copypasterepeat

I try to avoid the common traps, but it can be tricky.

I also impose this additional constraint on myself, which the game doesn't enforce, that I can't reuse letters that have been marked gray. Sometimes you just can't think of the next word, or might be tempted to use a gray letter because that way you could get more information from other letters, but I avoid using them.

In a somewhat similar vein: https://youtu.be/0S43IwBF0uM (The Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar)

I've never heard of candlepin bowling before this, but now that I'm reading about it, I'm surprised it's not more popular. It looks like a lot of fun. The fact that fallen pins are not cleared seems like it would lead to some interesting strategies.

An honest question: why is this being downvoted? I thought that downvoting is meant to be used when someone is trolling or bringing the level of discussion down, not when you simply disagree with someone's point. I mean sure, it's stated a bit sarcastically, but my gosh if we're going to downvote every sarcastic comment, that would include a good portion of HN comments.

Thanks for being so thoughtful about this. I think you made the right decision, although I can see how others might feel otherwise since the guideline is so subjective.

This sounds like a good technique that can be fully automated. I wonder why this isn't the default behavior or at least something you could easily request.

Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.

I wonder if the surge in productivity would hold up if you also take into account the productivity of delivery people, who are with the move to delivery apps as much a part of the kitchen-to-table pipeline as the people working in the kitchens. I don't have any data on what they typically make, but my very anecdotal evidence suggests it's usually not much, especially when you take into account the gas, wear and tear on the car, etc.

Agreed. I feel like the right test would be: "OK, you can use AI to easily generate these pac-man prototypes in an hour or two. But once you get past the 'wow I was able to get all this with so little work', you still have a basically unplayable prototype. Nobody would seriously want to play these or pay for them. How about you make a full-blown pac-man clone with all the nuances of the original? How long does that take? Do you even start converging to the solution at some point or do you keep playing whack-a-mole with bugs and issues?"

Agreed. It's also free to stream.

I've seen it a couple of times and I keep marveling at the sheer strangeness of how it all played out.

This is a tough question since what's best for the team and what's personally best for the manager's career may be in conflict, at least when it comes to the long-term. A manager who doesn't do any coding will over time get rusty and get further and further away from the current best practices, latest library/framework hotness etc. This can lead to awkward conversations of the type where the manager suggests "let's do/use X" where X was the best practice 5+ years ago and then it has to be diplomatically explained to him/her that's no longer the best practice. It can also be dispiriting to the manager if they got into software development because they enjoy coding, but now they have to deal with planning, people management etc., which they might be good at, but it may not bring them the same level of job satisfaction.

Thanks but that doesn't really solve any of the issues. It still just creates a new folder on the bottom instead of the current selection.

I always feel like I'm missing something, but I find the creation of new folders really awkward. I'd like to just be able to right-click on a folder or even on a file or between two files and have it create a new folder there. But the new folder option is not available in those cases. I have to go to File->New Folder or click on the empty bottom of the screen, create the new folder there, and then drag it. Would love to hear if someone can offer tips for this.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that's just how the justice system works. Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly a complicated statement says, since language is full of ambiguities. People have been discussing what the U.S. Constitution says exactly from the day it was written and there are still a lot of disagreements.

The standard response to this is that laws should be written in ways that are non-ambiguous but that's easier said than done. Not to mention that sometimes the lawmakers can't fully agree themselves so they leave some statements intentionally ambiguous so that they can be interpreted by the courts.

Would you care to elaborate which law you helped to pass?

Also, can you link to some good resources for someone who wants to get off the sidelines and get more involved in Chicago politics, whether the resources are on FB or elsewhere? I've previously tried Googling for some but with very limited success.

Thanks.

An entertaining read, even if I disagree with a lot of the ratings. Bananas get 1/5 for logistics?! They are the perfect portable snack. Grapes are definitely not guilt free - most table grapes are way too sweet for my taste. I can eat a handful and then I am done.

Also, there is a special place in hell for people who steal other people's lunches. That's one thing I could never understand. What's the thought process?!

Yeah, this makes sense to me. I started developing some of these similar intuitions while watching a visualization another commenter posted. Here are some things I realized:

1. The first pass (I think you call it the preprocessing step) is special in that it finds the maximum number and puts it in the first slot. The rest of the algorithm revolves around this max value (or at least I find it helpful to think of it that way). This is also the only time where j going above i makes any difference. After this pass we could stop the j loop when i == j but that would obviously complicate the code.

2. Second pass will always swap items in first and second slots since the first item is bigger than second (if they are equal, nothing happens). As noted in 1., j will keep going past i but it won't do anything since i is now pointing to the largest value in the array and the swap condition will never be met.

3. On third and all subsequent passes the value that a[i] is pointing to will be slotted in its right place in the sorted list that's being formed at the beginning of the array. This might require multiple swaps as j goes up and larger values go into the ith slot. Last thing that happens before j reaches i (so when j == i - 1) is always that the max value gets swapped from i-1 to i. This is basically what the second pass from 2. did.

4. The max value from 1. conceptually serves almost as a sentinel of sorts since it always represents the end of the list we've sorted so far and when j gets to i, it prevents the rest of j loop from doing anything. That's why the code can be so clean, without having to do any index arithmetic or short circuiting or any other complications. It's clean but definitely not simple, since it takes a while to wrap one's head around what's actually happening.

I agree. At first I thought it was doing something very simple but I am not so sure anymore. When you check the condition for the swap, you realize it almost works counterproductively while i<j because it keeps pushing smaller numbers in the wrong direction, but then it starts "fixing" those mistakes when i>j. I don't find this intuitive at all.

This is interesting. I've never heard of this service, but it totally makes sense. It makes me muse: what would it take to have a completion bond service in the software development market? If you were running one of these insurance companies, what would you require in order to be comfortable to put your own money on the line? Presumably it would be similar to what you listed for the movies: 1. everything that will be delivered down to every single detail. No room to change the scope midstream. 2. some historical table listing how long typical features take to develop. 3. personnel involved and their past performance.

I am guessing the first requirement would be the deal breaker, but probably not in every case.

Haha. Awesome.

Completely agree with the reduced power recommendation. That really helps evenly heat foods that start popping in the microwave or have hot spots when taken out. The few extra minutes are usually not a big deal anyway.

I agree that the perpetual part is kind of gimmicky, but having a stew for a week or two and stretching it out with additional ingredients can be a big time saver and, as you said, in some ways it gets better with time as it's cooked more.

I don't think that's a big concern since everything gets cooked into oblivion. With something like this, nobody is trying to hit some sweet spot and get vegetables or whatever else to be al dente. Everything is boiled for many hours until all bacteria is killed off.

Does anyone have more information regarding whether this effect is only observed in humans? I've always assumed that this is just how most animal bodies work, for the obvious energy and resource conservation reasons.

The way I think of this is that there is no shame in Jeffries not having as good and intuitive grasp of the problem as Norvig. After all, this kind of problem is almost tailor-made for Norvig's skill set. Like many of us who haven't done a lot of work in this space would do, Jeffries spends a lot of time early on just exploring the problem space. He starts with a seemingly intuitive (naive?) data structure and goes from there. So far so good. No shame in any of that. All of us have been in a similar situation. I think that the key moment comes at blog post number 12. As the author of this post describes, this is where Jeffries basically recognizes that his approach needs to radically change and where a lot of people would throw away what they have, it having served the function of helping one understand the problem, and start from scratch with different assumptions, data structures, etc. Jeffries didn't do that, probably because he firmly believes in the TDD dogma and probably because he felt pressured to make this work, since he way publicly working through this. That's where Jeffries goes wrong. He should probably have admitted that in some cases you should just start from scratch instead of tinkering at the edges of something that's clearly suboptimal.

Ah I see what you mean. Yeah, that makes sense. If the host behavior is not clearly stated then the right answer would indeed be "it can't be determined from available information".

I guess I don't understand why you think "I don't know" is the only correct answer. It's clearly not, which is the point of the problem in the first place. It's a bit hard to grok, but once you do, it's clear what the right answer is.

Ah I see that now, thanks. It was under the ad banner so I missed it first time around.

Agreed.

Not to mention that a liar doesn't necessarily have to mean someone who tells a falsehood in every single statement. It could just mean someone who frequently tells falsehoods. Or, more deviously, someone who wants to cause maximum uncertainty in his listeners, in which case some mix of true and false statements would probably be the way to go.

I'd say that Matt Levine has a fair amount of credibility. He's probably my favorite finance columnist.