anon1253

As others have mentioned, I have no idea what any of this has to do with blockchain, or how it could even conceivably help with anything other than riding a hype train. That being said, would be curious to see how it holds up against the standard state of the art (e.g. https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-progress/blob/master/e...) as summarization (especially the abstractive kind) is very hard, but also has a surprising amount of useful applications

Does anyone know of similar technology for the inverse? Saving cold from the winter for the summer? With hotter summers and more extreme temperature swings to be expected, it might cut costs on running the AC's

We've been using a full Clojure stack (front-end + backend) in production for nearly 4 years and very happy with it (6-8 people full time). But that is very much anecdotal. I guess one thing to note is that the language is very stable, there are very few (if any) breaking changes and a 4 year old library will "just work" most of the time. Even more amazing is that it's trivial to port 40 year old ideas from (Common)Lisp if you're so inclined, or interface with a known good Java implementation. To me that is a big plus, personally I wouldn't even want a ton of extra features in Clojure ... the language is fine and libraries fill in the rest. It does give the impression that not a lot of happening and that it might be fading or boring, but in a lot of settings boring is actually a good thing. The amount of times some NodeJS or Python thing changed from underneath me and I needed to rework an entire codepath or build infrastructure just because the language changed their mind on how things should be done are gladly behind me with Clojure!

Excellent points! From my personal experience I'd also like to add that there is a bit of preference involved. I find Lisp like languages much much easier on the eyes compared to Javascript or other C-like syntax. This is also partially due to the excellent support of s-expressions in editors with things like paredit [1], parinfer [2], or clever-parens [3]. With that functionality the syntax becomes nearly invisble and you're editing a /tree/ rather than characters. Coupled with autocomplete and auto-indent [e.g. 4], the code is much easier to manipulate in my experience (but again, might be preference)

[1] http://danmidwood.com/content/2014/11/21/animated-paredit.ht... (also http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html)

[2] https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/

[3] https://github.com/luxbock/evil-cleverparens (Vim with Emacs via Evil)

[4] https://github.com/Malabarba/aggressive-indent-mode

Groningen, The Netherlands. Population 300k, strong university and other educational fascilities. Has the Dutch infrastructure but still relatively cheap compared to the other majors cities (eg Amsterdam)

identical title https://joelkuiper.eu/semantic-web

Posts like this always remind me of "Notes on Postmodern Programming" (http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~kjx/papers/nopp.pdf [pdf])

I even have an H-index of 8 (eight papers of which I am included as an author, cited at least 8 times). It's more the uncertainty that I am struggling with. I don't want to become some wage slave weighed down by a barely payable mortgage. I want to work on stuff that truly matters, but funnily enough ... the world is in disagreement on that one as far as I can see (ads, "social" networks, forcing influence one way or the other ...)

Good one to vent a bit. I'm 30 now, living in the Netherlands, and dropped out of a PhD in epidemiology/bioinformatics to work remotely for a company in the US. This has been great. Pay is wonderful, approx 130k/year. My official title is something like Senior Data Scientist. I work mostly on the application of machine learning and natural language processing to clinical study data. Between the day to day ops and management, I sometimes put together neat little ML prototypes. And, in the past 3 years I managed a team that I personally put together through hiring and firing. The company I work for gives me a lot of autonomy, and I think we've delivered truly amazing things in that time span. We've literally build a state-of-the-art medical search engine from scratch, from the design, to the Clojure programming, down to the nuts and bolts of putting the machines in the racks. Since things were seemingly going well, I thought "good moment to buy a house". So I bought a house, approx 400k (coming down to 2000/month roughly). But ... I've recently become aware of some changes to the company structure that may or may not play out well. I think they will, but they might not. So there's a reasonable risk that I might be unemployed soon-ish. This scares me. Being in the far North of the Netherlands, there aren't a lot of job opportunities for a drop-out like me. And, finding a company that is willing to take the risk of hiring me remotely ... yeah I'd even be hesitant in hiring myself at that pay-rate. The thing is, I might have to sell the house and all that shitty adult stuff if that happens, just to cut monthly costs. That scares me.

On top of that ... I'm not even sure I /want/ to work anymore. I would love to work on things like climate change, but that being underfunded (and not having a degree) I don't see happening. The only openings I see for a Senior Data Scientist position usually require a PhD (which I dropped out of sigh), or are in the ad space. And, for as long as I have a say in the matter I will never work in the ad space.

I've been thinking of doing my own thing, bootstrap something. But I literally don't know what. Cynicism maybe. You hear all these stories of bozos pitching some idea but can't get the people to build it; I guess I'm the opposite: I think, given time and resources, I can build a lot of things ... but seriously, I wouldn't have a clue what to work on. Except maybe multi-stage flash desalination using concentrated (heliostat) solar power to green deserts as a carbon sink ... but yeah, not a civil engineer.

The thing is ... through life choices I think I've made myself unemployable. I need the autonomy to do stuff, or I'll go mad (also, don't make me get out of bed before 10AM ... just not going to happen). But on the other hand, man it's been a productive 3 years ... and I learned /so/ much. I wish I just knew what to work on next. But my dysthymia prevents me from seeing that stuff clearly. If someone with a cool idea comes around, I'd love to sink my teeth into stuff; on my own, all I think of is the impending climate change disaster. Fun fun fun.

I'm the same, but I've found a life hack: work remotely for a company in the US while in the EU ... then it lines up better!

Even for an experienced programmer this stuff happens, and it's the most frustrating experience I've ever had. It's the stuff that happens when management and C-level just "wants stuff" to be buzzword compliant. And, every day/week/month the requirements change. This weeks feature X has "top priority" and then amnesia kicks in and now feature Y is the next best thing. As a programmer-now-manager I try to shield people from this, trying to find the gems among the rubble of business meetings. But it's tricky, so this really resonated with me:

"I have an overwhelming empathy for developers in this position. They have more information than they will ever need, but it’s completely disorganized. It’s like trying to build a ten piece puzzle, except you have to find the ten pieces within a pile of 10,000,000,000 pieces, all of which are square, and you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like at the end. Good luck."

Even with a team of highly experienced developers things quickly turn to a mess if it's not perfectly clear what to work on. I don't mean things like "button should go 1px north to align with header". That's trivial. In fact, I would go so far as to say: most production-ready programming is trivial. Trivial in the sense that someone, somewhere, solved it in a way that's correct. But, when it is not /crystal/ clear what the requirements are, what the business case is, or what the edge-cases look like: oh my. I've been in the incredibly unlucky position of only being in settings like this. Start-ups, academia, R&D positions. And, as a result even with the best intentions and the best teams you'll still produce production-quality garbage. Mostly because incentives were misaligned and there was no coherent vision. Agile story-driven development only works when there is leadership that has the guts to say "no", and when there is something well defined to work on. Sometimes I yearn for some CRUD webstore ... at least then the things are knowable. Anyway, just my rant. I'll probably go the meme-way of becoming a plumber/welder/etc at some point ;-)

Very nice. Seems a bit finicky with all the cranes though, but what do I know. If the cost of concrete is a problem, why not put a huge sheet-like structure below a landfill and very slowly rise it up or down ... same principle, but now you're just moving waste and there's no shortage of that!

CloudyNights/Astrobin for astrophotography

How does it compare to my amateur attempts with a 12" Newton https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelkuiper/42502865635/ :p ?

All kidding aside, do you think there is some scientific value in the efforts of hobby astronomers and astrophotographers around the world?

It’s running Windows now and sleep just works. But the trackpad still randomly stops working after sleep, needing a reboot. I get 2,5 hours of battery with normal usage. And it runs uncomfortably hot and loud but CPU utilization is at 2%. I guess it’s just not my thing or I got a dud, but my experience with Lenovo customer service has been horrible.

Trackpad also doesn’t work under Linux with the NFC model. Hardware wise the webcam and sound are beyond horrible. The fan curves are obnoxious and it still gets uncomfortably hot. It’s such a shame, I had high hopes for this laptop but it’s collecting dust in a drawer. Between the sleep states, track pad, thermal issues and throttling, poor audio visuals and battery life … the thing really should never have had that price point.

Same here, I tried replacing it with a 2018 Lenovo Carbon X1 with the intent of running Linux but that ended in tears. I just really wish they had continued this line of laptops ... or at the very least kept the keyboard in their newer models :/

Nope I would probably have gone with chemistry/biochemistry. Maybe even philosophy

2011 "Explicit memory as a framework for the neural correlate of consciousness" https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?d...

It's the same in the Netherlands. I pay upwards of 50% taxes, but don't get any unemployment, pension or other benefits/insurance. It's ridiculous in my book.

It's awesome. Watched it on cable TV together with Charmed. But Buffy was always the better one. Still sad Angel got cancelled though.

Yep that's what I meant from memory, thank you for providing the correct reference :-)

Note Carbon X1 is not the appropriate one ... which I learned the hard way

Hmm, maybe. I work in Natural Language Processing for medicine, and there are many interesting challenges ... a lot of them still academic even. But the biggest thing I'm worrying about these days are more business oriented. Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing in particular, is nowhere near advanced or accurate enough to fully automate things. So most of my thinking goes into things like "given the limited abilities and limited data, how can we still make something that is useful". That's both a business and a UI/UX problem...which suck up a lot of brain cycles for me. Up to the point that I've become somewhat cynical and wish I was doing CRUD work instead ... since all the hype around NLP usually amounts to saying "yeah no, that's not really how it works, and you'll [the customer] be disappointed if we actually did that". The hype train is both a blessing and a curse

undo-tree is great! I use it like a "mini git", it supports branches/forks, so I can usually just try something in any order and easily go back to where I want to be. I use it in combination with Evil (vim) bindings, and everything works like a dream.

Maybe not what you remember, but maybe this helps? https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy/blob/master/R...

There are various theories of emotion (overview here https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...). I think you might've been looking for the James–Lange theory?

"The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory

"Initiate a process, to create an environment in which the solution will occur independently of yourself" — Talos Principle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqA3pGe3Og&t=239s

I would sort of do a hobby project in the following languages (in addition to Java for Object Oriented Programming, although something obscure like Smalltalk can be fun for an evening):

- Haskell, functional programming with static types

- Clojure (or Common Lisp), functional programming in a dynamic language (and understanding the AST-as-syntax-homoiconicity)

- C/C++, "low-level" programming (e.g. pointers, memory management, registers, the basics of compilers)

- Prolog, Logic Programming as a completely different paradigm

Then after you've "grokked" the pros and cons of these languages, pick one language to become good at. It doesn't matter if that is Java, Java is a fine language; but being exposed to different paradigms broadens your horizon in my experience, and sometimes the idioms and ideas are portable. Personally I've done a lot of back and forth between Java, Python, Clojure and R . If the choice is mine I usually pick Clojure, but not always. Statistics and datascience I still do in R or Python just because the sheer amount of documentation and libraries available. I guess I've been influenced too much by Rich Hickey but he asks "would you rather become good at programming or at problem solving?", and for me it's the latter. Language paradigms help you to recast problems onto a different frame of mind, but at the end of the day it's your ability to help further a cause/business/idea that counts. Just my 2 cents!

I usually just go with squarespace if I'm lazy. generic, but good UI and usually gets the job done.