megameter

I think on some level, barring the "stuck-in-bed depression" cases, we all work hard, but the work is nothing like a startup or a coding challenge.

It's more often things like going on a walk and identifying the birds, going to the bar and getting better at telling stories or playing pool, seeing patterns in watching daily traffic or weather. Things you absolutely could go deep on, but just can't justify as "character building exercise" because they won't directly lead to you acquiring property or power.

And that's where the alarm bells start to come in; if you get anxious about that, you can get stuck on the idea of work and cut yourself off from a balanced set of interests, and this hits young people especially hard because they don't know what the balance could look like, or they observe media(including HN) where the balance is clearly defined towards one extreme, think "I will become that" and treat it as a masochistic exercise. I believe this to be a deep affliction of the online world particularly since, without trying you can stumble into media containing the "best" of everything.

Unfortunately, checkmarks aren't language agnostic - abstract iconography as a whole is a linguistic phenomenon. I'll just copy paste Wikipedia's notes(edit: HN breaks on the actual symbols so I'll link too):

It is common in Swedish schools for a to indicate that an answer is incorrect,[2][3][4] while "R", from the Swedish rätt, i.e., "correct", is used to indicate that an answer is correct.

In Finnish, stands for väärin, i.e., "wrong", due to its similarity to a slanted v. The opposite, "correct", is marked with {\displaystyle \cdot \!/\!\cdot }\cdot \!/\!\cdot , a slanted vertical line emphasized with two dots.[5]

In Japan[6] and Korea, the O mark is used instead of the check mark, and the X or mark are commonly used for wrong (alongside a triangle △ for entries that are problematic but not wholly incorrect).[citation needed]

In the Netherlands a 'V' is used to show that things are missing while the flourish of approval (or krul) is used for approving a section or sum.

In Brazil, the check character is used to indicate the "yes" concept. For example "yes, it was checked" or "yes, this is the right answer".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_mark

If we are speaking of C code, it's not quite so bad as it looks to have somewhat fat structs across multiple arrays, since you can fit 64 bytes in a cache line on contemporary desktop CPUs, and that sets your real max-unit-size; the CPU is actively trying to keep the line hot and it does so (in the average case) by speculating that you're going to fetch the next index of the array. Since you have multiple cache lines, you can keep multiple arrays hot at the same time, it's just a matter of keeping it easy to predict fetching behavior by using simple loops that don't jump around...which leads to the pattern parent suggests, of cascading messages or buffers in groups of same type so that you get a few big iterations out of the way, and then a much smaller number of indirected accesses.

Last I checked, field declaration order still mattered to structure size and cache usage because the defacto packing and padding rules preserve the order. I admit that I haven't done any C optimization lately so I am curious. It is possible to make this optimization, but it may disrupt codebases that take shortcuts based on an assumed order. And it would be especially difficult to do the analysis of what should take precedence in the cache.

Could you link an example of compilers accommodating these optimizations?

With every market there's a timing element and a large part of it revolves around exactly those kinds of marketing considerations. The right product at the wrong time won't get traction because they're taking a space already occupied by some incumbent - but offering when there's hype and interest around your category and a lot of first-time customer potential gets you in the door unchallenged, hence why there are distinct "generational waves" of startups that find a growth segment and sink their teeth in it at the right moment.

I suspect that transportation is not the issue, because any way you slice it, building materials come with large footprints. The footprint can be in the factory or on site, but you need big trucks moving stuff around in all cases, and every day the site has a crew on it is a day that generates vehicular traffic. Since the total time for the build goes down in modular, it can be surmised that less public space-over-time is used, even if more bandwidth is used at certain points.

As grandparent says, modular's biggest selling point is in quality control, which improves project risk profile. Factory assembly lends itself to systematic controls; one of the most common headlines in construction failures is "contractor used wrong parts or materials". That can quickly spiral into massive cost overruns when we're talking about something they assembled on site and realized they screwed up only after it's buried in the ground. If the whole subassembly arrives on site pre-checked, there's less that can go wrong. And "subassembly" is the way to think about it, not "box". It's certainly possible to devise a clever modular structure that ships packed but encapsulates more of the desired features with less sawing, nailing and bolting. Boxy shape language is not unique to modular, it appears all throughout industrial goods.

Just about anything can be turned into a nerdly pursuit, a game of building a benchmark and then optimizing against it, if you want to. And when you look deeply at "how do people feel content with themselves", it's because they have actually pursued such a goal throughout different aspects of their lives. The social ladder looks singular, oppressive, because from the outside, it just looks like have/have-nots, when the actual thing of it has a great deal to do with how you use your personality and inclinations, which situations you engage with and which you bow out from, and where you choose to invest effort. Tinder is just one game to optimize for, and you can bow out of it and play a different one. It's not high school; you can make up some rules now.

For example, socialization is not really about "I have friends/I don't have friends". Interacting with a retail worker to get coffee is socializing. Talking to strangers at the bar is socializing. Going in for the date or job interview is also socializing. Different people are interested in different facets of these things. You can be a wallflower in one space and gregarious in another. And friends tend to not be characters in a story, conveniently falling into meetings; nor are they rational-expectations economic actors, optimizing all situations for maximum self-interest; they're more like cattle you have to round up to do anything with because they will just stay home like you if left to themselves, so you end up with a Venn diagram of friends for "A" and friends for "B" with minimal overlap, cause that's what you can get them for.

There are game players on Twitch who are quite good at the games they play and get lots of followers - ergo they are popular - but show minimal social ability. Their face is well-lit, but they grunt and swear and complain their way through every session and ignore their chat. Nobody is going to be charmed by what they are saying, but expressiveness tends to show through their gameplay, which can make up for a lot. And there are also streamers who hide behind an avatar, are not particularly exceptional at game-playing, but have a great ability to build stories and create situations that get their chat engaged. And there's no hope of quantifying these differences as a rank of overall quality as a person, but the fact that those differences do exist and neither is muted, undefined, expressionless, really does matter, and matters more than the particulars.

So - think about how you want to engage with people. Study that problem. Going to the gym, getting a style change, etc can help, but they're like subsets of the overall direction you're going in. Becoming a kind of person that you are not OK with is not going to help. Likewise you can get stuck in a rut because it looks like being dishonest in that sense is the "right" way, that there is only one way to be social and it's not your way; that usually afflicts the young because they observe other people pushing boundaries in ways that they aren't OK with, see negative stereotypes, and think "well, maybe this isn't for me" and write off their engagement before they really try. But, it's also a socially constructed phenomenon in the first place. Taking your inclinations and principles and polishing them up as best you can is a great path to becoming an Interesting Person.

Cursors are one of the most useful conceptual abstractions for information processing. Besides the concrete aspects of position and seriality, they form the building block of stateful selections which is a must-have for non-linear editing. Text editing feels fluid because the cursor is pretty smart at going where you want to be - or in the case of vi, it's good at being precise and explicit in skilled hands. I often start defining problems around editing tasks in terms of what cursors and selection are going to look like.

One of the things that I think gets lost easily in graphical interfaces is the cursor; it turns into some kind of ad-hoc mix of mouse pointer, "keyboard focus", touch inputs, IME, viewport state and other things filtered and shaped into some sort of behavior that depends entirely on the application code. These UIs have to be super-smart to work well, and they can be mostly consistent in the average case, but it's also unviable to automate them without great effort.

There are oodles of games that started as free games and then made a commercial release later on. It's not really unique to web or "instant".

Further, there's a huuuge dropoff in interest once you do go to a paid release. Often these games are accessed from locked-down school or office environments as part of a "game jukebox" in the same way that YouTube often doubles as a "music jukebox" - there's minimal investment in what you're playing, so, like fast food, it's more important that it leaves a good impression in five minutes than to actually have substance. FNF's basic appeal is akin to a fashion brand with a cool logo - these characters could have used any number of delivery vehicles but the game, and the game when put on Newgrounds specifically, happened to be the right one with the right audience. And because it's positioned for ease of access you get the high virality. When you flip things so that the audience pays upfront, they have to have some conviction in this one, out of a countless number of games, being the one they should champion. It's just a radically different proposition and only some games can cross over between the two markets.

FNF does benefit from having a lot more hardware and bandwidth available these days. Music is classically the Achilles' Heel of web gaming because it's either space-inefficient or you need to invest in a sequencer format of some sort(which was only feasible in Flash by fighting the available technology every step of the way). But FNF delivers full-length audio streams without too much difficulty, so we've clearly made some giant strides there.

The 90's dot com gold rush is the rhyme to the crypto gold rush. Lots of talk about ecommerce, revolutionary tech, etc. The 2000's saw the sobered outcomes: ads, ads, ads. All the apps were just conduits to adtech - very wide marketing funnels. Nearly all the actual services had been demonstrated before in a non-monetized, pre-Web context.

A16Z is correct in saying that the dot com boom had a major build-out aspect. It needed broadband deployment and intensive consumer marketing. Cryptocurrency has so far demonstrated itself to be more like a bottom-feeder on hardware resources; hardware not being used for something obviously more valuable gets repurposed into mining of some kind, and energy negative uses have so far been accommodated through various kinds of theft of either the energy itself(in industrialized mining) or the compute time(in malware). In this light, the tendency towards specialized compute is not shown to be universal, but part of a set of interlocking arms races - securing systems and energy resources better, finding proofs of work with broader applicability across different kinds of hardware, and creating demand for hardware that is more efficient at those proofs that exist.

Cryptocurrency in application is likely to be a one-note phenomenon in the same way that the internet boom became an ad boom - the same services with a little speculative cherry on top. It has a big inherent application simply by being decentralized and tradeable. It can be worse on other dimensions and still succeed by being really good at that one thing, financializing the world in greater degrees, and pushing the arms race forward.

There are basically three forms of working a job:

1. Shuffling around credit between people and projects

2. "Getting by" enough to not be fired

3. Studying something of interest through the work

At competitive companies it's a lot of the first - everyone's looking for a way to take credit, which means there's a lot of performance anxiety and destructive power plays. Companies that are "coasting" see more of the second type, and this is roughly where you are in terms of mindset. It may be a dead end, but you will get paid for a while; of course this clashes if you are in a competitive team. But if the job involves an implict need to absorb stress or physical exertion, it can feel like plenty enough to get by.

But it's the third that is the only one that has some innate sense of contentment, and is always tied to those "dream jobs" and "dream projects" people seem to have, and the kind of drive that motivates high achieviment and immense technical ability. In a lot of cases it has to come from within; teams lacking leadership in this respect fall into coasting or bickering behavior, and society as a whole defaults to total indifference. So it can easily happen that you feel a purpose for a few years, then fall down for a while, then rediscover yourself. But you have to continuously have that purpose in mind to not get overly swept up in events.

It's almost certainly the case that you have something you want to study more deeply, and if you set yourself up to go down that path you would start to excel within months without feeling difficulty. But knowing it means knowing yourself and doing some deconstruction of the path you've followed so far. School-to-FAANG is a kind of life script, and all life scripts have a lack of "happily ever after" closure to them.

How do you do that deconstruction? There's no definite way, but it's a question that guides a lot of philosophy around virtue ethics and self development. So one way to go about this would be to get philosophical for a while, take a class, read some classics. Another is simply to push yourself a little to get out of your comfort zones and try out things you think you will struggle with. One of my favorite methods is simply to draw on the energy of high achievers in various fields and their biographies, interviews, etc. Live streams, by being so encompassing for long periods, can reveal a lot of underlying drive, attitude, etc. So I will often turn to gaming streams to see some of that.

It makes me think that actually, the war had the same imposition of "stiffness" to all its biggest players. The US, Japan, the nascent EU and even the former Soviet Union all had a defined "place in the world" in the post-war order and followed more-or-less the same trajectory with their domestic economy. Gradually things started slipping, the Soviets being the obvious first to collapse, but everyone started running into some issues later in the 20th century and started kicking the can down the road to address them.

Countries outside of those great-power roles in the conflict didn't end up on the same timeline and so are landing in a different place today. Australia or Taiwan for example; both changed status and became markedly more independent.

TVTropes uses "Cape" and "Cowl" to distinguish those kinds of heroes: Capes fly in for the photo op like Superman, while Cowls like a Zorro or Batman slink around with limited official support.

There's definitely been a move towards social media promoters making sports, versus yesteryear's slower moving partnerships of manufacturers, league bodies, and sponsors. "Esports", though it has various early history, has fallen into being predominantly a construct of this kind of hustle; if you can get some bodies in the same in-game space and on a live feed, you can come up with a way to build events out of it, offer prizes and all the rest. Thus even some relatively obscure stuff like speedruns of modded NES games will boast a small scene.

I think of it not as one type of thing overtaking the other, so much as it is something like an unbundling of the traditional sportsfan experience. The individual athletes will have one set of content, the leagues will have another, and you can participate in either with fewer commitments. Sponsors get a smaller but more focused niche market to tap into.

That's nice, but most of us here are version control consumers, not version control professionals. We need something that has very few knobs to turn because our job is focused around delivering value through other tasks.

Git is highly professionalized. It has layers of modal state. That is built into the operating model. It is made for Linus Torvalds, a professional merger of code. If you are using all of those commands "almost daily", you are a professional code-merger too.

Haxe is a great piece of technology on its own, and I am often working in it as a default, but I always caution potential users that it is more like a building block than a comprehensive package: if you want to do complex cross-platform things using Haxe, you will still want an full-time engineering team working with you to build out the full solution, since you will probably need to leverage the strengths and tooling of the target environments too. Haxe tries hard to get out of the way and give you the access you need, but builds and debugging always introduce challenges that depend on platform-specific behaviors. The quality of the results is more suggestive of the quality of the average Haxe user than the language itself doing anything magic(though it is a very sensible design).

That said, you can make some great things just sticking within the available frameworks. OpenFL is good, as is Kha. HaxeUI is definitely worth checking out(it can use multiple backends). For editing tools there's still going to be a bias towards working with Electron because of the combined set of I/O features.

Haxe is hard to document because its scope is large: "accommodate everything all these other languages do". So there isn't a one way of documenting it that will accommodate all users and workflows. It would help if you outlined what you need.

As a graduate of the high school in question, I support the idea of selectivity everywhere, not just as a "magnet school" or "honors track".

There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.

But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.

Most trackers, Renoise among them, could be characterized as a standalone sequencer instrument with some DAW features.

Renoise specifically is sampling-first. It has the gamut of typical sampler features and built-in effects, plus you have multiple ways to sequence everything(besides high-level pattern reuse across the song, you can abstract a lot of stuff into key-triggered sub-sequences or macro knobs). It has built-in effects, you can record automation curves and if you have something very specific in mind, there is Lua-based scripting and a little community of third-party scripts. In general, step sequencing is faster here than in any piano-roll based system, with the knock-on effect of it being extremely easy to build complex percussive sequences with a lot of timbral variation. Melodic lines and harmonies can be more frustrating if you are used to reading the piano roll to establish pitch visually. Renoise does have a tool to snap note entry to a scale of your choosing(with plenty of options for scale type) which smooths out the entry process tremendously, and if you're using a lot of block chords, they can be macro-ified as well to reduce the visual noise.

The VST support is OK. They recently started supporting VST3. I occasionally encounter glitches with it - particularly one longstanding one where it renders stuck notes - but not enough to dissuade me. Worst case, I isolate the problem notes and bounce them to samples(which is easy).

My parents are boomers on the cusp of being silents, themselves, and there's definitely some difference between what they percieve and the younger generations. It's hard to say how far back it all goes, really - while the depression and war years were certainly influential in making the culture that overshadowed the rest of the 20th century, stories of harsh discipline are age-old. Perhaps what makes it defining is just the fact that it occurred as a near-universal in the same way that the current pandemic did, and the result was a postwar generation with very sharp differences in attitude.

There's definitely some latent potential for video editing to be redefined along broader task-and-genre lines. That is, in essence, the difference between "consumer" and "pro", because a pro is burdened by having to reshape the medium in utmost detail to fit a structure that they planned, while a consumer expects a readymade media which simply "filters" their efforts through a predefined strategy.

Since video editing is no longer governed by literal machinery, it can deprofessionalize into a set of smaller consumer languages, though if you imagine all the forms of editing that exist, it's unlikely that we'll have total coverage anytime soon.

Inside the bubble, this is just called "morale".

It's very visible as a phenomenon in gaming. What gets pitched in new games is not rules and assets, but a whole set of beliefs and values: there are games where you are spurred towards world conquest, and games where you are meant to relax and socialize. The value system is literally encoded into the play through those rules and assets. Therefore, game makers have a ready-made market wherever they can pitch people's beliefs back to them, like "I'm secretly the hero", or "playing longer makes me more powerful."

And then the negative side of that comes into play when the game pops someone's bubble: "that's unrealistic", "it doesn't let me play how I want", "that other player is using a cheap move" - and it gets really out of control in video gaming specifically when the hype is built on a promise of all possible worlds being contained within the game, or being patched in through updates. Star Citizen has been managing this sort of hype for years, and No Man's Sky had the player bubble popped but eventually came out the other end of it many, many updates later. Cyberpunk 2077 likewise had feverish hype followed by massive disappointment, though that story still has time to play out.

I often tell myself to reexamine my grip on things. If I hold an idea too tight, I'm sure to lose objectivity - I don't need a tight grip on anything, just the pragmatically useful one. And playing very difficult games has helped me loosen my grip, in fact; good strategy and techniques often result just from seeing the game as it "really" is and playing into that, and that's a useful life lesson.

The prison experiment example already has a volunteer playerbase, it's called "Jailbreak mod" and versions exist for various iterations of Counter-strike and probably other FPS games, and almost certainly Roblox. It is role-playing, and attracts certain kinds of personalities. I have played it.

It speaks to the contradictory nature of software development as it's currently practiced, I think.

"What does the software do?"

"What do you want it to do? We can add that."

"Well, I want to be able to access my old work in a few years, and maybe use it in another program."

"I pinky promise that that will happen, and we will make that happen, after we get through all our other customer requests."

It's not exactly a new problem that we keep updating software - "bells and whistles" is an old piece of hacker jargon - but there isn't a sense of definite publication now, because there are so many methods of blackboxing in the way, and that's been allowed to take place through the promise of "one more thing" and "surprise and delight" - we only really put up with it through a sense of increasing hype and spectacle. If you have a really firm grasp on what you want the computer to do, you can eliminate just about every application program.

There's definitely a wave of late entrants trying to muscle their way into the PoS game, and I see Solana as one of those; one of the more credible ones, but with its distribution engineered to make it very controlled from the beginning.

From a speculative standpoint these are good if you can sell into the hype cycle, but I've seen enough of them come and go that I wouldn't try to hold. Even a little bit of centralization sucks a lot of air out of the room.

It was always speculative that it would be the "next big thing". The basic claim of this tech is that a higher bandwidth screen experience is a better experience - and that's always had practical constraints, like, I'm not replying with a 4k video message here, because it's not the medium for that.

Between AR and VR, AR is the harder to address comprehensively - we knew going in that we can make pretty pictures in VR by leveraging existing CG pipelines, and there's definitely some market for aesthetic immersion in VR. But VR has also mostly hit a wall outside of that realm since it gives up a lot to achieve this goal - cost and accessibility are both much weaker relative to 2D screen experiences. It's badly positioned for consumer use despite intensive marketing in that direction. AR adds the extra claim of making use of more of the real world, and this is still a thing with potential, but again has trouble in many cases justifying itself relative to the headaches - for a lot of applications the quality and kinds of sensor data needs to be higher for it to really give results.

Net result: a bunch of startups got funding to chase after the buzzword, the survivors mostly pivoted into more traditional businesses.

I've gradually come around to the side of PoW being important as layer 1, because it's as close as we're likely to get to Lockean labor theory of property being directly manifest rather than built on a legal-deeds-and-titles national framework, and that has an immediate effect of building trust out of speculative value. PoW can be made more efficient along some axes, but not all of them. As such it puts every economy in a Red Queen's race to do things with available energy and computing power that are of more value than speculation.

However, PoS has an important role as the layer for specific applications and markets, since it acts more like central banking with the tradeoffs of such.

Well, how little volatility is needed to be called stable? Over a few years, large swings can happen with major forex pairs. Take GBP/USD for example: High of 1.71602 in 2014. Low of 1.14926 in 2020. It currently trades around 1.4.

So, not the same kinds of returns and drawdowns as BTC/USD, but enough to make one's eyes water and stomach churn. Forex has always had a reputation for volatility.

There is a very similar problem in advice-giving for technical questions, the problem of "Why do you want to do that? You should do this instead." I've seen others recommend trying to ask binary yes/no questions ("I think it's like this. Yes/no?") or to turn an open-ended question, when asked, into a set of binaries rather than guess at the intent.

The property that seems to be common in addressing both is benchmark-setting. The advice of "kick the can down the road" for less productive advice is premised on knowing that it doesn't fit your success benchmarks, but not wanting the confrontation(since a hedgehog benchmark is going to boil down to a single-issue attachment). Likewise, a battery of narrow binary questions that have a definite pass/fail characteristic constructs a form of fox knowledge - it's pragmatic in how it describes the "potential shape" of the outcome, so it makes for a better holistic benchmark than asking "what's the best way to do this?"

The kind where the user has to chase dependencies.