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clumpthumpon Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

I've been having a lot of fun getting started with Max/MSP following Cipriani & Giri's "Electronic Music And Sound Design" books. Max is a paid program though; Pure Data is similar but open source.

clumpthumpon Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

Call me old fashioned, but I would absolutely like to see autocorrect turned off in many contexts. I much prefer to read messages with 30% more transparent errors rather than any increase in opaque errors. I can tell what someone meant if I see "elephent in the room", but not "element in the room" (not an actual example, autocorrect would likely get that one right).

clumpthumpon Ask HN: Why don't we have 3 day weekends yet?

What does productivity have to do with wages, hours, or conditions?

The labour movement, which got us the weekend and the 8-hour workday, has had its power greatly diminished. That is why we don't work less.

clumpthumpon The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting

I disagree with that. Sure, wrong documentation can mislead and confuse, but it can also be very helpful.

Lying comments have often helped me because it's often useful to know that a particular person at a particular point in time believed something to be true, even if it isn't true any more and even if it were never true. In a pile of spaghetti code, a good lying comment can point to the needle in the haystack where the root cause of a bug is hiding.

clumpthumpon I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

It's definitely annoying that users can't opt-in only to the types of notifications they want on installation, but Uber and Uber Eats are not guilty of what Starbucks is doing in the article (at least on Android); you can disable all notifications besides "Taking a Ride" and "Your Order" notifications.

clumpthumpon I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

I suspect some apps go too far in the other direction on purpose, having a large list of promotional notification types amidst useful ones so that people miss opting out of some or are too overwhelmed by the list that they decide not to bother, and whenever they add a "new" type of promotional notification, it's on by default until the user goes and disables it too.

clumpthumpon Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

Hanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But greed? I see a lot of that.

clumpthumpon The Most Shameful RPG Dice (2009)

I actually quite like the standard d4. Lands with an air of finality without faffing about. Also, I'm clumsy with dice and roll them off the table far too often.

clumpthumpon Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?

Not the person you're replying to but I had the same experience. My company was careful to announce the extra holidays as a special pandemic related wellness thing (subtext: not permanent) whenever they did it, so the discontinuation was just not announcing new ones.

clumpthumpon /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

I was not starting such a discussion. I'm baffled by your comment and can only assume you're reading my comment through an American lens, which is half foreign to me (only half because I'm exposed to so much of it on the Internet).

clumpthumpon DoorDash Joins Forces with Wolt

No, it doesn't. I can't tell from their comment whether their city/town has good cycling infrastructure or not. Even if it does, the app would still incentivize using it (and roads and sidewalks) incorrectly and dangerously.

clumpthumpon 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

Want workers to have more personal time? Encourage people to "be political" at work.

clumpthumpon While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".

clumpthumpon Ask HN: What Happened to Larry Page?

Yes.

clumpthumpon Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k years ago: hypothesis

"PFS" sounds a lot like the MERGE operation of minimalist (natural language) syntax, which Chomsky has similarly linked to behavioural modernity.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/06/20/noam-chomsky-the-sc... (not too much info here, but the best I can find at the moment)

clumpthumpon Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/vermilion-alberta-sa...

The CBC article differs in two important aspects. The BBC article says they "enlisted the help of experts", when the CBC article says they just called a locksmith who gave them some combinations to try over the phone. The BBC article makes it sound like some tourist just tried a random combination, while in the CBC article, a machinist put his ear to the safe and listened for clicks.

clumpthumpon Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

>If it were easy to report abuses to Airbnb directly

They have made plenty clear that they don't really care about how people near the rental unit are affected. They will never make this happen unless "NIMBY impulses" put enough pressure on them to do so.

clumpthumpon Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

The jury's still out on the Critical Period Hypothesis the last I checked. But in any case, you're right that there is a big difference between acquiring natural languages and learning a programming language. Language acquisition is a special kind of learning, an innate capacity we have for natural languages that mostly takes place without conscious effort. We certainly don't start learning our mother's programming languages while in the womb.

clumpthumpon Reasons Python Sucks

People confusing this terminology is one of my pet peeves. And it's not a petty one. It often impedes the conversation they're trying to have.

clumpthumpon The Growth of Reddit

I feel like your comment would be more accurate a few years back. Browsing /r/all is a lot more tolerable since it's gotten a lot less Gamergate-y. Mocking Gamergate is a lot more common nowadays. I really don't know what you mean by "the dedicated meme parts of the site are gone", because goofy meme subreddits are very popular right now. One of the most popular ones mocks Gamergate and related views: /r/gamesriseup.

Anyway, the userbase is so huge that even "smaller" subreddits has a decent amount of activity. Sure, video games and SF movies/TV is all you'll get browsing /r/all, but there's, e.g., /r/truefilm, /r/flicks, lots of music subreddits.