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aGHzon Composition shouldn't be this hard

I'm genuinely interested in examples of these reliable abstractions, or at least in some keywords I can look up.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sort

to put a number of things in an order or to separate them into groups: Paper, plastic, and cans are sorted for recycling.

sort something into something I'm going to sort these old books into those to be kept and those to be thrown away.

sort something by something You can use the computer to sort the newspaper articles alphabetically, by date, or by subject.

sort (through) She found the ring while sorting (through) some clothes.

aGHzon How we lost communication to entertainment

I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.

aGHzon Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an “aha”

From the second paragraph in the article:

> You might even say “Aha!” This kind of sudden realization is known as insight, and a research team recently uncovered how the brain produces it (opens a new tab), which suggests why insightful ideas tend to stick in our memory.

aGHzon Why We Spiral

Keep an anxiety log for a few months. In my experience, this feeling of correctness is a retrospective impression that relies heavily on confirmation bias, and in reality is nowhere near that high. Either way, a concrete log will confirm or deny it.

If it's truly correct, then I'd say it's not anxiety and that you're probably more attuned to subtle cues. You can learn to pay conscious attention to these cues, evaluate them, and decide strategically if you want to act on them. The idea is to keep your advantage without the negative emotional reaction.

If it's not that accurate, having proof can help you internalize that you're just going through some particular emotional process, without according it any undue weight. Having let go of that, you can start picking up mechanical tricks for anxiety management, like breathing techniques.

aGHzon Knowledge and memory

Thank you very much, this is exactly the starting point I needed. I'll keep following the citations trail into more recent years, but your second link from 2007 reinforces my feeling that we're still very far from understanding the mechanisms:

> Second, within LIPC, we found a gradient in which a more dorsal-posterior region was involved in SR, a mid region was involved in both SR and EE, and a more ventral-anterior region was involved in EE, but only when SR was high.

To me, these are merely clues about how the high-level pieces fit together, and there's a long road to actually understanding the neural correlates of memory.

aGHzon Knowledge and memory

> The working memory and episodic memory papers in the last few years have isolated the correlates, we a have a fairly empirical neurobiological description of memory function and process.

Would you kindly provide some references? I'm very interested in this research as an armchair enthusiast, but in my own reading I've yet to find anything this confident.

aGHzon Our $100M Series B

The complement of a set consists of everything that is not in the set. Having your complement commoditized is a good thing, it refers to everything your users need that is not part of your value proposition. If it's commoditized, your users have easier access to it hence use more of it, which drives up their demand for the things that _are_ part of your value proposition.

aGHzon Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories

When compared to the "plumbing" commands. If you want to know more about git's plumbing vs porcelain metaphor, this is a good quick overview: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39848551

aGHzon Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)

Attention. It's really all you need [1]

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

aGHzon Try thinking and learning without working memory (2008)

The full term is "mise en place" and your analogy with the IDE is not far off, but there's an interesting nuance that's very useful to adopt when programming too. Mise en place is an ephemeral thing, you do it every time you start cooking and you look ahead at all the things you will need and arrange them in an optimal way for the steps you will take. It's an activity that encourages you to:

- always start from a clean state

- chunk your time

- give a bit of forethought to the work ahead

- do a little bit of workflow optimization

Over time, this is one habit that can have impressive compounding benefits.

aGHzon Gordon Bell has died

Never too early to prepare for Y10K compliance: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

aGHzon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

You could simply encode the json to base64 and put it in the url fragment (hash). Then you can save by bookmarking the url and share by copy/pasting it, all without a server. I've seen some web games use this method but I can't remember which off the top of my head.

aGHzon Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 transformers and the “Attention is all we need” paper?

It is a lot harder to take the black out of the cat than it is to take the mat out from under it.

aGHzon Manifesto for minimalist software engineers (2013)

The minimum viable product concept comes to mind. You don't have a product until you invest the effort required to pass the minimum threshold.

Another example I can think of is escape velocity. I'd venture that the principle you're asking for is "phase change", where a threshold gates a drastic change in behavior.

aGHzon A rash of nearly lethal mushroom poisonings in Ohio

Several comments here advise getting a good mushroom identification book instead of relying on plant id apps for foraging. Do you have any recommendations? And more generally, how would you go about assessing the trustworthiness of any such book?

aGHzon Leap: Neovim’s Answer to the Mouse

dtt will stop just before the first t character, dft will delete the t as well.

aGHzon Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

That's interesting, as a québécois I don't agree with any of this. The only thing that raised an eyebrow was "est à même de", but if turns out it's just another way of saying "capable de", I guess it's simply not a common idiom around here. Aside from that, I found the wording flowed well even if I personally would've phrased it differently.

aGHzon An Intuition for Lisp Syntax (2020)

Do you want Python? Because this is how you get Python.

Joke aside, this is why I never understood this problem. With proper indentation it looks essentially like Python with a generous helping of your-father's-parentheses.

aGHzon The Inner Osborne Effect (2021)

"Reduction in force", similar to a layoff. A layoff happens when the company can no longer afford an employee they'd otherwise like to keep, a RIF happens when the role no longer makes sense and is closed permanently.

aGHzon I Avoid Async/Await

This is correct, I wasn't paying attention.

aGHzon I Avoid Async/Await

But in JavaScript, these two awaits will not happen in parallel, you really need to await Promise.all() for that.

aGHzon I Avoid Async/Await

You really end up creating promises manually, the vast majority are downstream from an IO call like fetch() or a database query.

aGHzon How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

Quick tip, you could replace the ifs with

mkdir -p Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym

aGHzon The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

It seems the term is in fact "signifiers". From your link:

> Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.

aGHzon Python web scraping

Yeah, I'm pretty sure anyone having to do any moderate amount of scraping eventually arrives at a similar solution.

Thanks! It's still a work in progress, so if you have anything you'd like to see in there, I'd love to hear about it (I also welcome code contributions if you're so inclined).

aGHzon Python web scraping

Like the OP, I needed more control over the crawling behaviour for a project. All the scraping code quickly became a mess though, so I wrote a library that lets you declaratively define the data you're interested in (think Django forms). It also provides decorators that allow you to specify imperative code for organizing the data cleanup before and after parsing. See how easy it is to extract data from the HN front page: https://github.com/aGHz/structominer/blob/master/examples/hn...

I'm still working on proper packaging so for the moment the only way to install Struct-o-miner is to clone it from https://github.com/aGHz/structominer.

aGHzon Python web scraping

That's not actually lxml's fault, it depends on the libxml2 installed in your environment. Just like Jake232, I haven't found a site that lxml can't handle lately, using libxml 2.9.1. You can find your libxml2 version in Python with:

  >>> from lxml import etree
  >>> etree.LIBXML_VERSION

If you find a page in the wild that it can't handle, I'd love to know the URL.

aGHzon Ask HN: State of Django vs. Rails?

It bears mentioning that this is usually done in conjunction with virtualenv. The common practice is to include a requirements file in your repository, and have every repo clone live in its own virtualenv. This is something I very much love in the Python world: encapsulation of deployments is separate from package management.

aGHzon Ask HN: State of Django vs. Rails?

I didn't mean it as an insult. But when you make a statement then provide an example that contradicts it, that's usually a troll move. Ergonomically speaking, the example you provided is easier to type for Django than Rails. Again, didn't mean to offend.