prionassembly

AdaBoost, etc. were invented precisely to make good use of weak predictors.

I played the font game three times.

1) Looking at the font names I eventually picked my favorite/workhorse: IBM Plex.

2) With hidden names, I picked Courier Prime, which I disliked at first sight.

3) Again with hidden name, I picked Cousine, which looked alright in the simulator but had lines that were too strong and even on my more contrasted color scheme. I prefer fonts with varying line widths, which the game didn't really detect -- it was mostly unreadable versus readable.

Pinterest is a predator on the web, sucking content and walling itself off, but it's full of good stuff if you enjoy the arts (I've been "into" asemic writing for years) or graphic design.

Is there a name for this type of technique I can google?

People who are good at the grind are good at the grind. These are also often the people who succeed in life; intelligence is vastly overrated.

So like a restricted subset? That's a really neat idea; you should develop it into a paper or something.

This restricted subset concept has the huge advantage that you can slip out of the harness in a pinch. So you can reuse a relatively developed Float-less Python program in Full Python and later walk back removing floats.

That's really clever. It essentially obviates the whole configuration DSL tango; it also gets people started where the rubber hits the road -- not with syntax and parsing, but with why the DSL exists and what it's supposed to do and not do.

"Accelerando" is an awesome name, and it came on the scene just as the "exponential pace!" thing was going on in the zeitgeist.

I feel like you want to move beyond being the "Accelerando guy". You have my best wishes on that.

Kipling has this

    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies
    Or being hated, don't give way to hating
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

Almost no one really understands asyncio (I pretty much don't), but syntax like "async def" and "async with" makes you feel like you do, and stuff like FastAPI encourages you to type "async".

Once in a while someone says that "yes, you can do logic programming in PHP or OOP in Haskell". Maybe, but syntax is more than a nudge, it's a finger on the scales.

I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants.

I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.

The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.

Yes, but Buzzfeed presumably broke news and did the whole journalism mambo. Anyone can write sociopolitical commentary.

> Kahneman and Gladwell.

Eh, that's not all. There's a long lineage of accomplished people going cuckoo. And Nobel prizes appear to be an amplifying factor, from Shockley and Pauling to Mullis and Krugman.

I didn't use words like "unenlightened" and "selfless". What are you replying to?

> it's overtly obvious how much work a child is,

It really isn't. My sister lived with me on and off during her kid's first years and I saw a lot of it (also experienced the joys of being the cool uncle). But I still underestimated the amount of work you have to put in. Also: taking care of a 9-month old is possibly 81 times the work of taking care of a newborn. But evolution is funny like this: the payoff scales very close to the energy expenditure.

It's really hard to explain the benefits one gets from having kids because, well, with your mentality one doesn't get any benefits. I was almost militantly "child-free" until something I can't quite explain happened to me, and put the world in an entirely different perspective. This is when we decided to try for a baby. We were different people already when the baby came.

The differences in thinking between parents and the childless might well be larger than political, racial, ideological, religious etc. differences.

Did we read the same article?

The omnivore equivalent would be an article that describes eating meat as an unfortunate side of life, like commuting and calling into call centers to cancel your cable. My modified reply would be "hey, it's normal to eat meat, it's part of our programming". That doesn't vilify the vegetarian, it calls out a puffy well-being article that says "eat vegetables so you can overcome the stress of eating meat".

... anyway, I was the cool uncle (and my sister lived with me on and off, so I really had a close experience with my first niece) for a long while, and near-militantly "child-free" until I was 40. One day, something rang in my head, and I was changed. Keep rocking the vegetarianism, but try not to be too proud to listen to that ringing. If it comes to you.

It's strange that it reduces kids to a chore (although kid-related chores are WAY more numerous than the childless can ever imagine). Some of the time spent with my kid is restorative; indeed, much of the resistance to returning from the home-office has to do with wanting to spend time with the kids.

Having children is a good thing for the soul. We're supposed to have them, it's in our DNA. Something is out of whack with contemporaneity -- the time is out of joint -- when we can only see them as a cost center.

If I had any inclination and cause for terrorist attacks...

I think of archive.org as "for important things" and tend to use archive.is etc. to make non-paywalled links.

The internet dies if archive.org and wikipedia go down within the same month.

Things can't be conditionally sane or insane. A winning gamble remains a gamble and people are right to balk and say "you bet the house on this?".

Julia doesn't really compete with anything, despite having some cool tech behind it.

It's like -- Julia is the Rory Gilmore of programming languages.

On the contrary, it's widely acknowledge that mathematical ability and productivity decreases rapidly with age.

(There are other fields benefiting from long expertise, like project management...)

Re: traffic from HN. My submissions fall off the new listings in minutes, but I still get more visitors than from twitter posts with tens of likes. This website is crazy big.

What in the oompa-loompa is a microfounder?

Ok, let me try to put this in a more actionable way.

There's plenty of horror to go around here. Both parties have committed atrocious crimes, and they plan on continuing to do so indefinitely. (Israel pays lip service to a two-state solutions, while the policy on Arab leaders everywhere is "destroy Israel". But eh, words.)

By (financially!) punishing only one side in this mess, you're rewarding the other side. Are you that certain this is the righteous path?

I said "a firm anti-Israel stance". Let me try to put this in a polite way: you've already made your mind about this, you're not... open-minded.

Many both-sidesisms are bogus, but this one isn't. There's enough horror to account for on, uh, both sides. (Isn't it amazing how we're conditioned to mock the phrase "both sides" now?)

That's a strange extreme. I mean, there are good odds that you're from the country that perpetrated Abu Ghraib, and for what -- a make-work war on the other end of the planet.

The whole Israeli question is really too complicated for a HN comment. All I'm claiming is that the BDS movement claims a kind of moral certitude that's not only not sufficiently grounded, it doesn't try to be sufficiently grounded. And while I'm sure many support "global progressive movements" out of the goodness of their hearts, the fact that there is such a movement betrays something darker. Remember that I said "xor" -- the firm anti-Israel position is naïve xor malicious.

Then: you don't have to be "firmly anti-Israel" to see many of their crimes.

You would enjoy "The information: a history, a theory, a flood" by James Gleick.

Eh. My wife has trouble taking out blood for panels and exams. Arm goes blue for up to a week for the tinest quantity of blood extracted. Frequent exams would be painful.

> Forcing medical procedures

Covid vaccines?

Yeah. But the web is like a VW Bug four-cycle motor rigged to a ratty tricycle overlaid with a stage-looking platform where large bears perform pole dances (poles glued to the tricycle's handle), and there's classrooms for ants on top of the heads of the bears and underneath it all the water level keeps rising...

Maybe we should have a dozen protocols for different kinds of applications. (I mean user-facing applications!) Maybe online banking shouldn't involve CSS and JavaScript. Spending some time with Gemini is a real eye opener in this respect.