153 karma · joined August 19, 2022
You are not the same person as the one on your death bed. You do not have the same priorities. The only thing left for the person on the death bed are memories, so it's natural that this is a common regret.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
At first glance this seems to offer similar functionality to PAR2, with the disadvantage that errors cannot be corrected, as parity data is not stored in the digest.
Whenever I practice, I always have my notes in front of me and I focus on puzzling through the problem at hand rather than testing my memory.
But in an exam, for me there us always the possibility of failing to recall some fact. To combat this, I record every not-completely-obvious fact into Anki and aggressively practice it in the run-up to the exam.
In general, I just do not like a lot of situations which are time-limited. I have been this way for many years.
Also, when I have nothing interesting to say, I would prefer to not say anything and listen instead.
In real-life situations, I much prefer one-on-one conversations to groups. Not sure if that is a consequence of any of the above.
For me this is the biggest reason.
However I also recently quit social media (by this I don't count IRC, HN and the Fediverse as these are mostly text-based - okay to browse in my books), quit soft drinks, quit YouTube (almost, new videos come in through my subscriptions about once a day) and started reading (albeit very slowly) after a multi-year lapse. So it's not all bad.
Games with impressive graphics but no gameplay aren't known for being particularly big drains of human attention.
As another example, take the comments on the recent thread about the browser game generals.io [1]. One might say that 'it looks like a spreadsheet with conditional formatting', but it doesn't make it any less addictive, according to the commenters.
I am looking forward to even more stability and usability in the future!
What makes you think this?
One observation I have made about sites with a list of images/videos to view is that it is sometimes easy to succumb to visiting the site only to look at 'mindless' media (memes, sexually suggestive material, etc). At least for me, this seems to be the case no matter the ranking algorithm or user interface (no infinite scroll, etc) used by the site.
I have not found Hacker News to be this way. It is both easier to stop scrolling, and I have to exert at least some mental effort to read the news links and comments.
At the top of my own bucket list, at the moment, are: Distributed Systems and SCIP, both from MIT, and Compilers, from Harvard!
To get a flavour of your opinion, could you suggest some runners-up for "best computer science course"?
I think the idea is not to be apathetic toward indifferents, but rather to not let yourself fall into dispair if something out of your own control doesn't go your way, at least that's how I choose to interpret it.
In what way is the "owner" of the code significant, in this case, other than being a proxy for the maintainer of the most popular fork?
These projects are open source, so the only thing this code is really attached to is the license. Whatever entity controls the majority of developer effort effectively controls the future of the project. So far, that entity has been Element, and the features being worked on in the client and server applications have been and will be influenced by the customers of Element and the sponsors of the Foundation (for an example of this influence, see the biometric/PIN lock introduced in the Element X mobile applications).
I suppose you can't really count on the same text/markup being shifted around as articles get split and modified in the ways you've described. Also I suppose there is no such thing as a cross-article edit in MediaWiki terms iirc. Use vector embeddings? Throw an LLM at the problem? Rate editors on their familiarity with a given topic area (and track how that evolves over time)?
The idea of using edit information in addition to the raw text written by editors seems like it's extracting additional bits of information from human interactions.
I might have read some idea in a HN comment of training AI not just on code, but on how that code is edited in a git repo, or maybe I am just imagining it.
I've had the idea of building something like this. The concept being that you would select an article and a time interval, and be shown the "best/most stable" revision of the article within the given window. The tool could use any number of metrics for determining which revision is best, the most reasonable one I've managed to come up with is "highest number of views during a state where the article was not locked/available to edit".