HN user
Is this the origin of the classic analogy that Windows is a station wagon, Mac OS is a European luxury sedan, and Linux is a free tank? I had no idea that the author Neal Stephenson came up with that.
The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.
If you don't like it, that's fine, I won't argue over taste. But your other descriptions of Bach's life deserve to be fact-checked.
He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
This interpretation is not particularly historically accurate. Let's investigate:
He was a nepo baby with a big purse.
Musicians of the baroque era weren't particularly wealthy or notable. Musical fame wouldn't come until the Classical era. And yes, music was his family trade, but that's how most trades went in that time. His parents both died before he turned ten, so he was mostly raised by his older brother. By all accounts they were not wealthy. So I think the term "nepo baby" is misleading, and "and "with a big purse" is simply incorrect.
His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society.
This is highly overexaggerated. JS Bach had two brothers who survived childhood, and neither was particularly "prominent." Most of his "notable family" were his children, especially CPE Bach.
However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
Bach's career was one of slow and steady growth. It doesn't appear that he leaned on his connections or family name much.
Bach did get some widespread acclaim by the end of his life, but mostly as an organist, not as a composer. His compositions were mostly discarded and ignored for a whole century until Felix Mendelssohn revived interest in his compositions. The cello suites, for example, were lost for nearly two hundred years, and only re-discovered in the 1920's.
Bach's most approachable music might be his cello suites.
But also, I think there are two camps of fans of "classical music" (by which I mean music in the styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, etc). There are those who listen to the music, and those who play it.
For the most part, those who only listen to music often prefer Romantic and Impressionist styles. From the moody and dramatic to the gentle and contemplative, these styles are very approachable to the untrained ear.
But those who play an instrument (or sing in a choir) spend lots of time practicing and rehearsing and interpreting the music as it's written on the page. This extra time makes all of the little nuances of Baroque music truly come to life. The classic example is Bach's Crab Canon, which is a fine little piece of music... but once you realize that the whole thing is a palindrome, and you can actively appreciate how the same parts work in a forward and backward context, it becomes really interesting and pleasant.
So if Bach doesn't do it for you, and you play an instrument, try diving into playing it yourself.
I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history
I interpreted this more as "don't forget to check out the French-language Wikipedia articles too, since they might have contents that are absent from the English-language Wikipedia articles." This would likely be the case for anything concerning Québécois or Acadien culture, or the early settlements by the French; but not likely for most things west of Ottawa (aside from some pockets like Grande Prairie, Alberta or Saint Boniface, Manitoba).
It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.
Bazzite is a good distro alternative to Holo ISO, that might be better suited for a laptop or desktop.
Thankfully, we can now do this ourselves.
The Steam Deck hardware to compete with is:
- A custom CPU with integrated GPU that's somewhere between an AMD 6600U and 6800U, underclocked for battery life and thermals
- 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (6400 MT/s)
- 50 Wh battery
So, to make your own Steam Deck-like laptop, you should buy a USB or wireless controller and install the Holo ISO distro (for a UI like the Steam Deck) on a laptop with the following specs:
- 50+ Wh battery
- 16+ GB of RAM (preferably LPDDR5 for thermals)
- A sufficiently powerful CPU+GPU (most new 15W ones will do, especially if you set it to underclock when on battery power)
- A USB-C port with USB 3 Gen 2 speeds and DisplayPort support
- A sufficiently nice screen, speaker, trackpad, cooling fan
Full text: https://archive.is/YbPek
Try this page, called "Rust's problems and concerns": https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i...
In short, the Rust Foundation does not permit users to redistribute modified versions of Rust/Cargo without their explicit approval.
I want to second the recommendation of MyNoise.net. It's phenomenal. Especially at work, it's perfect for getting in the zone. I pay for it even though I mostly stick to the free ones.
If you're working at a computer, I recommend opening multiple tabs at the same time. For example, one with some relaxing white noise, one with a music-adjacent one like Mr Rhodes or 88 Keys, and maybe also a crackling fire for cozy vibes.
- https://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php My favorites are: "Stormy Weather", "Fireplace", "Irish coast", "88 Keys", and "Mr. Rhodes"
You can also find myNoise sounds on YouTube and Spotify:
Full article here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240711173851/https://www.theat...
I feel incredibly called out, and I'm not even an SRE.
Look on page 117 of the PDF (the paper says 113):
Vader: You're very good, Luke. But I'm twenty years older and stronger than you in the use of the Force. You haven't a chance with me... any more than your father had.
This draft was written before they came up with the idea that Vader could actually be Luke's father!
They focus on business users.
- Yahoo Finance is the big one. It has few competitors, and is probably their primary revenue stream.
- Yahoo News is still doing well.
- Yahoo Answers helped Yahoo stay relevant for a very long time, but it is dead now, replaced by Quora.
- Also, I think they do fantasy sports.
For context: Dr. Gabor Maté is a world-renowned medical doctor, who runs a family practice (as a GP) and a specialist in childhood development and trauma. He has written multiple best-selling books on the topic. However, his views on ADHD (first published in 1999 and recently resurfaced in multiple podcast interviews) are often disputed by experts on the subject.
Dr. Russell Barkley is a retired neuropsychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry specializing in ADHD. He is one of the world's leading experts on the subject. This is his video, debating/debunking Dr. Maté's claims about ADHD.
Possibly, but literally no other laptops sound anywhere near as good as Macbooks.[0] Apple has done some real magic in the laptop speaker space, and they've kept their secrets to themselves. Shame I always wear headphones.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Actual summary:
Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part.
HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives.
So the claim being made here is that SSDs will "soon" achieve a lower lifetime cost than HDDs per unit of storage, due to high electricity prices.
I remain unconvinced that skiplists cannot be better replaced in most cases with a good hash table/dictionary implementation.
Skiplists are ordered. Perhaps without much advantage compared to, say, a balanced BST. But Hash tables aren't ordered, so they aren't as good for storing data when preserving order is important.
Also, most linked lists should actually be deques.
Yep, for almost all purposes, so long as using the extra memory for the reverse pointers isn't an issue. Deques are more flexible and much easier to work with (and especially to debug) than singly-linked lists. Not much of a take, I think a large proportion of developers would vehemently agree with you there.
The “discursive hygiene” picture of fallacy theory sees fallacies as mistakes that a good arguer will avoid. Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”. However, they note another, less wholesome reason why some may be interested in fallacy theory. If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely, leaving the impression that it has been won.
TL;DR: the Harry Potter fallacy is thinking that shouting out a named fallacy (e.g. "That's an ad hominem!") makes you instantly win a debate, as though you were casting a magic spell.
It's certainly not the worst, but I take issue with how overconfident de Botton is, and consequently, how convincing his work can seem to many viewers who take it at face-value without more critical thinking. He's academically inclined but largely self-taught, and his hypotheses are not always as well thought-out as one might expect from an "academic".
He does a lot of media analysis, especially of other YouTube channels. His views are definitely not unbiased, but in this case he provides a counterpoint that people interested in The School of Life might benefit from hearing.
If you're not interested in The School of Life, then it's not worth an hour of your time.
Alain de Botton's School of life is... honestly weird. It's really confident and tries to give good advice; but so much of that advice is quite bad, and the channel might overall do more harm than good (for more people than fewer).
YouTuber Big Joel has done two breakdowns of it that are worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlkJJygIoVU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ30qL7j3Q.
Also, "Advocating for a resigned alienation from one's work is advocating for living one's life for other people." I agree with that. I'm not advocating for resigned alienation. That's a very extreme interpretation of what I wrote.
I recommend finding a good work-life balance. Good work is a part of that. Working hard a good job with good coworkers is very rewarding. But putting all your eggs in the basket of your job is not.
It's not that they regret starting their businesses, it's that it consumes them and their life outside of work. They have no work-life balance. Their work may be rewarding and satisfying, but they aren't living happy lives.
This is what I've observed, anyway.
If you want to be "exciting" (the opposite of boring) you'll always feel like you aren't living up to your potential; just like how power lifters always think their muscles are small and anorexic instagram models don't think they're skinny enough. Balance is much more rewarding.
Do good work, work that pays, that you're good at, that you can be proud of. Then go home. Switch off, and enjoy your hobbies. Learn an instrument, get good at cooking exotic foods, and find a workout routine you enjoy.
If you want to indulge your big ideas, read voraciously, and code up side-projects. Write a blog, or a book, or something like that. But don't try to make money from it. Betting your livelihood on your ideas puts too much pressure on, and you won't be happy. Most entrepreneurs aren't happy, not even the wealthy ones.
I see! Thank you lifthrasiir.
I don't get it. This post appears to be an intro to lambda calculus, but renamed to birds, and without enough detail to do anything interesting or worthwhile. Can someone enlighten me about what's interesting enough about this post to make it to the front page?
May we all be Don Knuth on this blessed day
Please do write this, and let me know when it's available to read!!
Definitely not great... I bet that in a few years I bet it will be shockingly good. Experts have probably been working on it for years, and now that they've chosen a sufficient model structure with effective convolutions and whatnot, it's just a matter of tweaking the parameters and feeding it more and more data (3D scanning tools are making this easier as time goes on too).