Sounds like my kind of thing. Got a link?
472 karma · joined November 3, 2016
I just read it a couple of months back because I figured I probably owed reading some Taleb as back table stakes for all the hours I've spent reading HN (and SSC). Picked Black Swan because it seemed to be the most well known and I've never liked jumping into a series with the most recent release. I enjoyed it, will read more of him, but haven't yet.
Do you have an order recommendation?
I had trouble with the one class in uni that used Haskell and I've been working in a Python shop for some years now, so I kept expecting to encounter some impenetrable section that would make my eyes glaze over and my hand close the tab. I was probably closest around page 9!
But the writing was excellent, and clear, and satisfying, and little concepts I was so close grokking kept catching my eye and pulling me back in until I understood them, then their neighbors, then the section, then I was done.
Guess I've picked up some things since college. Wish I could go back and take that class again. I think learning to use Rust's Option type in anger on a personal project helped me understand monads more than anything in that class.
Also, I'm happy to see the method described by the paper does seem to have become the official GHC build system [0].
0. https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/building/hadrian
Relevant Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Relevant HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749
>Because Signal doesn’t have access to your keys – or your data – your PIN isn’t recoverable if you forget it, so our apps help you remember your PIN with periodic reminders. Don’t worry, these reminders get less frequent over time.
Having read that, I doubt I'll get too irritated at the reminders and eventually they'll go away. You have a point that anyone who hasn't read the update blog will have no similar hope and might use something easy. I guess I'd hope the Signal user base is more security conscious than that. For instance, I know my PIN is going to be alphanumeric and immediately stored my password database.
I have a browser extension [1] that lets me set custom tags on HN users. I'm not unconflicted about using it, since I have some ideological hangups that tell me to let people's words speak for themselves and to not let someone's history muddy the waters of a discussion in the present. That being said, HN isn't anonymous and it's a comparatively small community and I decided I might as well try keeping track (to some extent) of who's saying what here because it's practicable and there are other places I can experience death-of-the-author just fine. Besides, it reminds me that jacquesm sorted two metric tons of lego using legos and machine learning that one time, so now that always makes me smile when I see him comment.
So here I am, looking at your comment and trying to figure out what it tells me about you as a commenter - what I would want to remember about you if I saw you again. It needs to be fairly terse, to fit.
The first idea that arrives is "It's not reasonable to be white." I dismiss this immediately, because it's the most cynical and least-founded take on your comment (though darkly funny to me).
The second idea is "The 'It's ok to be white' campaign is not reasonable." I turn this over in my mind a few times and even start typing it out. But while I'm typing, I re-read your edit and pause. Then I realize - I'm doing exactly what that blogpost described. "What did 0xff00ffee mean here?"
What if all you meant to do is ask is the literal question "Are you saying that the 'It's ok to be white' campaign is reasonable?" And it's hard for me to even come up with a way of phrasing this in such a way that it sufficiently emphasises the literal, un-euphemistic, un-implicating character that I'm trying describe.
Then I pause again and realize that I've fallen down a semantic rabbithole and there's a snowball's chance in hell that you meant your comment in the third way. And by this time I've read your next comment [2] and am aware that you're aware of the ambiguous, scissor statement nature of your original comment and the amount of context that must be conveyed in order to disambiguate it. This humanises you. Instead of a snarky internet signaller, you become a real person, with parents whose views you care about and who's already expended effort trying to convey the that large context to people without setting off the self-generating minefield that you know exists. The snappy comment wasn't because you haven't stopped caring about changing people's minds; you're just tired of arguing with apparently superficial people who aren't prepared to take context into account (and you were responding to someone who may be a particularly strong example of such).
So I guess you're "a real human bean".
0: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication
That being said, you've just made a very interesting sequence of comments in this subthread that, taken as a whole, can be interpreted in at least a couple of quite different ways - and the more comments you make, the more your (probably predominately American) readers are going to build up a mental model of what you might be implying.
Personally, as an American who maybe has spent too much time on the internet, my interpretation of your comments in this subthread is that they are essentially a piece of performance art. Also personally, I am enjoying the performance quite a lot. I'll make no comment about whether or not the performance is appropriate to the spirit of this website as revealed to us by dang.
But! Maybe it's good for me to practice responding to what people actually say. And I think your logic slipped a little:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22924541 (GP) said:
>Taken out of context, the quote is reasonable. [Taken in context], it... means repress and kill everyone [but whites].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22924684 (you) said:
>How do you get from this quote to the context of genociding other people?
The issue is that GP said "There is a context that the quote was made in, and that context turns the quote bad" and you non-sequitured by asking "How does one, starting from these words, derive the bad-making context?" You're right, you can't. The literal words are fine by themselves. But the words are not all there is (at least to an American audience in the current year, which the audience I'm most qualified to have an opinion on).
This is why when you tell an American "allahu ackbar" they think "suicide bomber". Or "it's time for a change" means "the boundless optimism of a young black presidential candiate". Or "planned parenthood" could mean either "women finally gaining control over their own bodies" or "state subsidy of immoral behavior" instead of, you know, literally planning whether/when one wants to have children.
Americans wouldn't tattoo 1488 on themselves if there were no additional, metatextual information that they wanted to convey to a viewer, so it seems kind of naive to interpret that kind of thing in the literal manner you've been exploring. I don't think you're suggesting they should be interpreted literally, though; I think you're lamenting that some humans have gotten to a place where they see terrible concepts in words that are intrinsically innocuous.
I think that's just a part of being human, but I'm American so maybe it's just a part of being American. I lament it also.
0: (posted here regularly) https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
>We're going to hook you up to a state-of-the-art polygraph. We know you've heard that polygraphs are snake oil, but we think we've made a breakthrough on this one, which is why we're running this test. Answer truthfully to all questions except the five on this shortlist. For any of listed questions, you may choose to lie. If you tell one undetected lie, you get $5. For each additional undetected lie, your payoff is multiplied by 1.9. If any of your lies is detected, you get no money and you get shocked. The intensity of the shock has a similar exponential relationship with the number of lies you told.
If shocking volunteers doesn't get past the ethics committee, then maybe you start off the volunteers with a baseline payout of $50 or so and allow the payoff to both grow and decrease exponentially. The goal being that on that fifth lie, they're really on the edge, knowing that they could either make a lot of money or get {shocked,nothing}.
That was only in 2011. At the time it was solidly in "this feels like it could happen, but definitely didn't" territory. Now we're in "Let's see if I can induce this in this guy's browser game" land. Feels strange.
I assume given context that Safari and IE are right out. Chromium and variants are probably out? If Firefox and variants are out (not sure if all of them have the pulse dependency, because honestly your comment was the first time I learned about it - probably because I'm using Arch), what's left? Qutebrowser? Konqueror?
I guess implicit in the above is an assumption of certain (non-basic) functionality that many people would consider table stakes in a web browser. Given that choosing to use any software involves making certain compromises (like "if you don't use Chrome, some Google applications will likely not perform as well") I guess my underlying desire is to know which compromises you are willing to make, given that you aren't willing to compromise your desire to keep pulseaudio off your machine in order to be able to use Firefox.
On a scale I'm having trouble naming but that goes from about 1 ("my son bought me this iPad so I can see my grandchildren on Facebook") to 10 ("I wget webpages to my server then email them to my Trisquel laptop") your pulse/firefox constraint seems to me to be solidly in the upper half, which I respect, but which also makes me expect you are willing to accept compromises that I'm not (yet) in choosing a browser. Maybe I'm wrong, though, because there's a lot of browsers on this chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Ti...
I learned how to nap while adjusting to the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule (20 min naps every 4 hours). Wouldn't have described myself as a proficient napper before that, but do now.
My memory of the process is a little dim given it was in 2011, but the first thing most people I talk to about this say is "Man, I could never do that, I'd never fall asleep fast enough," and the answer to that is simple - during the adjustment period your problem is never falling asleep; it'll definitely be waking up. :)
But I still nap even though I stopped Uberman after a year (it worked fine, life just took me elsewhere), and things I've learned:
- I think most people would agree that meditating is definitely a trainable skill. The edge I ride while meditating is being completely immobile, comfortable and relaxed while keeping my awareness focused and sharp. Allowing my mind to wander is one failure mode, but falling asleep is another. For me, a "poor" meditation session frequently feels like a great nap ;) But in all seriousness, for me the physical setup for meditation and a nap is almost identical - comfortable position, no pressure points that I'll need to adjust in five minutes (this is just experience), and as relaxed as I can get. Some guided meditation tracks help train this by making you go through each part of your body and relax them one at a time. That's helpful to do a few times imo, but you get the hang of it quickly and should be able to do it yourself and all at once very fast.
- As far as my thoughts go - it's almost the opposite of meditation. In meditation, I'm constantly wrenching my attention back to my breathing or my big toe or whatever. For a nap, I drop the reins on my mind and let it do whatever it wants. Free association. I have basically one rule, which is that I don't think about problems - nothing that I'm trying to solve or understand. If I'm fresh off of work or an intense game or something, I'll seed my thoughts with some pleasant topic, situation or person and then let it wander from there. The more nonsensical and unreal the thoughts are, the better - it's almost like maintaining internally-consistent thoughts keeps my brain conscious and vice versa. Think Alice in Wonderland nonsense-poem level absurdity. When I'm on a well-balanced schedule (I'm on a two-nap schedule now and trying to hit my naps with about 30 min accuracy), my naps are light enough that I dream easily - so frequently, whatever free-associated thoughts I'm having transition seamlessly into dreamstuff.
- I used to sleep with closed-back around-ear headphones playing music the vast majority of the time (my naps are almost always on my back; my core sleep is usually on my front). I was diagnosed ADD years after learning to nap; I interpreted my use of music as giving my brain the stimulation it needs to relax or something. I was also in a college dorm, so I also experimented with earplugs under the headphones but generally found them uncomfortable (basic etymotics, not foam ones). I don't sleep with music much any more, but I still frequently sleep with headphones on for some basic background conversation reduction and as a visual "don't interrupt me" signal if I'm in public.
- sleep masks are a gift from heaven. I didn't use them back then, but I seriously picked them up last year and after a week or so of getting used to sleeping with something strapped to my face, they are astoundingly helpful. It's worth it to get a pair with eye cups so your eyelashes don't brush the inside (much) when your eyes move or open. These are a much stronger "don't interrupt me" signal than headphones, lol.
- I'm pretty skinny and don't have a big caffeine habit so small amounts of it noticeably affect my ability to nap. Be aware of any stimulants you're consuming - coffee, cigarettes, adderall, what have you - and if napping is hard, consider experimenting with timing / ordering naps and stimulants. During the Uberman transition period, I did play around with chugging a bottle of Coke and immediately taking a nap, so I could fall asleep but the caffeine would hit as early as possible after I woke up and not affect my next nap too much. I don't remember if this worked well, but this is the kind of thing you can play with.
- During Uberman, I was sort of forced to nap anywhere and everywhere - on lawns, in the backs of SUVs, on buses, in movie theatres, etc. I actually put my mattress away, and when napping in my room, I folded a rough blanket into four or six layers on the floor and slept on that (to make it less tempting to stay in bed). This definitely got me more accustomed to sleeping in mildly uncomfortable places and that's stayed with me. (But I tell you what, it's real hard to nap at Disneyland. All the benches I found were too short to stretch out on, there are no grass areas that aren't fenced off, shade is a valued resource that's almost always either in a high-traffic area or, in the more isolated pockets, already occupied. I ended up on a bench in the sun with a sleep mask on, my legs threaded through the armrest and my head on my gf's lap so randos wouldn't call security on me... it was not a best nap ever :) )
I wrote a small thing to help me manage creation and navigation of named i3 workspaces using dmenu (and I love it) but the first improvement I made was to add the ability to flip between the two most recently used workspaces and bind it to Alt-Tab. This immediately drove me up a wall by jumping to workspaces on different outputs (laptop screen, external monitor, etc) which was correct but remarkably disorienting. The next improvement was to make toggling only consider workspaces currently on the focused output. [0] I'm quite happy with the result (though there are still some bugs involving tracking workspace age while shifting them around between outputs).
There is a further improvement I'd love to add but don't know how - I want the Windows Alt-Tab behavior where Alt-Tab enters a "switching mode" and then as long as Alt is held down, repeated tapping of Tab fires an action (in this case, cycling focus to older and older targets). I haven't been able to find a key binding program or recipe that supports this kind of interaction (I'm currently using sxhkd).
0: https://github.com/mosbasik/fluidspaces-rs/blob/dev/src/bin/...
I know this because I wanted to do the same thing and have looked all over for a justification for it. In this case most people seem to agree that the bog standard for loop is the way to go:
for psu in psus:
psu.enable()
I think the rule of thumb is don't use a list comprehension unless you're going to use the list afterwards, else you're wasting an allocation.
[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
[2] https://technology.customink.com/blog/2015/06/08/ruby-pretze...
I assume the center of gravity of such a world would be the actual center of mass of however the voxels are arranged, meaning players could affect it with large enough structures or small enough worlds. Without adjusting "straight" "horizontal" structures to conform the curvature of the world, gravity would no longer be a force that was normal to the surface of the structure at some points on it.
I can also imagine people digging to the center of a world to find the gravity flip-flop point and playing with it. Or hollowing out the interior of the world in order to get a zero-G chamber (assuming no atmosphere) [1]. Or building gravity trains [2].
[0] https://imgur.com/a/0J5RoE1
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshel...
Note: I think you mean humus. Hummus is "a Levantine dip or spread made from cooked, mashed chickpeas... blended with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and garlic."
Always surprises me that out of all the different kinds of internet communities, it's only the oft-maligned imageboards that consistently provide that feature.
I was kind of expecting Discourse to play with the idea, since they seem to be the modern-reboot-of-forums with the most traction + willingness to experiment, but they haven't so far, afaik.
On mobile; I may be misremembering some details. Would encourage you to check new version behavior if you're interested.
Present day humanity (i.e., no manned interplanetary missions, minimal manned presence in orbit, etc.) discovers total-extinction cataclysm will happen in two years. Scramble to figure out short (how to get genetically viable population into orbit) and long (how to keep them alive for a thousand years until the surface is habitable again) term solutions to preserve humanity.
Experts Exchange was a tech QA site with a comically misinterpretable domain name that was popular in the late nineties and suffered in the dotcom bust.
(Also, this feels eerily similar to the first time I realized "Oh, going and reading the source of $LIBRARY is an option if the docs are too vague.")
I attended Caltech for CS, struggled with chronic late submissions, cratering self worth and other issues over about three years, took several short leaves ending with a medical leave and was diagnosed with ADHD. Got on medication, got a development job for about a year at UT Southwestern and enjoyed it immensely. Decided to come back and try again, but coming back to junior and senior level classes after a break was very hard, and even being back in the environment that I associated with such failure was hugely draining. I decided to withdraw indefinitely.
I'd already finished all but one or two of my CS requirements, most of the rest were going to be maybe 4-5 non-CS math/engineering/science classes, several humanities and a biology. About a year and a trimester's worth. As far as GPA, I left with about a 2.7.
I'm still not sure if that was the right decision. Part of me says I'm living in LA and I have a year of work on my resume, a bunch of knowledge from the tech CS program, a couple of mildly interesting personal projects on my GitHub, and I should be ok; I just need to put myself out there.
Another part of me says I'm a piece of shit that can't complete the only thing worth completing related to my career, I'm going to have to explain why I don't have a degree to everyone I ever interview with, and why would anyone ever pick me over a graduate.
All this made more painful by the fact that if I had graduated, the Caltech degree would have been an amazing asset - and if I had gone anywhere else (well, anywhere a bit less high powered) I believe I would have at least graduated, if not done very well. Source: the two sophomore CS classes I took at UT Arlington in half a summer and got A+s in both.
This thread is hard to read. Thanks for your story; I need to remember people like you exist while I'm job hunting.