloquine) didn't give me any unusual dreams, but it permanently altered something in my brain.

I don't agree that DDT is necessary to eradicate malaria. See for example that malaria has been eradicated in Thailand (except for border areas), but not (yet) in Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, despite having the same climate. A combination of regular pesticides and flood control are sufficient - if the government is competent and dedicated. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.

tsuyoshi

6 jaar geledendiscuss

If you want to parse complicated strings using only a POSIX tool, and put the results into an array, you're better off using Awk.

tsuyoshi

6 jaar geledendiscuss

When I converted a CPU-intensive program from OCaml to MLton-compiled SML, without changing any of the algorithms, I got a 30% speedup. That was more than 10 years ago though, and both compilers have seen some improvement since.

tsuyoshi

6 jaar geledendiscuss

I wrote this for parsing CSV in Awk: http://yumegakanau.org/code/awk-csv/ It maybe doesn't handle all the CSV out there, but the cases you mention (quoting and commas) it does handle.

I usually load CSV data into PostgreSQL to do anything with it; mostly wrote this Awk library for fun. So I'm not going to argue that Awk is the best language for doing this kind of thing, but it is possible.

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