hugatest

I checked out the blog and noticed the book "Quantations".

> How does the theoretical world of quantum physics create our everyday life? "Quantations" explains this with wit and clarity, making the imaginary real.

I also took a peek into the book. I'm sorry to sound negative, but this is just full of fluff that has nothing to do with actual quantum physics. It's all pseudo-philosophical fluff and that stuff is the reason my aunt thinks she is a "medium" and communicates within some kind of "sixth dimension". Sorry to say, but this is all BS.

Yeah, same here. In a sense I'm looking forward to retirement. And in a sense I dread it, since once that day has come it would mean that I'm old and the last third of my life has firmly started already a few years ago and nothing will turn this back.

Wow, this is brilliant!

Then you need a better mail client.

This is quite cool, but I'm wondering why we need to re-invent the wheel for all those threaded discussion platforms.

The OG is definitely email. What would really rock would be an IMAP gateway which you subscribe to with your favorite email client which then gives you threading, read/unread markers etc. It could abstract different front-page days as folders and each submission as the root of a thread. Then you could use whatever email client you like the most, with all their decades of polishing. It could even support replying to threads. And it could support different "backends", like HN, reddit, whatnot.

Anybody? That's something I'd pay for. Or do I need to keep dreaming?

As long as you know the implications, you don't need to know how the values are stored.

You may say it's easier to know how they are stored, then you can derive the implications anytime you need them. Maybe that works for you, but most people who I know that got this wrong do actually know how FP values are stored, they are just drawing the wrong conclusions. So better focus on the implications, cause it's those that matter.

I already expressed this in the GP comment, and it's a little shocking to see all the replies that didn't actually pick up on that.

> >Ketamine is a life-saver

> Anyone who talks in such terms shouldn't have their opinions on medicine listened to.

Criticizing hyperbole by using hyperbole is a questionable strategy.

> It’s really not uncommon for some trials to fail to differentiate from placebo when it comes to depression studies. That doesn’t make this study “rubbish”, it just shows that you need to examine the body of evidence rather than cherry-picking studies that appear to match the outcome you want while dismissing those that say the opposite.

But this study doesn't say the opposite. It fails to show an effect. That's different from proving the absence of an effect. Every Ph.D. student in an empirical field learns this in their first year. I'm surprised this study gets so much attention.

You can make a study verifying that a pound gold and a pound feathers accelerate downwards at the same speed in a vacuum, and perhaps you messed up the vacuum, so they actually fall with different speeds in your study. Doesn't prove gravity is messed up. You just failed to prove that it's not. Can have many reasons. Same with this study.

Right. You can know these abstract properties though without knowing how a float is actually represented in memory.

In the olden days it was IRC. Already then it was about controlling yourself. Whether you would get distracted or not. If you want to get into the zone, it's up to you how to do that. If you have an IRC or Slack window on the side to let you get distracted is your call.

And why is that necessary knowledge?

Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision etc). In other words, why would a Haskell programmer need to know the IEEE FP standard?

I do embedded and it's fantastic. I could never do the cloud/web grind.

At uni, different styles do cluster.

There are the circles in which the nerds cluster who are really in the tunnel about whatever subject it is, here it's programming or CS in general. They do it for fun, they come home and sit at the computer all evening and half the night. Occasionally they do the homework assignments, and if those are interesting, they nerd out about them endlessly. And they are really good at it. They don't really go to parties and are a tad (or a lot) anti-social. But they don't care. Typical minor subjects are math or physics. It's beautiful.

Then there are the circles of the in-it-for-the-moneys. They do homework assignments because they have to, they go to classes because they have to, they read business news, go to parties, feel important and have dollar signs in their eyes every time they think about graduating and finally making big bucks. If lucky then they get help by some of the nerds (see above). But they actually detest the nerds, just as the nerds detest them.

There are more circles and I don't want to deep-dive here, but I actually this also reflects at the workplace 10-20 years later. It's easy to see from which of those two groups the high-performing ICs (some of them a bit socially awkward) come, and from which their managers, and why there is tension between those.

Those who think they are unit testing but are actually integration testing.

This is not just about terminology. If you don't have actual unit tests then your testing is much more complicated and heavyweight than it needs to be with costly consequences for maintaining your software. You can run thousands of unit tests in a second if you just run some functions and verify their output. If you need to set up some hardness to interact with the kernel, virtualizing and mocking tons of facilities around it, then your testing speed goes down by orders of magnitude.

If your unit test needs root privileges, then it's not really a unit test in all but very few exceptional cases. It means you are interacting with the actually running kernel, which means you are integration testing, not unit testing.