scott_s

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788738

Three is an ever-green game. It requires more strategy and planning than 2048. I still play it, over five years since I bought it. Easily worth the $6 to purchase.

grzm is correct, it does not happen automatically. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Academic paper: "Engineering In-place (Shared-memory) Sorting Algorithms", Michael Axtmann, Sascha Witt, Daniel Ferizovic, Peter Sanders, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13569

To start discussion, I think it's interesting to note how I landed on this repo and paper. I got curious about Tim Sort, and some searching on HN brought up a 2018 story, "On the Worst-Case Complexity of TimSort", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883461. In the comments, poster lorenzhs has an excellent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884612) which points out IPS4o as a sorting algorithm that takes modern hardware into account.

Yes.

I think the point this author is making is that Nietzsche’s use of word “nihilism” does not match our accepted definition.

I think it's worth noting that dvt's post agrees with the submitted essay. Quoting more:

> At times he described himself as “a nihilist,” by which he meant not that everything is meaningless, but that he actively rejected the available eternalisms. He also condemned “nihilism,” understood as apathetic unwillingness to take problems of meaningness seriously. He particularly included Christianity and “Apollonian” rationalism in that. Nietzsche’s intention was to develop a new, positive alternative.

Even if people bought for just the next week, they had to buy more, because now they were using their toilet at home, exclusively. Everyone buying more at once caused a real shortage.

Correct; there was a market shift, where all of the demand for commercial toilet paper went to consumer toilet paper. Because of that shift, there was a real shortage in consumer toilet paper. Unfortunately, the myth that this shortage was entirely an induced panic seems to have caught on. For more, see https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/3/21206942/toilet-paper...

This is the approach I take when I write, so this is how I try to write. I hope it is reflected in my first-author papers. Three papers from the past several years: https://www.scott-a-s.com/files/middleware2016_loadbalancing..., https://www.scott-a-s.com/files/pldi2017_lf_elastic_scheduli..., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.00064.pdf.

Or use a language with generators and coroutines? I believe this would be natural to express in Python and (maybe) with C++20's coroutines. Java’s stream API could also probably accomplish something similar.

WOW. J.A.N. Lee taught my intro to programming in C++ course back in '99. He retired during my undergrad.

Rock-solid reliability for large-scale transaction-heavy workloads.

I'm not sure if it's a habit from a "good" writer, but most new academic writers are reluctant to make themselves the subject of sentences. This leads to passive voice and awkward sentences.

Who ran the experiments? We ran the experiments. The experiments were not run. Who proved the theorem? We proved the theorem. We present. We conclude. Our analysis. It not only leads to better, simpler sentences, it's more accurate. We, as human beings who exist in this world, did these things.

Also, and this is more of a pet-peeve and may only be a practice from my particular community, but references are not nouns. "Betty White [6] already proved a version of this result" is good. "[6] already proved a version of this result" drives me batty.

I don't think of it as making good writing work in academia. Good writing is an advantage in academia. Reviewers are more likely to accept your paper, and readers are more likely to read more.

Not exactly. My advisor, an experienced researcher who already knew what I was writing about, missed an important thing that I said. That meant I failed to communicate something to a very sympathetic reader. That's a big miss. From that, I learned that if something is important, find multiple ways to say it in multiple places.

I only really know academic computer science papers, and even then, papers that tend to have a systems component. Your most important claims, conclusions and results should be stated in your abstract and introduction. Some things are fundamental enough to repeat in your design/analysis and results, and some others will only end up in one of those sections. Don't use the same literal sentence, over-and-over, but reinforce important sentiments. If restating something all over your paper doesn't feel right, then it may not be as important as you think it is.

Academic papers are not novels, and they certainly are not mysteries. Don't hold out on a reveal until the end: say the most important stuff upfront. People often will not read your paper end-to-end, and usually only some of the sections. It's not possible to make your sections truly self-contained, but it's worth repeating fundamental things. If your experimental results are confirming your theoretical analysis, restate that theoretical result in your experimental results as context. If your experimental results demonstrate that a particular design decision you made in your system truly does provide better performance, restate that design decision.

I admit I had a similar initial reaction, but then I realized it's similar to golf clubs. Golfers don't use simple wooden mallets, nor do we expect them to. And part of the skill of the game is knowing when to use what when.

"Your words are expensive." Said to me by my graduate advisor when he said I had not stated something, and I pointed out I had, once, in an earlier section.

My writing style, even my academic writing style, is a result of how I was trained as a writer: as a journalist, from spending so much time on my high school newspaper. I have long felt this was an advantage. I was trained as a writer to write straight-forward prose. And I was trained as an editor to eliminate unnecessary words and try to find the simplest way to say something.

My advisor was right, of course. Academic writing is not journalistic writing. I still try to keep my prose as simple as possible, but now I will repeat important sentiments throughout the paper. People don't read academic papers the same as news stories; readers expect to be able to read sections in relative isolation. If something is important, repeat it! But repeat it simply.

> Am I supposed to feel bad for olympic athletes now?

No. That would be sympathy, where you feel bad because they feel bad. But empathy, where you understand their feelings would be good. Not just for Olympic athletes, but in general.

> When we feel we have it rough recognizing that others may have it rougher lends a perspective that leads to gratitude and less self-centeredness.

Sometimes, for some people. For some people, when they express their feelings, and the response they are met points out that others have it worse, they sometimes feel worse. It can sometimes feel like a dismissal, invalidating their feelings and experiences. I'm using qualifiers here, but I personally think most people want to feel validated.

No. https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccine...

That article agrees with what the parent poster said, based on my skimming it. That article documents the great lengths those women, and their parents, went through to achieve their mastery. It also indicates their may be cognitive differences between high-level chess players and good amateurs.

This very submission is 160 pages documenting this very fact.

I intended to say "This is not one of those times that this adage applies."

I live and work in NY. It was standard in my contract with my former employer.

This is one of those times that this adage applies. In the worst case, "begging for forgiveness" does not mean asking your manager for an exception. It means losing an expensive court case with your former employer about who owns your IP.

In an interview on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe (https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts/episode-829), West explains that part of the reason the Defense Department cannot explain these videos is rather pedestrian: the systems in use are classified. Quoting from the transcript (https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_829):

"The problem is that the military don’t want to talk about this, partly because this is a classified system that these are recorded on. It’s called the Raytheon ATFLIR system. And it’s a fairly advanced targeting pod that straps on underneath the planes. And if you look for example videos shot with this on YouTube, you will find, basically, nothing—like a few really grainy ones, because even though I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of hours that have been shot with it, it’s all classified. So they don’t want to talk about it. And if they do analysis of it, that becomes classified by default. So they’re not going to release it. And they’ve actually explicitly said that they do not plan to release the results of the investigation into these videos."

Mick West over at metabunk.org has covered a lot of these. He has a background in video game programming, which he uses when trying to reconstruct three dimensional spatial relationships from two dimensional videos.

Their name is not in the author list for the paper.

Edit: Parent comment originally referenced the paper that caused this mess.

For many people, being head validates their experiences. It’s reassuring to be accepted by another person.