ckcheng

Contactless payments was already adopted in Canada for several years by 2010 [1]. It’s not recent. Not sure why US is slow in this adoption though

[1] See first two sentences here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-securi...

You can move the region and thus move the mouse actually:

From: https://www.semicomplete.com/projects/keynav/

> The following is the default configuration:

    h : select the left half of the region
    j : select the bottom half of the region
    k : select the top half of the region
    l : select the right half of the region
    shift+h : move the region left
    shift+j : move the region down
    shift+k : move the region top
    shift+l : move the region right
    semicolon : Move the mouse to the center of the selected region
    spacebar : Move the mouse and left-click

> Q: Does it work on ... Wayland...? > A: Sadly, no; keynav is totally dependent on X11, and porting it to any other graphical system would really be a clone/rewrite.

I hope it'll eventually get ported. It's such a useful tool. Much better for me than just moving the mouse around like "mouse keys" would.

The series relates to recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896343 which was just a Google spreadsheet

The series relates to recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896343 which was just a Google spreadsheet

Exactly, I need to take lots of notes and beyond search and sync, I need it conveniently everywhere with me on all devices.

That's why I use Google Keep --- which is pretty terrible... except it's free, it's everywhere there's a browser, there's an app for it on every phone/tablet, and it works offline when I sometimes don't have internet connection.

Works ok since I write notes in plain text, with some markdown notation (but without actual Markdown support in Keep).

In the past, I've used Notational Velocity and other fancy things, but I find plain text is best. And now I need sync on all devices, so went with Keep.

LXQt. Lightweight. Gets out of the way. Functional. I'm not terribly into aesthetics.

Sorry, meant to reply to you here, but did it there ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27350720 ).

In short, Xournal (original, not ++) can add pictures and text too! And it's available via official Debian repository. So it's easier to install in Debian.

Xournal++ is a rewrite of Xournal, and has more features, but I don't want to deal with downloading a .deb or using snap or flatpak. They're working on getting Xournal++ into official Debian repository though, but it's not there yet.

Xournal (original, not ++) is quite good for filling in basic forms on Debian!

Just wanted to add: Xournal (not ++) can also add text and add pictures (like a pic of a signature) too.

Xournal can be installed from the official Debian repository, but not Xournal++ (not yet - it's apparently being worked on).

So Xournal is very convenient for filling in basic forms on Debian and is easier to install.

Xournal++ could be installed on Debian by downloading a .deb, or using snap or flatpak. But not as convenient as installing Xournal via apt-get.

When Xournal++ makes its way into the official Debian repository, I might switch to it.

For now, I'm very happy with Xournal (the original)!

Tail-call elimination / optimization is not a Scheme language-specific feature though.

Other popular languages have TCO to varying degrees, like C and C++ when using fairly standard compilers like MSVC, GCC, Clang, or ICC [1]. Destructors do get in the way though sometimes.

Java/JVM doesn't support TCO, but Kotlin and Clojure make do with special syntax to support tail-recursion (i.e. tailrec, recur).

Apparently JavaScriptCore supports TCO for JavaScript [2].

The book makes it sound like TCE is language-specific, but since that book was published, it's spread to many other mainstream languages too.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34125/which-if-any-c-com...

[2]: https://dev.to/rohit/demystifying-tail-call-optimization-5bf...

On Linux, browser.backspace_action = 2 was default since 2006-12-07:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action

Apparently, you can use value 1 to use backspace to scroll a page if you like!

Does Flash time bomb itself by phoning home or checking network time? That'd stop it without updates. Could go back to an earlier Flash version without the time bomb at all, like they did at that railroad.

If waiting outside, just make sure someone around can see you and get help if you get a serious allergic reaction or something though.

Apple deserves credit for bringing magnetic power cords to laptops, but they didn't invent it.

It's been used on Zojirushi kettles since 1982: https://www.zojirushi.com/blog/?p=4147

I do like Magsafe. I always wonder how may plug/unplug cycles the USB-C charging will last. I never worried about magsafe.

Others here mentioned carykh's jumpcutter. I tried to get it to install but couldn't, then discovered it hasn't been updated in a long time.

There's even an issue with links to alternatives and forks: https://github.com/carykh/jumpcutter/issues/180

I tried out Auto-editor [1] and it works great for what I needed! Although for "removing" silence, I prefer to increase play speed instead of jump cutting.

[1]: https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor

Yeah, I just tried that and it works with restic, at least in my quick tests of it: slept the computer with restic in mid-scan, and it was ok resuming on wake a few minutes later.

A simple crontab entry to run restic every hour should work. I tested it running every minute and that worked fine.

If there's a chance that the laptop would sleep and stop restic in a mid-backup that was started by cron, then this[1] suggestion would probably be sufficient to work around that:

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25552894

What I'm not sure about is whether restic would resume backing up a large file from where it left off if interrupted, or if it must re-backup the entire file.

> such as extensibility

That's a fair point. I very much value FF's extensibility.

To be fair, I never advocated for "all browsers" to use WebKit.

My suggestion is in terms of "strategic voting" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting

Right, and it makes me wonder if it'd be better for Firefox and diversity of browser engines for FF to use WebKit.

Looking at the StatCounter Aug 2020 stats [1], ignoring browsers less than 2% usage share (because I'm lazy), it looks like:

Chromium based = 74.53%. Safari = 16.82%. Firefox = 4.09% (but effectively 0 on mobile).

And that's with Apple forcing WebKit on Apple mobile devices.

Throwing Firefox's 4% into WebKit could be like strategic voting to strengthen the opposition, stop splitting the vote, and reduce Mozilla's cost of maintaining FF (keeping their recent layoffs in mind).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

Microsoft using Chromium might moderate Google's influence on it and in turn the web.

With Mozilla's recent layoffs etc, it seems in the long run they might be better off building Firefox on Webkit. It'll strengthen Webkit's position as an alternative to Chromium and stop splitting the non-chromium vote, so to speak.

For clarity, Universal approximation doesn't mean ANNs can approximate just absolutely any function...

Depending on which proof you're looking at, ANNs can provably approximate any continuous function, or any Lebesgue integrable function, or any real vector-valued continuous function on a compact subset of R^n space [1]. That's certainly a very large class of functions, but it's not just any function.

Also, those proofs only work if you allow ANNs with arbitrary number of layers or layer width. Perhaps the required ANN size to approximate the AI / AGI function is so huge that it's beyond the number of particles on Earth. At what point is it beyond impractical? What if the ANN size (number of layers or neurons) is beyond the number of particles in the galaxy? Maybe it's just the wrong approach.

I haven't studied those proofs in detail, but as existence proofs, they just show that some ANN exists that can approximate a given function (of a certain class). There's no guarantee that there's a general algorithm that can learn the required ANN, is there? Maybe you just have to be really lucky to randomly initialize onto the correct approximating ANN...

Also, I'm not aware of any proof that human or bio NNs implement a Lebesgue integrable function, or etc. It's entirely possible bio NNs uses some weird (quantum?) physical process, and implements a function outside the scope of any ANN universal approximation theorem.

I'm just a little more cautious around those universal approximation theorems. I'm more or less in agreement with your comment otherwise!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...

Yeah, I've been able to use it for months (FF on Mac)... Was it rolled out to certain computers for testing before?

Think Canada uses something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_appointments_in_Canad...

Lower level appointments go thru a provincial JAAC, while superior and above go thru a federal JAAC. After JAAC's shortlisting, the respective provincial or federal government or minister of justice decides.

I suppose there's always a way to stack the committee to get a biased shortlist to choose from, but the committees aren't all appointed by the government. Some are appointed by judges, law society, etc. In practice, it seems to work way better than just having a city council choose.

Totally agree that formal and mathematical logic crosses over lots between math and philosophy folks (well, analytic philosophers and logicians). Categorizing books is pretty subjective. Looking at the table of contents, it feels like a work from someone working in the philosophy dept. There's an entire chapter for each of Modal Logic, Philosophy of Language, Intuitionism and Intuitionistic Logic, and Fallacies and Unfair Discussion Methods --- when I learned those things, I learned them from philosophy department courses. Certainly it was a very analytic philosophy department, so I'm totally on board with putting it under an analytic philosophy section. I seem to notice publishers and bookstores like to group religion and philosophy together though, so maybe that's why Springer did that. And yeah, I agree that it'd be a better fit for an analytic philosophy section.

"Philosophical and Mathematical Logic" is by Harrie de Swart affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University.

> Throughout the text, the author provides some impressions of the historical development of logic: Stoic and Aristotelian logic, logic in the Middle Ages and Frege's Begriffsschrift, together with the works of George Boole (1815-1864) and August De Morgan (1806-1871), the origin of modern logic.

Those topics feel pretty typical of logic as studied in philosophy depts. I think traditionally, a lot of logicians working with formal or mathematical logic worked out of philosophy departments. I've been told that more recently, a lot of them now work out of Comp Sci departments. There just isn't enough of them in one place to have a Dept of Logic I guess! :)

"Mathematical Logic" by Roman Kossak is probably mis-categorized. Topics look like typical math topics. Affiliation is Math Dept at CUNY, Bronx Community College campus. Yeah, probably should be under math section.

Is there much choice though in terms of jobs? I mean, is it worth learning D vs rust? I'm actually thinking about that nowadays, for what to learn next..

The memo interestingly talked about screens, and that it does not contribute to the pixels as squares model because there are "overlapping shapes that serve as natural reconstruction filters"...

But it was in context of old CRT and Sony Trinitron monitors! I was wondering what it'd say about LCD screens but the memo is from 1995, and the first standalone LCDs only appeared in the mid-1990s and were expensive [1].

What it says about CRT electron beams no longer apply, but I'm guessing this still does:

> The value of a pixel is converted, for each primary color, to a voltage level. This stepped voltage is passed through electronics which, by its very nature, rounds off the edges of the level steps

> Your eye then integrates the light pattern from a group of triads into a color

> There are, as usual in imaging, overlapping shapes that serve as natural reconstruction filters

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_monitor#Liquid_crysta...

Good to know. I felt that way about Ubuntu / Lubuntu for that time too, until now. This gives me some confidence about Debian to put some time into trying it out. Thanks!

Oh, didn't know that. That gives me a better sense of "how stable" each is. Thanks!

The packages are somewhat tested, but "you are participating in the development of Debian when you are tracking testing or unstable" [1]. My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu.

See, I'd like to use LXDE, and right now I use Lubuntu. I'm interested in switching to Debian, but then I read someone say Debian testing is "more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices" [2]. Then I look at these best practices [3] and I'm like, I don't really have time for all that...

But maybe that person is just overly cautious. So I look at Debian's page [1] for best practices and it wants me to use btrfs or LVM snapshots in case an update puts the system into an unrecoverable position. I... don't think I have time for that.

Maybe I can use Debian stable and just get software not available in Debian stable via... snap [4]. Ok, they also list Flatpak and docker, but this is getting frustrating... Is that really the best way to go about this? Because other than snap auto-updating on my machines behind my back, Lubuntu's been working great up to now.

So basically, is there a Ubuntu / Lubuntu that just doesn't have snap auto-updates? If anyone knows, I'd really appreciate it!

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038222 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044878 [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Snap