pickdenis

Node.js is the opposite of what some people would consider "real time."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

I clicked this and expected to read about new kinds of thermal paste or whatever, not to be slapped in the face with a whole field of solid state physics I'd never even heard of before (magnonics). I'd complain about being paywalled by the website but I'd probably not understand anything beyond the abstract (and even then, hardly). Can someone offer a dumbed-down explanation of this to someone who only barely understands Maxwell's equations?

The fried liver was the first opening I ever studied while learning chess as a 8 year old. I had so much fun with it until someone pulled out 5... Na5 on me. Then I cried.

If you follow the thickest lines, you get into the fried liver or 5... Na5 lines. Very suspicious.

This is DEFINITELY biased towards fast time controls and low ELO.

It seems that you need to do more dissecting yourself. It would be unjust to summarize urbit like that. It really is as they say, an "Operating Function."

Does anyone know how Urbit's solving the problem of being incredibly slow? It's running on a naively simple virtual machine and they claim that higher level operations can be abstracted and implemented in native code (called jets last time I heard) to make the overall execution time reasonable.

Or, alternatively: Does anyone even actually use urbit? I tried once and it was so god damn slow it made me sad. It's so cool.

Interesting how the author used himself as the antagonist in some of these situations. Good article.

(This isn't related to hip-hop or melodies.)

I have absolute pitch; I can tell the pitch of any musical note I hear without any reference at all. I can also produce any pitch within my vocal or whistling range without a reference. This all comes completely naturally to me, and I don't have to think about it. Listening to this rap song, I noticed something strange.

The article talks about the melody of the song, but the rapper isn't singing. Of course, his rapping voice still has a pitch but it's actually not obvious to me what note he's "singing". If I listen very hard, I can still pick out the pitches of his notes (like how he centers on D). However, it is much much harder for me to tell the pitch of a speaking voice (or rapping voice) than a singing voice. This leads me to believe that there is a separate, functionally discrete part of my brain dedicated to processing music.

It also perhaps explains why I don't like rap music that much; it feels like my brain processes it as though it is spoken word rather than music, creating a somewhat strange and unmusical experience.

I'm glad to see that this problem bugged other high schoolers. I spent a lot of time learning about the lambert W function and real analysis in general due to this problem in high school.

Not him, but I'm gonna use this as a chance to plug unison[1]. I've been using it for more than a year now to keep files synced across more than 3 computers and it works flawlessly. It gets a tad slow to start propogating changes if you have too many files and a weak server (around 150k files, server has an Atom N2800), but it's not more than 15 seconds.

One nifty thing is that you don't need to run unison on the server ever, just have it installed. I have systemd units that I enable on my client machines and that does all of the syncing; unison connects to the server with ssh and does all the work there over that.

[1]: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.html

> Make no mistake that advertising does work even when you are completely aware that it is advertising.

This is an interesting claim that I've heard before. Is there some way to measure the subconscious effect of advertising? It feels like a bit of a bogeyman to me.

The multiple compatible function signature declaration got me. I pray that I'll never have to understand and work with code that looks like that.

No idea what he's talking about but try out Unison! I use it to keep files on my computers synced to a central server. It works absolutely great and handles conflicts in the most sane way (imo).

The only caveat I've found so far is that you may have to increase the number of filesystem watches if your default value is too low, otherwise unison won't be able to monitor all of the files you are trying to sync.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I think it's implied that the capacity was there, just no impetus.

NwAvGuy was a true beacon of light in the sea of bullshit that the audiophile community can sometimes be. It's sad he's not around anymore. I had a lot of fun building his Objective2 amplifier.

It would be cool if the preview was shown and auto-updated every time a change is made.

Here is a paper that uses meta-learning for quick imitation learning in robots that works across domains: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01557

The main sell is that it allows the robot to quickly generalize to new domains (surroundings and objects being manipulated), albeit not tasks.

On the practical side, if you're working on a low level with NGS data, htslib[1] may be worth looking into. It is a C library for reading, writing, and manipulating data structures that are commonly used in NGS (BAM, VCF, etc). I have used it and can attest to its quality. However, as is the issue with all software related to genomics, its only documentation is its header files and example programs. Here is the very example I used to get started[2]. The comments in the header files are usually good enough.

The reason I'm recommending it is the quality of its interfaces. It can seamlessly handle (input or output) virtually any kind of file you throw at it (SAM, BAM, CRAM). I can't say the same for a lot of other software I have run into in this space.

[1]: https://github.com/samtools/htslib

[2]: https://gist.github.com/PoisonAlien/350677acc03b2fbf98aa

> what avenues would advertisers have left to sell products to us?

My serious guess would be even more paid shills. It's amazing how much more weight a message can have when it comes from someone that's not obviously tied to the company.

I lived the first 18 years of my life as a healthy child that ate no meat. I now eat meat. Why? It's tasty and everyone else does it. Should we stop mass murdering sentient beings? Probably[1]. Is hunting and killing on an individual basis okay? I think that should be left to every individual to decide for themselves. If you don't want to kill animals, then don't. But don't stop me, a fellow animal, from doing it.

[1]: Sadly, our economic system does not agree.

Why are you trying to prove that fungi are sentient? You're just being disingenuous. The core issue is the fact that we kill and eat animals that feel pain and emotions (the "vegan debate", whatever), something that seems wrong at face value. How about addressing that instead of hiding behind annoying semantics? It's obviously what the OP meant.

Look at your sibling comment for an example of a comment made by someone who actually cares about discussion and not winning stupid word wars. You both said the same thing in essence, but they don't come off as a prick.

Fine: replace "living" with "sentient". Do you still have a snarky answer?

> the single-biggest booster for me as a practitioner.

Can you instantiate this claim with an example? I'm somewhat knowledgable in both math and computer science theory but have yet to feel as though my math background has helped me in practical CS.

> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility.

You'd have to give me a _very_ compelling reason to support developers who use Windows, when Windows lacks these essential tools. Besides, don't people who develop on Windows live in WSL?

The design of unix/linux systems answers your second question with "yes." A "file" isn't necessarily something on your SSD, but rather an abstract concept: something that you can "read" from and possibly "write" to (and some other less illustrative things). It could be under your desk, a pointer to another file, or a file on a remote computer.

Look into "sshfs".

Just use the "basic HTML" view. When the new design is loading, there will be a link at the bottom to click to use basic HTML, and then there will be a button to set it as default. I use this and have (almost) zero complaints. It is an excellent mail client.

This is fine and all, but I think they're completely ignoring the elephant in the room. R is a crazy, random, whimsical language that puts PHP to shame.

I use Python instead of R unless I'm told to use R. I hate using R, even if there are better libraries written for it than the Python equivalents. I can't stand the terrible naming conventions (seriously, can't you at least be consistent with CORE FUNCTION names?) and ridiculous amount of data structures. There are vectors, lists, matrices, tables, data frames, S4 classes, environments, oh my... I've been programming in R for a couple of years now and it still takes me around 2-3 tries to figure out what's stored in a variable and how to access it. Do I need two ['s, a trailing comma inside the [], etc.

Debugging R basically seems to mean "use a hack to generate stack traces."

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I see _absolutely_ no reason to encourage use of R over Python. I love lisp and the ideas it espouses, but R seems to take the worst from that world.

Transfinite does not mean infinite. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_induction

I wonder what the implications of technology like this could be on the large scale. It may have a terrific impact on the hydrological cycle.

> And the opacity of the algorithms’ power means that it isn’t easy to determine when algorithmic governance stops serving the common good and instead becomes the servant of the powers that be. This will inevitably take a toll on privacy, family life, and free speech, as individuals will be unsure when their personal actions may come under the radar of the government.

Here is the whole premise upon which the argument rests. I think it's asinine to claim something like this sans ANY qualifiers without a good historical example. Can someone correct this author's mistake and provide a historical anecdote of this?