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nitred

204 karma · joined November 30, 2014

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nitred··on New, Infectious Coronavirus Is Detected in Malaysia – and It's Coming from Dogs
I think the markets and the global economy need to start hedging against pandemics. Like a trade-off between market efficiency and long term stability against pandemics. I feel like the current global economy has "over-fitted" to a world without wars, pandemics, supervolcanoes, solar flares etc. As for pandemics, I think Covid was rather mild. It could have been a lot worse.
nitred··on Brain-Computer Interface User Types 90 Characters per Minute with Mind
Discounting fantasy or sci-fi novels, I read about 6-12 non-fiction books a year and I usually only finish them half or quarter of the way.
nitred··on Brain-Computer Interface User Types 90 Characters per Minute with Mind
You've put to words what I've been thinking about for many years. I'm one of those people who find languages difficult and often find it difficult to convert my thoughts into words and sentences. From my perspective, 75 percent of mental effort goes into sentence formation and this process often derails my thought process.

When I discovered NLP models like Word2Vec and Thought-Vectors, which assign vectors to words or even whole sentences/concepts, intuitively, it felt like that was exactly what was happening in my mind. It might be an illusion but I do not think in sentences or words, I only think in concepts and images that appear in my mind's eye in an instant. To form a larger idea, I build a chain of concepts. I am sure that eventually probes can pick up a clear distinct vector that uniquely summarizes the entire concept of what I was thinking or visualizing.

And as you suggested we could start off with a smaller subset of semaphores or concepts or visualizations that at first are the easiest signals to pick up via probes. After practice, these signals only get crisper.

nitred··on A half-hour to learn Rust
"... or as well as any compiled language can."

Some syntax is close to Python so some mental load is minimized, i.e use of snake_case, self, None and type annotation syntax, dict unpacking.

Some lines read like sentences i.e. for loops, single line if statements, impl Foo for Bar etc. Some design choices also read better I think, for example, let reads better than var.

Of course such preferences are personal. I've read other comments that mention that the tutorial covers only basic Rust features and it can get much more complicated when using more advanced features.

Edit: Added sentence about advanced features.

nitred··on A half-hour to learn Rust
Just started listenting to it. It's exactly what I was looking for, thank you. Armin Ronacher's opinion on such things would hold a lot weight in my head.
nitred··on A half-hour to learn Rust
I agree it's not pretty. It took me several passes to just understand what was going on there. But ownership is something I've never come across before and it doesn't exist in Python (not to an average user anyway), so it seems a little unfair to compare Rust and Python based on that feature.

However when you take a high level feature like overriding operators which can be done elegantly in Python, for a complied language, Rust's way is quite concise, readable and to my eyes quite pretty.

Edit: Typos

nitred··on A half-hour to learn Rust
As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an hour, I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour. Its features seem, obvious. My experience with Go was frustrating since I felt like I had to give up elegance for practicality. I did not expect to learn 1-2% of Rust when I woke up today. My thanks to the author.

I'm curious what other what other developers who primarily use Python think of this article and Rust in general?

nitred··on Pygame 2.0
Indeed! I despised them initially thinking typing made code unreadable. But I've grown used to it and I only use type hints when necessary. I use Pydantic when I need more than just "hints" and when validating config file schemas.
nitred··on Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
In Angle #6, did that crack in the roof occur in real time due to the explosion or does it just seem that way due to low resolution of the camera? If that crack was due to the explosion, then I'm concerned for much of the infrastructure which is within a 3 KM radius around the explosion.
nitred··on MetricsDB: TimeSeries Database for storing metrics at Twitter
Could someone tell me the disadvantages of solving the problem in the article using S3? I am actually curious.
nitred··on NASA starts year-long isolation to prepare astronauts for Mars
NASA, if you need a volunteer, I'm your guy! Please?
nitred··on “Thank You” in Hindi and English Mean Very Different Things
I'm from India and I completely get what the author is saying, but why is this article on 'Hacker News'?
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