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dopu

735 karma · joined July 9, 2015

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dopu··on Lenses in Julia
Is set basically syntactic sugar for deepcopying a struct, mutating the specified field, and then returning that deepcopy? Seems like it could be quite slow.
dopu··on Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
I’m not doubting you, but the vast majority of ideas people have for games are largely derivative and could quite easily be implemented in Unity.
dopu··on The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
There is an underlying precarity in the academy that is so deep it almost feels like a natural part of science. This is part of what makes reform so difficult. Early on, rocking the boat feels like career suicide. Later on, if you are lucky enough to become established, you are much less likely to feel like deep reform is necessary: after all, the system benefited you. And even then, the precarity doesn't go away. You still compete for grants like everyone else, and your trainees are attempting to become established. Why should they be the ones to shoulder the risk of, e.g., ignoring the glam journals and exclusively putting out preprints?
dopu··on The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
It seems to me that something like eLife's model is the best solution to this [0]: you still have a minimal amount of curation, but generally if a paper is written well enough and within the field it won't be desk rejected. Then, it gets published on the site and sent off for peer review. Peer reviewers assess how sound the paper is and pass a judgement which readers can view, as well as provide some recommendations to the authors make it stronger. The authors can then either revise the paper, or do nothing at all. In either case, papers don't languish in reviewer hell and the larger scientific community gets to see it.

[0] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/66d43597/elife-s-new-...

dopu··on Window-Switcher: Alt+(backtick) same-app window switching for Windows 10/11
This behavior and macOS’s terrible default window management ultimately drove me back to Windows for serious work. I suppose I never fully adapted to the macOS way of doing things, but I never understood what they envisioned users were supposed to do here. Is the intended behavior that the user minimize any VSCode windows that are not currently in use?

But then what if I have multiple windows open because the other has some reference codebase? Do I keep that in a separate desktop instead? It’s just perplexing.

dopu··on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022)
I've arrived at something similar after going through a lot of different solutions: Evernote, Quiver notes, Apple Notes, Logseq, Tana: now I just keep everything in one big Journal.md file in Obsidian. I added a datestamp shortcut that inserts the date as a title in "2024 February 19 (Mon)" format, and get to writing. I use subheadings sometimes if I'm writing a lot on a particular day and it gets messy, but most days it's just a hodge podge of everything, and that's fine.

It works. A big issue with computer notetaking software, I've realized, is that I was spending too much time trying to figure out where to put things: what note should this be connected to, which folder should this be in, etc. Dumping everything into a single document, under today's date, gets rid of that. The other issue this solved was that I never looked back at what I'd written previously: opening a bunch of files was too tedious to ever do unless I was explicitly looking for something. With this, I can just scroll down and see what I was doing last week, immediately.

dopu··on Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
I don’t disagree with you that life can seem bleak in the present, but people have brought children into the world under much harder conditions. There is something particular about post-industrialization that has caused this attitude shift.
dopu··on Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission
I recently decided to open up Edge and see how it was, given that it is the only browser on Windows which features hardware isolation [0]. Though it seems like this feature is deprecated now.

The sheer amount of garbage I had to turn off made me give up and close it half way through. Which is a shame, because there seems to be good tech underneath all the garbage.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...

dopu··on Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo
There's an arcade near me that has a functioning Battlezone cabinet. The use of a periscope in combination with the 3D graphics is so genius.
dopu··on Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim
The relevant peer-reviewed preprint, from eLife [0]. It is worth reading the peer reviews (spoiler: they're brutal) [1].

[0]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 [1]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#t...

dopu··on Going Rogue
Have been really enjoying Brogue lately. Besides the difficult, turn-based gameplay (decision making is more cerebral than reactive), I think ASCII graphics are part of what makes these games so enrapturing. Our brains are incredible at constructing rich narratives from limited information.
dopu··on We need female mice in neuroscience research
Yes. Say today the mouse engages in 3 behaviors (groom, walk around edge of enclosure, then dart across it) but tomorrow spends the whole day huddled in the corner (1 behavior, not exhibited yesterday). That’s sort of what they mean by within mouse variability.
dopu··on Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project
I agree with you about it being broken. We’re so focused on grades because they are a believed to be an important part of the credentialing process for getting jobs. An ideal learning environment would likely be something closer to Plato’s academy, imo. Probably not possible under capitalism except for the very rich with a lot of leisure time.
dopu··on Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project
I disagree, I think it will provide him with a great foundation for college. As great as online learning is, I don’t think it’s the same as taking a class that you go to multiple times a week and get in person feedback on. It also takes multiple passes at a given subject to properly understand it. I’m sure he’d learn many new things he didn’t quite get from his self study if he enrolled in an actual analysis course or w/e.
dopu··on Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations
I don’t know who she is, but you don’t need to be neuroscientist or a statistician to see how laughably bad that correlation claim is.
dopu··on Kagi – Paid Search Engine
I haven't switched due to finding the $10/month subscription too steep at the moment, but I concur that the quality of search results is high. Often higher than Google actually. Sadly, pre-pending !g to general searches on DDG is practically muscle memory by now.
dopu··on Grad student unions strike deal with University of California
Well, it’s unfortunately true. White women have by far been the greatest beneficiaries of DEI efforts. Of the POC that have benefited from these programs, many come from wealthy families. Functionally, DEI programs mostly exist to launder the reputation of universities.
dopu··on Atom was archived today
Took about 10 minutes to set up, and it's working great. Thanks!
dopu··on Atom was archived today
It is so noticeable how different they are in speed. I’ve worked in Sublime for many years now (and continue to for most projects) but will switch to VSCode whenever I want to hack on some Go, since the LSP stuff works so well there. I constantly find myself messing things up due to input latency.
dopu··on My bike was stolen (2017)
What a sad human being they must be.
dopu··on Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups
It is becoming increasingly difficult to not just recommend an iPhone to the average person with privacy/security concerns. Sure, you can tell them to go the GrapheneOS route, but I don't think you can trust the average user not to just go and install Google Maps/Google Photos/etc as soon as the alternative FOSS option inconveniences them. I've certainly struggled with this. Then they're arguably worse off than if they'd just stuck with the Apple equivalents.
dopu··on Programming language comparison by reimplementing the same transit data app
I've been learning Go recently and it's been such a pleasure, particularly for 2D gamedev (with ebitengine.org). I don't think I've gone from reading the spec to being able to read others' programs fluently as quickly as I was able to with Go. Plus it's so fast! Compilation times had me thinking it was interpreted when I first started playing around with it.
dopu··on OpenRCT2: Open-source implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 with new features
This looks pretty great. I’ve been meaning to get back into RCT2. Does OpenRCT2 _feel_ like the original?
dopu··on Notes against note-taking systems
_elaborate_ being the keyword here. Taking notes is not the same thing as constructing a zettelkasten system with which to take notes.
dopu··on Eye-tracking is a missing input device for VR experiences
It’s no wonder that it takes us many months of training to get monkeys to perform simple saccade-based tasks.
dopu··on Godot 4 Beta 1
HN hug of death? godotengine.org is offline for me at the moment. Regardless, really looking forward to trying it out! Here it is on the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220915181526/https://godotengi...

dopu··on Tool beeps every time data is sent to Google
The beeping while he types in the URL is completely unsurprising. That’s just autocomplete. Still, a neat tool. Does anyone know what triggers the call to Google whenever he expands a menu on the site? Google Analytics?
dopu··on Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed
The Marxist definition of working class (i.e., the proletariat) had nothing to do with income distributions.

Does the person you’re replying to make decisions about how profits are allocated in the company? What product the company is going to make? Do they make the big hiring and firing decisions? No, probably not. They’re likely a software engineer. They sell their labor in order to be able to make money and sustain themselves. Ergo they are part of the working class.

dopu··on Ask HN: How do you critically evaluate scientific papers?
I think it's a process that's best learned by watching other scientists do it. That's how I've learned to do so. Though you're never done -- you can always improve your bullshit detectors.

There's always obvious things to catch: do all of the data points plotted on this graph make sense? Does a predictive model fall back to chance performance when it should? Should the authors need to z-score in order to see this effect? Other labs typically use X statistical model here: why are these people using something different, and how should I expect the results to change? If my brain is having a difficult time understanding how they went from raw data to a given plot, that's usually an indication that something's fishy.

Then you need to check for consistency between the results. Figures should come together to tell a coherent story. If there are small discrepancies in what Figure 1 and Figure 3 are telling you, investigate. It could be that the authors are hiding something.

Then there's sociological factors: how much do I trust the work that this group puts out? Being in higher-prestige journals is actually an indication that you should be more skeptical of the results, not less. There's more riding on the results telling a neat and coherent story, and more space to hide things in (given that you typically need to do 2 or 3 papers worth of experiments to publish in Nature these days).

Unfortunately, there's a great deal of bullshit published every day. Every paper has a little bit of it. The trick is to get great at spotting it and getting something out of the paper without getting discouaged with science as a whole.

dopu··on After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try
I've been on logseq for a while now and while I do genuinely recommend it, it is not without its issues. On recent versions I've faced issues where the page I'm typing on gets completely deleted. I end up having to go into Dropbox's web interface to restore that page. I'm fairly certain this issue is due to Dropbox and Logseq interacting with each other in a weird way, but regardless it has brought me a lot of headaches. Looking forward to them finally releasing their own syncing solution.

Other than that, the main issue I struggle with in these PKM/Zettelkasten style note taking apps is discoverability. I write down a lot of notes, but it is hard for me to find my way back to them. The benefit of hierarchy-based notetaking systems, where things get placed in folders and subfolders, is that at least I can get a big picture of my database at a glance. I've yet to find a nice way of doing this in logseq and its cousins.

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