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talyian

184 karma · joined August 14, 2016

Yes.
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talyian··on What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
It makes you a paradoxer if you stopped after the step of finding the consequence that feels absurd.
talyian··on Coronavirus has caused a bicycling boom in New York City
It's true that Trader Joe's in Manhattan are jammed with lines going out the door and shopping there is mayhem regardless of whether there's an ongoing pandemic.
talyian··on Richard Stallman Has Announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
In Go, there's a lot of common terminology reflecting the concept of "evaluate your own move independently of your opponent's move", from direct terms like "tenuki" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenuki) to strategic koans like "play away from thickness[strength]" (https://senseis.xmp.net/?PlayAwayFromThickness). I think this type of thinking is something that all journeyman-level Go players learn in order to progress, more so than in Chess.
talyian··on Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants
Plants can be weirdly resilient to smashing -- various bits of plant fragments can decide to grow new roots.
talyian··on More details about mitigations for the CPU Speculative Execution issue
the requirements are easy to meet - you just need to be able to time operations at a suitable precision. The exploits are possible in Javascript running in a browser.
talyian··on Google Blocks YouTube Access from Amazon's Streaming Devices
Fair enough. In this case, "Road Neutrality" protects the consumer's access to a restaurant or bank. However, in reality there are civil rights laws that in turn forbid those restaurants and banks from refusing service to customers based on their ethnicity and gender.

I don't think it's a stretch, if we're comparing Networks to roads, to also compare network services like Google and Youtube to public accomodations like restaurants, hotels and banks, and discuss a set of protected classes for internet nondiscrimination.

talyian··on Google Blocks YouTube Access from Amazon's Streaming Devices
If only Net Neutrality went both ways...
talyian··on New York's Uptown Rats Are Genetically Distinct from Downtown Rats
There's this great book on a similar topic, "The Origin of Species," if you're interested in the phenomenon.
talyian··on Suicide Linux
Sadly, the machines I don't want people running commands on happen to be also the machines I don't want to rm -rf everything on as well.
talyian··on Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)
If it makes you feel any better, silk is still the preferred standard for smoothness, and even baby bottoms are slightly more smooth than butter:

https://trends.google.la/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=s...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smooth+as+butt...

talyian··on A guide to the things Silicon Valley ‘invented’ that already existed
I wasn't convinced about the value of Paul Graham's recent "General idea, small delta" essay until I noticed how easily you can just use those 4 words to justify these things.

Even the obviously laughable stories like Juicero - surely there's issues with bad execution, but as long as there are "juice bars" selling a glass of pulped vegetables for $8 that people are willing to buy, I'm willing to say that there's a niche for a better-executed and perhaps better-targetted juice-related tech product.

talyian··on Course Notes – J.S. Milne
Learning math isn't "really, really hard", but it is unforgiving in a particular kind of way: you're basically required to internalize a concept fully before going on to later concepts. (This is coming from being mostly self-taught up through calculus-level math)

Students often don't fully grasp one concept before the teacher moves onto the next topic. Once this happens, the student is missing a crucial building block and tends to just get stuck with all the later things that build on it. This is a common experience in schools and I suspect is the origin of the "math is hard" trope.

It can be hard for a student to self-evaluate whether he/she has full mastery of a topic. This is exacerbated by situations where a struggling student will go to office hours or work with classmates and "solve" a problem, without having acquired the skills to solve slightly different permutations of that same problem on their own.

In programming, we don't have this problem. You can write HelloWorld without understanding console IO, terminal protocols, window buffers. You can write a webapp without knowing the OSI stack. Software is built upon abstractions.

talyian··on US won't punish United Airlines over passenger-dragging incident
You comply if you think the request is reasonable and lawful, otherwise you don't.

Maybe you get your nose broken and United allegedly pays you $140 million in damages. Maybe the incident causes all warrantless police offices to be banned from hospital ER rooms.

Or maybe the law doesn't stand on your side and you wind up in jail and fined. Who knows.

talyian··on A Preview of C# 8 [video]
Compared to say Python, it does act a bit like importing free functions without explicitly naming them, but you do get the bonus of type-based dispatch and overloading.

    using System.Linq;
    foo.Select(x => bar);

    from itertools import *
    imap(foo, lambda x: bar)
talyian··on The Web in 2050
The value of a high-throughput network interconnect slot from your peers is tied to the current value of all the cryptocurrencies the DHT routes, not just the cost of running the server and the physical links.
talyian··on The Web in 2050
My apologies for the machina ex machina. I needed a clean end to the post and got lazy.
talyian··on The Web in 2050
The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a global consortium of content and browser developers.

Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-peer router for nearby Internet users.

Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet. This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider for reliably fast localized caching of search results.

The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented the Internet.

talyian··on The Problem with F# Evangelism
The first class IDE for F# is VS Code + Ionide. The language service backend for F# is also very well supported for emacs.
talyian··on Ad blocking is under attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idem
talyian··on Summer Reading List
http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-2015-reading-list/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-winter-reading-list/
talyian··on Get Started with F# as a C# developer
> can I use this for 'real life' code as part of an existing C# desktop application .. without tons of hassle

Yes. Your standard OOP features like inheriting from C# classes, implementing interfaces, etc are supported natively in F#. The main hassle in being C#-compatible is exposing an external OOP api with only .NET types and interfaces instead of standard F# types. This means, for example, exposing `seq` (`IEnumerable`) instead of `list` (`Microsoft.FSharp.Collections.List`) or using the struct-tuple construct in F# 4.1 so C# 7 can access it.

> good samples of real life application code

No personal recommendations but have you seen https://github.com/fsprojects/awesome-fsharp

talyian··on Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy
In some competitive games like Dota and LoL, the random distribution for critical hits is weighted so that it ramps up over time, resetting after a successful crit. (http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution) This both reduces the chance of two high rolls coming up twice in a row as well as long periods of low rolls.

It doesn't have the "you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure" since "not a critical" isn't really that negative of an outcome.

For something like D&D, the same kind of "better-than-random" distribution just comes from adding dice. 4d6 is much more consistent than 1d21+3.

talyian··on 3D Comics
This kind of 3D is a lot more accessible (via Tilt Brush) than mesh-based 3D.