1. talyian 4 days ago parent

   It makes you a paradoxer if you stopped after the step of finding the consequence that feels absurd.
2. talyian Mar 14, 2020 parent

   It's true that Trader Joe's in Manhattan are jammed with lines going out the door and shopping there is mayhem regardless of whether there's an ongoing pandemic.
3. talyian Oct 24, 2018 parent

   In Go, there's a lot of common terminology reflecting the concept of "evaluate your own move independently of your opponent's move", from direct terms like "tenuki" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenuki) to strategic koans like "play away from thickness[strength]" (https://senseis.xmp.net/?PlayAwayFromThickness). I think this type of thinking is something that all journeyman-level Go players learn in order to progress, more so than in Chess.
4. talyian May 27, 2018 parent

   Plants can be weirdly resilient to smashing -- various bits of plant fragments can decide to grow new roots.
5. talyian Jan 4, 2018 parent

   the requirements are easy to meet - you just need to be able to time operations at a suitable precision. The exploits are possible in Javascript running in a browser.
6. talyian Dec 5, 2017 parent

   Fair enough. In this case, "Road Neutrality" protects the consumer's access to a restaurant or bank. However, in reality there are civil rights laws that in turn forbid those restaurants and banks from refusing service to customers based on their ethnicity and gender.

   I don't think it's a stretch, if we're comparing Networks to roads, to also compare network services like Google and Youtube to public accomodations like restaurants, hotels and banks, and discuss a set of protected classes for internet nondiscrimination.

7. talyian Dec 5, 2017 parent

   If only Net Neutrality went both ways...
8. talyian Dec 1, 2017 parent

   There's this great book on a similar topic, "The Origin of Species," if you're interested in the phenomenon.
9. talyian Oct 27, 2017 parent

   Sadly, the machines I don't want people running commands on happen to be also the machines I don't want to rm -rf everything on as well.
10. talyian Oct 25, 2017 parent

    If it makes you feel any better, silk is still the preferred standard for smoothness, and even baby bottoms are slightly more smooth than butter:

    https://trends.google.la/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=s...

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smooth+as+butt...

11. talyian Sep 14, 2017 parent

    I wasn't convinced about the value of Paul Graham's recent "General idea, small delta" essay until I noticed how easily you can just use those 4 words to justify these things.

    Even the obviously laughable stories like Juicero - surely there's issues with bad execution, but as long as there are "juice bars" selling a glass of pulped vegetables for $8 that people are willing to buy, I'm willing to say that there's a niche for a better-executed and perhaps better-targetted juice-related tech product.

12. talyian Sep 8, 2017 parent

    Learning math isn't "really, really hard", but it is unforgiving in a particular kind of way: you're basically required to internalize a concept fully before going on to later concepts. (This is coming from being mostly self-taught up through calculus-level math)

    Students often don't fully grasp one concept before the teacher moves onto the next topic. Once this happens, the student is missing a crucial building block and tends to just get stuck with all the later things that build on it. This is a common experience in schools and I suspect is the origin of the "math is hard" trope.

    It can be hard for a student to self-evaluate whether he/she has full mastery of a topic. This is exacerbated by situations where a struggling student will go to office hours or work with classmates and "solve" a problem, without having acquired the skills to solve slightly different permutations of that same problem on their own.

    In programming, we don't have this problem. You can write HelloWorld without understanding console IO, terminal protocols, window buffers. You can write a webapp without knowing the OSI stack. Software is built upon abstractions.

13. talyian Sep 7, 2017 parent

    You comply if you think the request is reasonable and lawful, otherwise you don't.

    Maybe you get your nose broken and United allegedly pays you $140 million in damages. Maybe the incident causes all warrantless police offices to be banned from hospital ER rooms.

    Or maybe the law doesn't stand on your side and you wind up in jail and fined. Who knows.

14. talyian Aug 25, 2017 parent

    Compared to say Python, it does act a bit like importing free functions without explicitly naming them, but you do get the bonus of type-based dispatch and overloading.

        using System.Linq;
        foo.Select(x => bar);
    
        from itertools import *
        imap(foo, lambda x: bar)

15. talyian Aug 24, 2017 parent

    The value of a high-throughput network interconnect slot from your peers is tied to the current value of all the cryptocurrencies the DHT routes, not just the cost of running the server and the physical links.
16. talyian Aug 24, 2017 parent

    My apologies for the machina ex machina. I needed a clean end to the post and got lazy.
17. talyian Aug 24, 2017 parent

    The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a global consortium of content and browser developers.

    Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-peer router for nearby Internet users.

    Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet. This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider for reliably fast localized caching of search results.

    The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented the Internet.

18. talyian Aug 16, 2017 parent

    The first class IDE for F# is VS Code + Ionide. The language service backend for F# is also very well supported for emacs.
19. talyian Aug 11, 2017 parent

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idem
20. talyian Aug 3, 2017 parent

    http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-2015-reading-list/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-winter-reading-list/
21. talyian Jul 28, 2017 parent

    > can I use this for 'real life' code as part of an existing C# desktop application .. without tons of hassle

    Yes. Your standard OOP features like inheriting from C# classes, implementing interfaces, etc are supported natively in F#. The main hassle in being C#-compatible is exposing an external OOP api with only .NET types and interfaces instead of standard F# types. This means, for example, exposing `seq` (`IEnumerable`) instead of `list` (`Microsoft.FSharp.Collections.List`) or using the struct-tuple construct in F# 4.1 so C# 7 can access it.

    > good samples of real life application code

    No personal recommendations but have you seen https://github.com/fsprojects/awesome-fsharp

22. talyian Jul 19, 2017 parent

    In some competitive games like Dota and LoL, the random distribution for critical hits is weighted so that it ramps up over time, resetting after a successful crit. (http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution) This both reduces the chance of two high rolls coming up twice in a row as well as long periods of low rolls.

    It doesn't have the "you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure" since "not a critical" isn't really that negative of an outcome.

    For something like D&D, the same kind of "better-than-random" distribution just comes from adding dice. 4d6 is much more consistent than 1d21+3.

23. talyian Feb 20, 2017 parent

    This kind of 3D is a lot more accessible (via Tilt Brush) than mesh-based 3D.

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