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CatMtKing

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I practice taijiquan, a martial art. My teacher often describes concepts that I can relate to basic mechanics. When I do, it feels like I understand, but as my teacher says -- until you can actually express it with your body, you don't really understand.

For example, a lever seems conceptually simple, but to create a lever in the body is extraordinarily hard. The joints have to be solidly connected and free to open or close. The direction must be precise and rotation must not wobble. There are so many things that can err and lots of places for force to leak out.

Search Ads 10 years ago

I only use the search when I know what app I'm looking for. Wouldn't that would drive up the numbers artificially -- as I had the intention of downloading the app before I began searching.

Funny story I have with Dropbox:

I was setting up my new desktop to dual boot Debian and Windows. In the interest of saving space, I tried to have Dropbox in both systems target the same directory to sync. I'm not precisely sure what happened - I think the folder hadn't finished pulling in all the files before I logged out - but it somehow trashed everything in my lab's shared directory. Thank god for their API and their automatic file versioning, or I would never have gotten out of that pickle.

Being able to read English is a different skill from being able to write it. A lot of the Chinese students I know can understand it mostly fine but have trouble writing coherently for an English reader.

When I was learning C, I would write my program, then run it step-by-step in the debugger (I was using Visual Studio at the time) until it was pointless to do so because I knew what would happen next. If I made a change and did not have a mental model of what would happen, I would run the debugger.

Learning how to solve problems is a different process, but this gave me good understanding of basic code structures.

I'm Leaving Mojang 12 years ago

Is the definition of talent that one does something noteworthy on a regular basis?

I think that Phil Fish video that he linked really hit the nail on the head.

I'm Leaving Mojang 12 years ago

I think that's exactly why he's not going to get what he wants. He's not going to have a normal life with the comforting blanket of anonymity again.

From the article it seems like some of the symptoms are associated with inadequate sensing or awareness of social cues. That makes me wonder if taijiquan is a good exercise to help with that, as it trains sensitivity to small movements, intentions, and body structure. I'm not sure how well kids pick it up, though.

It's disingenuous to claim a DSL is part of the language syntax. E.g. I would not consider the regex formatting specification as Python syntax. I mean, if we follow that line of thought, it's like saying Jinja is Python syntax.

It's a toy example; he's just trying to show how currying works, rather than why you should use it.

If anything, it does show that one useful thing about partial application is that you can write a generic function (formatNames) and then make it more specific (formatNames("John")) without repeating yourself.

Sort of like:

Here's the data. Analysis is an exercise left to the reader?

I guess what I'm trying to point out here is that while collecting data does take up most of the bulk of the work, data is meaningless without analysis and direction to inform further gathering. That's why the field of study called statistics exists. It's not just about academia points.

On the same vein, the reader should be critical of the analysis; it should not be taken as accepted truth. And the writer should try to predict and address criticisms.

Why Perl Didn't Win 12 years ago

I can read Perl, but the only way you'll get me to read it is to write a script with bugs in it and force me to debug it. It's fun in a masochistic sort of way. Anyway, Python and Haskell are my languages of choice now.