a_lieb

That is exceedingly cool. Is there anything available about this online? Sound clips, source code, etc.?

I think recommendation systems actually are pretty good at recommending stuff you already like. I think a lot of us tend to buzz right past those as "well, obviously I've seen that already" and don't take note that it actually hit the nail right on the head for the first 5-10 results.

The trick is to find stuff that cuts across the space in some sense—stuff that's out of your current wheelhouse, but still has features that you would like. (E.g. I like the music of both David Rawlings and Mark Ribot, even though they are in wildly different genres, because they both have a certain ear for melody and relationship with dissonance that I like.) I don't think anyone is doing that well yet.

I feel like that's not all that rare—you just do it as a series of blog posts these days. You could make a strong case that a set of independent pages that freely interlink is a better format, but still, the impulse is there, so people have found a way to make that kind of content.

Common Lisp doesn't have first-class maps (although lispm is right that you can think of lists as a thin abstraction around all kinds of data structures). But Clojure does have first class maps complete with their own syntax:

   {:key1 "Value 1"
    :key2 "Value 2"}

as well as sets, and a few other native types.

I've heard that in recent years there's an increasing understanding that while achieving lucid dreams is very doable, full dream control is rare even with years of practice. (I'm pretty sure there's at least one journal article on this, but I can't find it now.)

Do you find that you have pretty much full control, or are you just along for the ride a lot of the time?

This is right. It's "innately async" in the same way as Node: there is a built in event loop, and just about anything that could block (file I/O, GUI input, etc.) can be accessed through async functions instead.

I'm sure there are loads of confounding factors here, but for what it's worth, a study of tech salaries by Hired.com found that Paris had the lowest cost-of-living adjusted salary of all cities reviewed, at about $56,000 in San Francisco dollars[1].

[1] https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2018

Very neat. Seems quite accurate for my area. The least accurate example I found was a spot that takes 25 minutes listed as taking 35 (confirmed on Google Maps). Topographic barriers and traffic seem to be the big problems for other posters, and neither are a huge factor in my part of Western Mass.

> (“A” brings up “abc” but typing “ab” makes “abc” go away!?)

To be fair, this one happens to me with Spotlight all the time.

I teach programming, and I find people rarely have any special trouble in switching to a different style or paradigm. If I was teaching in the 80's and wanted to transition someone from old school BASIC to something like C or Pascal with structured programming and blocks, I'd show them an "if" with a code block and how it's different than a conditional GOTO, yet similar in a way. Gradually the mental model evolves to incorporate the new features, and when they look back, they can understand both ways, even though on paper it's "two different paradigms."

Similarly, if I'm teaching JavaScript and want to show the student functional programming, I'll show them how a "for" loop could be converted to use map or filter, or recursion. Far from "corrupting their mind" so they can't understand other ways, the imperative style serves as a foundation to learn other styles. The paradigm shift occurs gradually on some subconscious level, with the previous paradigm serving as a mental model to build up the new one.

It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's technology with no security.

I feel like there must be more to this story. Maybe they immediately saw security problems, or legal issues. Not saying it's going to exonerate Twitter (maybe the truth is even worse than it sounds), but this is such an obvious PR mess that I can't see them doing it for no reason.

That, in turn, shows how far the web has come. I remember a time when we didn't even have console.log()!

Obviously this more stable, slow-and-steady approach to the package ecosystem has its pros and cons, but the best fruit of it was SQLite, possibly the best library ever made. D. Richard Hipp describes it as "a Tcl extension that escaped into the wild." [1]

[1] https://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Paper.htm...

This has happened to me too many times. When I was a teenager in the early 2000's, I got pseudoquasi.com, and even back then people were surprised it was available. Now I have sound.fm, which is way better and more relevant to my interests, and I think I've literally woken up in a cold sweat thinking I let it expire. Never again.

I talked to a Facebook employee about how he handles all of the crap on FB as a user, and he said most people there make heavy use of the filtering tools, so they're only seeing the stuff that they care about. That always sounded like a good strategy to me, but maybe not for your case since it's literally one guy.

I think this is the take-away point: "Beyond stopping and starting a given piece, it is the job of a conductor to decide how it will be interpreted. How loud should the middle section of the first movement be—and ought the violins to be playing a bit softer so as not to drown out the flutes? Someone must answer questions such as these if a performance is not to sound indecisive or chaotic, and it is far easier for one person to do so than for 100 people to vote on each decision."

If you've ever worked with a conductor, even in high school band, the whole mystery disappears right away. In classical music, "conductor" usually refers to what would be called "musical director" in other situations: they oversee all of the big and little artistic decisions you need to make good music. Standing up there waving the baton around is a pretty small part of the job. When you explain to people this way, it's almost obvious: just like any big project, you want to have a manager with some kind of vision to give things direction. It's pretty hard to run the whole thing as a commune.

Maybe command line tools should have a --no-fun flag to disable all easter eggs. I'm only half kidding. It could be undocumented, but at least it gives you a way to ensure consistent output for tests if you stumble into a problem like this.

I'm glad to hear that. I've definitely seen it mentioned by a bunch of experts/academics as if it were accepted fact (Jordan Peterson is the only one that comes right to mind).

I think the idea might partly come from the dream-like quality of ancient myths, but I feel like that underestimates the ability of people to partition those myths from daily life. It's not like our current religious stories are exactly logical.

There seems to be an accepted idea that ancient people had a totally different way of thinking: that up to around 300 BC, humans navigated through the world with a dream-like, pre-scientific logic, and didn't view the world as comprehensible or subject to predictable laws and patterns.

I've always wondered, do we actually know this for sure? What's the evidence? Just by introspection, it is so hard for me to imagine being in a state of mind where I didn't believe that if I dropped a rock off a cliff twice, under similar conditions, it would do pretty much the same thing the second time. Or that if I did it over and over again, I would start to see patterns that I could rely on for later. This feels as hard-wired as just about anything in my mind.

To me, it makes more sense to think that humans have always thought the same way, and these days we just have better tools and have learned to refine the cognitive abilities that are wired into us. But I'm really interested to hear the case for the other side.

One important thing the article doesn't cover: we now have good reason to suspect that chronic sleep deprivation can cause brain damage. Not just a long term decrease in function, but actual cellular damage.

In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])

As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24429-sleep-boosts-br...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system

I do programming tutoring at LightHouse Holyoke[1], a learning center for homeschooled and unschooled kids here in Western Massachusetts. Legally the students are homeschooled, but the center has a full schedule of classes and also connects the kids with tutoring and other one-on-one activities. Most kids go 3-5 days a week and get most or all of their education through LightHouse.

It's a blast. There are about 15 centers like this across the country that operate under the banner of the Liberated Learners network[2]. It's mostly volunteer but there are some paid opportunities, especially for group classes.

[1] http://lighthouseholyoke.org/

[2] http://liberatedlearners.net/

Is there anything you can recall doing that would encourage or discourage chess stuff from popping into your head like that? Do you think it came out of intentionally replaying games on your head and then became more automatic? Or did it just randomly start to happen on its own?

This kind of automatic mental practice seems like an awesome skill to develop for any field of study. It's a way to practice and learn without using up any willpower.

I play guitar and sometimes I do find myself doing solfege exercises and visualizing fretboard patterns when I'm falling asleep/sitting in traffic/whatever. I'd love to be able to do that more.

Assuming it takes an average of 1 minute for someone to look up the answer and quit Vim, the readers of this question alone spent a total of 2 years looking up how to quit Vim. Whether or not it was a good design choice, it goes to show how much of people's time and energy is at stake when you make software at enormous scale.

I agree that intonation matters a lot; I guess I'm thinking about how you'd make a notation that better conveys the information already there in the current scores, which is 100% equal tempered. I actually like the idea of modifiers for microtones, and presumably any of that stuff would work just as well on a 12-tone staff.

Also, with a 12-tone staff plus shape notes, you'd get a little extra information for just intonation because you can tell for sure what key was intended for a given note.

I'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well.

My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same.

It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same.

It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then.

Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees.

(One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)

The editing on Audible books is amazing, so thank you!

If you don't mind my asking, when people want to do their own reading and are willing to get training, how are they trained?

I ask because (like every geek) I sometimes think about doing a podcast some day, plus I just want to be a better public speaker, and there seems to be a lack of options between free/cheap resources focused on basic skills (like Toastmasters) and intensive training for people who want to do voiceover for a living.