type_enthusiast

Heh, Enlightenment (somewhere before DR13) was also what got me interested in Linux, as a kid. But, in retrospect, I'd classify it as a "pretty UI" rather than a "great UI."

(disclaimer: I work for Netflix. Edit: I should clarify that I wasn't involved with this article in any way)

You can disable the behavior you mentioned. Go to your profile settings, and under "Playback Settings" you can uncheck "Autoplay previews while browsing on all devices".

For me, it was QBasic under MS-DOS.

    SCREEN 13

is the start of endless possibilities!

I think this kind of experience is missing for kids now – but I'd guess it's more about how ubiquitous computers are, and how there's a lot more between the kid and the computer. When a CLI is your interface, making even rudimentary graphics feels like achieving magic. When your interface is a cell phone or GUI, there's a much larger leap from zero to "feels like magic" – OK, so I made a circle bounce around the screen... there's already an app that does that.

The comment about the lack of seasons was odd to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, but spent about 10 years in Southern California where there truly is no such thing (based on my schema) as autumn and winter. When we were moving back to the Bay, my wife (an LA native) and I were looking at neighborhoods during January or something, and she remarked, "everything is dead here!"

It's winter. We have deciduous trees in Northern California... In autumn they turn orange, and they spend winter without leaves! A foreign concept in LA, where most of the trees are palms or coral trees or other evergreens.

It's true that we don't get snow like many European cities. But I guess the presence or lack of "seasons" depends on what you're used to.

Not to downplay the cultural importance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar – but can I suggest another one of Eric Carle's books?

It's called "Pancakes, Pancakes!" In it, the protagonist wants to eat some pancakes – but he discovers that in order to do so, he needs to harvest and mill some wheat, milk a cow and churn some butter, and so forth.

I read this to my kids when they were little, and it struck me as actually a pretty good lesson about how much work goes on outside of our house, in order to make Saturday Pancakes possible. But it's not presented in a preachy way at all – more of an excited way, like "isn't it interesting how much background work goes into Saturday Pancakes?".

I credit that book with getting my kids interested in food/cooking and much more than that as well – the seed of thinking about what has to happen for an Amazon box to show up at your door with a particular gizmo.

So I'll pour out some pancake batter for Eric Carle on Saturday morning.

Whether or not it's considered relevant here, I hadn't seen this before and I found it very moving. I'm glad it was submitted.

What will happen to all the used gasoline?

That is a super interesting article, thank you for posting it!

But, I guess my question is more about why the abstraction of "protein chunks" doesn't fall apart when there are relatively significant "diffs" in the RNA sequence.

Knowing nothing about biotech – if Moderna and Pfizer were working from the same sequencing data, why would their resulting vaccine mRNA sequences be different? Even slightly?

Edit: I guess what I'm asking is: presumably these vaccines both target the spike protein. Do both of these sequences express the same protein? Or is there a "close enough!" thing in the immune system, where it can be a little different and still be targeted by the immune system?

Disclaimer: I do work at a FAANG. I'm not sure what circles you're talking about.

"References" in the traditional sense may not be an important thing. But certainly being able to back your resume claims – whether with skills from that experience, or with people who will vouch for you – is important. If it wasn't, we could all just put "Optimized SQL and improved profit 20%" (or anything else) on our resumes, no?

I participate in interviews from time to time. I don't ask a lot of trivia-type algorithm questions, but I do try to size up where a candidate has invested their effort so far. Have they invested it in trying (and learning) to solve problems? Or have they invested in in padding their resume? I'll take the former over the latter every time, even if they don't have a bunch of brag-points on their resume.

That's just me, though shrug

> This seems like an argument that there are no priorities and no things that are more important than other things. I don't think you believe that.

On the contrary, I'm arguing that making an impact wherever you can is better than avoiding things that don't meet some criteria of "things that are likely to help my resume." The priority I'm advocating is, making an impact by applying your skills (or even better, learning new skills) to solve problems that you can find (or are brought to you).

This is how you'll build a breadth of experience (which will be valuable for employers) and identify a niche that you enjoy (which will be valuable for you).

If the takeaway is, "never work on internal tools," I've worked at companies where the internal tools were more valuable than anything customer-facing.

If you're great at optimizing SQL, probably just doing that in any place you can get your hands on will make a pretty big impact.

Overall impact is more helpful than resume points, IME, especially when references are involved.

Interesting, I'll give that a try this Spring! Thanks for the tip. Soapy water in general doesn't seem like something that's problematic as far as eating the oranges later... whether it's technically "organic" or not is secondary for me. I guess that maybe raises an eyebrow about what "organic" means, if soapy water isn't acceptable.

The second year of the leaf-miners, I would go out there every morning and look for affected leaves, just so I could squish the little bugger inside the leaf before it could become an adult moth. It was satisfying, but never really helped.

To contrast leaf-miners with other agricultural pests – before the leaf-miners came to town, we also had a bunch of Giant Swallowtail Butterflies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papilio_cresphontes) that made their homes in our citrus trees. Their caterpillars never did too much damage, and the annual presence of huge, striking butterflies was pretty enjoyable.

Sadly, I think our (organic) efforts to get rid of the leaf-miners also killed off the butterflies.

I hate leaf-miners with a passion. I planted a bunch of citrus trees a while ago, and citrus leaf-miners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllocnistis_citrella) took a great liking to them. They nearly killed a few of the trees – and this is in a backyard with me attending to them pretty much every day. I hate to think of the industrial-scale agricultural damage these little jerks must inflict on commercial citrus orchards.

But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).

Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.

For me, it was realizing that category theory is the mathematical language of abstraction – almost literally the "principle of least power" in math – and those abstractions often connect to programming abstractions. Even if you're not using words like "Functor" or "Monad" to describe them!

And it can be useful to think of them more abstractly than they actually are, even if you're not going to use them that way (or even talk about them that way in your code). Just making some "ridiculously abstract" connections can help provide a missing piece of architecture, even if you keep the math story to yourself (which you likely should).

So it can (potentially?) be useful to model various things in terms of what they mean "at the most abstract level", and then find ways to capture chunks of that into various architectural abstractions that make sense without category theory (kind of like a Karnaugh map, in a sense).

Sorry if that seems like a lot of "purple prose" or self-important... it really isn't. I think it's the same thing that a lot of people mean when they say "I don't use Haskell but learning it made me a better programmer." I don't use abstract algebra, but learning it made me a better programmer (those statements might even be homomorphic, depending on the Haskell involved)

You might enjoy Scala. It has a range of usable styles, from "concise Java" to "somewhat Haskell-ish with OOP-ier syntax" to "type astronaut", and you can get by anywhere in between (as long as you don't mind hearing others bicker a bit about what people ought to be doing). It can target JVM, JS, and native/LLVM. And, Scala 3 just reached RC stage; it tries to revamp some of the language aspects that people found to be pitfalls or otherwise confusing, so it might be a great opportunity to try it for the first time.

TLDR: And in the darkness, be sure to drink your Ovaltine!

I think there's room for both things, and we don't really have to (passive-agressively) squabble about which is better.

cats-effect is a meta-abstraction _and_ a concrete implementation of that abstraction. All of its functionality is abstract over the effect type, which for a lot of library use cases is good! (for example, this enables using ZIO with c-e ecosystem libraries; if c-e took the same tactic as ZIO then this wouldn't be possible)

When you get down to the application level, though – essentially the effect type is going to be fixed. I doesn't _have_ to be, but it takes superhuman levels of discipline not to make it that way. And ZIO is built for that – if the effect type is fixed to ZIO, it grants a lot of ergonomic benefits. So, ZIO ecosystem components are built with that in mind, and give a lot of ergonomics and higher-level semantics that aren't possible with c-e (or abstract effect types).

If cats-effect split the meta-abstraction and the implementation into two libraries, I think this debate would be moot. But, having the implementation together with the meta-abstraction makes cats-effect more likely to leak the latter into the former (I think it's gotten a lot better about this lately, though).

Anyway, just saying – both libraries are great, and they're different, and nobody should be made to feel bad about using either one of them.

ZIO (the core library) is not really a framework. It's still a library for an IO monad – it's just a pretty different IO monad, in that it absorbs environment (e.g. `ReaderT`) and error (e.g. from `MonadError`) into one data type, and the cases where you don't care about one of those are just type aliases. And it makes use of variance to give (usually) really ergonomic operations on these things. Disclaimer: I use it, and I'm a fan – I'll leave it up to the docs to really sell it; just wanted to take issue with the "framework" notion.

That being said, the sum of the ZIO _ecosystem_ is absolutely a framework, for better or worse.

> A Haxe macro is just regular Haxe code with the same syntax and same standard library, except it runs at compile time, and it can operate on the AST of your program. They're like shaders, but for your compiler.

Scala macros are the same way (but with an obtuse API until Scala 3, which should be out soon after all the syntax bikeshedding is done). It's also one of the things I love about Scala, though I'd understand why others might disagree. Metaprogramming is fraught; even moreso when it's plain that it's a program that runs at compile time (which is also the case with C++ templates, to fewer complaints per-capita for reasons I don't understand)

A C programmer and a C++ programmer walk into a bar.

A Haskell programmer describes how one would join them for a drink.

Well, that puts some perspective on 2020.

I mean, it's bleak perspective, but surely if we all write to our congressperson we can act now to prevent the heat death of the universe, right?

So, "their perspective" is that their home is where they live, and your perspective is that their home is an asset. From your perspective, they should be glad their asset has multiplied in value, and they should be happy to pay the government based on that. From their perspective, they didn't ask for the asset to increase in value, and they're just trying to live there — while people like you resent them for living there and not building a high-rise apartment building instead.

How about I go to your hometown and bully your folks out of their house? They ought to be fine with that, right? It's just an asset. Come on.

> What gives your parents more right to live there than anyone else?

I mean they own the home, so presumably that gives them a right to live there. They went there and bought a home for market value, even if it was a struggle to do so. They didn't complain about the existing residents or suggest that everything had to change to accommodate them. So I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

Two counterpoints:

- Direct your discontent toward the corporations and landlords who are exploiting Prop 13 when it wasn't intended for them. It was intended to protect homeowners (often on retirement income) from skyrocketing property values that is out of their control. It's done great at that, but unfortunately (like any regulation) has also been exploited by the greedy.

- That aside, don't presume to be entitled to buy the house you want in the place you want it to be for the amount you want to pay for it. It sucks that I can't afford to buy a nice home in my hometown because FAANG came in and made it the place to be, but I'm also not entitled to that. The notion that people like my parents ought to be taxed out of their home so that well-off twentysomethings can have a more favorable property market really grinds my gears. There are lots of people trying to just live in their hard-earned homes after doing the work and taking the risks of building the tech industry, and most of them didn't become wealthy venture capitalists in the end. Just like most of us won't.

I guess you're implying that old people are the reason for high housing prices in SV. Respectfully, what are the bad policies my parents are responsible for, besides pioneering the technology that makes you want to live in SV? And buying a house for 85k in a nice neighborhood in order to do so, without forseeing that Facebook and friends were going to move in and make their house unaffordable were it not for the protections you're mocking?

This is from 2013, so I guess it comes up every so often (2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19184412). But, I've had it bookmarked since the first time I saw it come up. It's a great article for anyone who's ever played a hexagonal game or has thought about making a hexagonal game.

The source site also has a lot of great stuff on applications of computer science to less-thought-of aspects of game development (by which I mean people usually think of pixel-blasting 3D engines as "game development", but there's a lot more to it)

FWIW, I don't think it's typical to have haleem for breakfast. My wife's family is from Iran, and when I mentioned how much I enjoyed the haleem (that my mother-in-law had sent us home with) for breakfast, they thought I was crazy! (They warmed to the idea - we've learned much from one another heh)

A great oatmeal breakfast (or lunch or dinner) inspired by the Persian dish haleem (which is usually made with wheat instead of oats and is simmered for hours):

Put a pound or so of boneless skinless chicken thighs in the slow cooker on low for a few hours, until they're ready to fall apart (the nice thing is that this needs little attention).

Sweat a diced onion in about a tbsp of butter in about in a biggish pot on low heat, with a pinch of salt, until translucent. Move the onions to the side, add another tbsp of butter, and toast a cup of steel-cut oats in it until it smells toasty/nutty. Pour the liquid that came out of the chicken into the pot (saving the meat for later) and then add a carton (32 fl. oz.) of good chicken stock (which they're calling bone broth these days at the supermarket).

Cook this for a while on medium heat (uncovered) until the oats are done (roughly 45 mins). Meanwhile, shred up the chicken really well with a pair of forks. When the oatmeal is done, stir in the shredded chicken. Season to taste.

Makes about four big servings, keeps great in the fridge for several days and reheats well. Makes a nutritious hot breakfast, especially with a sunny-side up egg on top. A traditional condiment for haleem is diced confit onions, which is also great. (I also like to add a bag of sauteed "power greens")