a_lieb

To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."

Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)

The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.

There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?

I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.

CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).

A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.

[1] https://cirr.org/

[2] https://www.coursereport.com/

To Chalmers' credit, he's been writing about this stuff at least back to 2003, when he had a paper called "The Matrix as Metaphysics" defending the idea that the claim that we're living in a simulation is not a skeptical hypothesis, and that such a world would be just as real, just one layer "in." (Probably not as wild of an idea now as it was back then.) Also a couple of other papers on VR since then and many on AI going back to 1990 [1].

[1] http://consc.net/ai-and-computation/

"Rightsizing" is a weird one, because it's occasionally used for benign stuff like reducing the rate of hiring. Much like "enhanced interrogation techniques," the broader meaning provides shelter for what it's really used for most of the time.

Here's a business model for successful open-source projects—one that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or the like about this already.

If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work.

There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.

If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.

Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no

There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1].

Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats.

It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc.

At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning.

[1] http://musicnotation.org/

For me it's simply a matter of convenience of searching; even pages with great and comprehensive docs can be hard to search. And the average is so poor that I often don't even bother to check if a particular project actually has a good search feature. If my search takes me to the actual doc page, (and it's good) then all the better!

The easiest way to think about Tcl is simply, "it's a Lisp, but with strings instead of lists."

It turns out that when you make a language like that, you end up something where your code looks and feels like a list of commands (much like a shell script) but is also capable of doing "real" programming stuff where needed without much pain.

The test suite for SQLite is (still!) written in Tcl, I think partly for this reason. You probably wouldn't want to write a test suite in bash, but you don't quite get that feeling of "it's just a list of commands."

I've found that one a lot more common than the "Hello" thing, but I'm sure it varies by the team.

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!)

Nice easter egg from the source code:

  <!-- <audio autoplay="autoplay" controls="controls"><source src="topgun.mid" type="audio/mpeg"></audio> -->

Are there any online stores where we have good evidence that they have good practices around COVID-19? Despite the crushing demand, Costco seems like one employer that might try extra hard to see after the safety of its workers.

Huh, maybe his intro-level materials are far different, then. I'm not going to die on the hill that there's any connection; I don't even know whether he claims there is. But it at least seems that this specific stuff (at least in the early chapters I've read) is both more fundamental and more grounded in math (very basic math in this case) than the other intro theory stuff I've seen.

All good points. I don't know much about his actual higher-level mathematical stuff (I'm pretty bush-league about theory overall, really!) But I've heard that a lot of people in the music theory world say it's awfully close to regular Neo-Riemannian theory.

That said, in the Princeton lecture notes, he does seem to start a given topic on fundamental/"why" questions and then build out, more than any other intro music material that I've seen. A far as I can tell, his own theories are in there, but more as a framework to help explain things, rather than demanding you think that way.

For example, in the first pages, he describes a bunch of well-known fundamentals in music theory/psychoacoustics, but in a very "Tymoszco-esque" way. He lays out five principles common to a huge range of music styles: some combinations of notes are considered more pleasant than others, you don't want to have melodies that jump around too much, etc. (These all go for the Western musical tradition, but also many others.)

Then he says that our scales are essentially "solutions" to how you can chop up the octave into steps and meet all of the five requirements. It turns out there are a relatively small number of ways to do that, we've found just about all of them, and those are pretty much exactly the list of scales that we're using. But then he quickly builds it out to common scales that you can play on a keyboard written out in normal notation, and goes from there.

This is extremely satisfying to my hacker brain, like picking a handful of criteria and doing a search to find all the possible lists of numbers that meet those criteria.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if you can explain music theory from fundamentals just as well using traditional Neo-Riemannian theory, or even something totally different. I just haven't ran into any intro-level materials like that.

(Also: it could even be that his list of requirements isn't really true, but it's hard to see which ones you would want to deny for Western music.)

For this, I would highly recommend the music theorist/composer Dimitri Tymoczko. His career project is to rebuild the basics of harmony from the ground up from (mostly simple) rules, closely based on how people hear. A catchphrase he uses a lot is "why does music sound good?"

He teaches a set of 2 comprehensive introductory music theory classes at Princeton, and he makes the lecture notes public: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/teaching.html. These are a really underrated resource and have now grown to be as complete as a full intro theory textbook.

There is a serious lack of stuff that teaches music theory from the ground up (how a lot of us hackers like to learn). So much of the confusion around music theory just comes from most theorists using using old, incredibly crufty "data structures" to describe music, when the actual material isn't so hard. Tymoczko is one of the few researchers pushing back on that. He is best known for his higher-level, mathy research (he wrote the first music theory article ever published in Science), but those lecture notes are a great way to get started for anyone who gets frustrated with learning theory the traditional way—which is pretty much everyone.

Due to exactly this issue, an increasing number of languages have an operator just for "if exists and not null": the null coalescing operator[0].

What "exists" means depends on the language; it can be as loose as checking if the variable has ever been set (PHP), but generally has nothing to do with truthiness/falsiness status.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator

I also worry about the increase in security surface area. A ton of additional C-level operations exposed to JS in all browsers. What could go wrong?

Ah, interesting—thanks for pointing that out. That is practically the same thing. I only wonder if the fact that it's two dots tends to discourage it from general use for things like arithmetic, compared to a single character.

Good question--just stack them up on the left on the same order as they appear in the expression, I guess.

I've always wondered if a good way to do infix would be to simply have the ability to mark an item with a character that means "move this to the front of the expression." Let's say the char is ":". Then this:

  (1 :+ 2)

  (+ 1 2)

  (1 2 3 4 5 :+)

This doesn't solve the "too many parens" problem, because you still have parens, but it does solve the "prefix math looks weird" problem. It's quite a bit simpler than what Dylan does, in that there's no special concept of "binary operators" and it's obvious at a glance how everything converts to sexps.

Forgive me if the answer to this is already widely-known, but at this point is Racket making a play to be a general-purpose, "batteries included" Lisp, rather than a stripped down tool for PLT stuff and making languages? It seems like there's room in the market for something like that. A bit like Clojure, but without all of the big design commitments that Clojure makes, like the deep integration with Java and focus on immutability.

If the scoring scheme works the same as the results he shows on the site (higher is better), then V8 is still far faster than QuickJS. Which wouldn't be all that surprising since the V8 folks have spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours on optimization and JIT magic, which is something that would be hard to duplicate, to say the least, in a ~1.5MB all-interpreted engine.

Richard Stallman is mostly known for his activist/politics stuff at this point, but he was also a heck of a developer. He wrote Emacs, GCC, GDB and glibc. I'm not sure if he was a total lone wolf, but my understanding is that in the early days he was overwhelmingly the main person responsible for those projects.

The benchmark scores [1] he gives only stack it up against other embeddable engines. It cuts those to ribbons, but can someone who's familiar with JavaScript performance weigh in on how it competes with the most popular engines like V8 and SpiderMonkey? It would be interesting if this is so fast that you could re-implement Node using QuickJS instead of V8, or even make a WebKit- or Gecko-based browser with QuickJS under the hood. Presumably a lot of the headaches with swapping in a new JS engine have to do with dependencies, and this has none.

[1] https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html

I've found a way to take this formula and make it into a very effective weight-loss diet. I've been at it for almost a year and have lost 20 pounds so far, and it doesn't seem like I'm going to have any trouble keeping it off. Granted, I'm not anywhere near the traditional 5-year mark used in studies to evaluate whether someone has relapsed. But it does feel like something that I can sustain, even for the rest of my life if that's needed to keep the weight off.

There are some trends coming together in recent research that suggest that the most sustainable way to lose weight not to follow any specific regime, but to find a set of food restrictions that you can live with but which still lower your overall "food reward" to a level that you can sustain without giving up. (See this book review at Slate Star Codex [1] for more on these ideas.) It's like a much more fine-tuned and personalized version of the fad diets that don't have calorie-counting but add some restriction so that you don't want to eat as much, like the Atkins Diet or the grapefruit diet.

It turns out what works for me is to limit myself to 3-4 specific meal categories a day, only changing something up every few months. Currently it's Grape Nuts Flakes and milk in the morning, a homemade turkey and roast beef sandwich (or even 2) for lunch, and homemade burritos or Barilla Plus pasta for dinner. No beverages except water. No sides, except there are a couple of low-reward foods that I'm allowed to eat all day (currently Spring Mix and steam-in-bag veggies).

Crucially, these are actually some of my favorite foods–and some are pretty high-calorie–but if they are the only things that I am allowed to eat every day, my food reward starts to drift down and I want fewer calories.

I don't put any limits on anything, so I'm never physically hungry and my willpower isn't being drained every day by trying to limit myself. I let myself eat pretty much whatever when I go out socially, but otherwise absolutely no cheating.

We'll see how it works out in the long run, but overall I'm just as happy as before. Any boredom from the diet itself is mostly cancelled out by the benefits mentioned in the article (saving money, not needing to think about making your meals, etc.) Not to mention the whole "losing weight" part!

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry...

Mastodon/Diaspora seems like a pretty good fit for a small and tightly-knit community like Old School Revival D&D. (Granted I had to Google that acronym to find out what it was, so I can't claim to know much about the subculture. :) )

A few other smaller subcultures have gotten a foothold on Mastodon; it's far from a ghost town. Another upshot is that unlike anything else you listed, it's decentralized and federated, so your instance could never be taken down.

In Tegmark's case, his hypothesis doesn't necessarily imply that consciousness escapes the laws of physics in any sense, even somewhat. He's simply arguing that consciousness is a state of matter, like liquid, solid or gas, and its properties emerge from lower-level physical laws, just like the other states of matter. Kind of a wild claim, but still compatible with strict materialism.

Tegmark's theory is an expanded version of Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, which has gotten a lot of interest in mainstream cognitive science. IIT also stays well within the laws of physics.

Non-materialist philosophers of mind tend to like these theories since they make consciousness correspond with fairly low-level processes, and that looks a lot more plausible than consciousness being something that only pops up in animal brains for some mystical reason. But neither IIT nor Tegmark's approach actually require any kind of escaping from the laws of physics. In fact Tononi sounds to me mostly like a materialist, although he's pretty slippery about it. Not as sure about Tegmark.

Also, important to note that almost no one believes in vitalism (the idea that life itself requires special extra-physical "secret sauce" to exist) anymore. It is only consciousness that is up for debate in mainstream philosophy.

As someone who teaches JS on the side, I'm literally scared of the idea of introducing another construct called "case." Especially one that goes in the opposite place of where the "case" normally does: "switch ... case" vs. "case ... when."

JavaScript is already jam packed with subtleties and gotchas that make it hard to learn, including situations where two things have the same name or the name doesn't quite match the underlying concept: C-style "for" vs. "for ... in" vs. "for ... of," object vs. Object, Object.prototype vs. "the prototype of the object," etc. We don't need another one of those.

I'd actually like this if it used another word than "case." "choose ... when", maybe? Kinda awkward, but I bet someone could think of something better. "case" has the nice feature that it's already a reserved word, but it's not valid syntax to have a variable name right next to an open brace, so the parsers could figure it out.

This is wildly conjectural, but assuming the "CO2 is causing widespread cognitive problems" hypothesis is true, I wonder if there are whole colleges whose student bodies are getting slightly worse grades because of this. There are a couple of small colleges in my area that are regionally famous for their stuffy buildings.

I appreciate any effort to make modern frameworks that can run in vanilla JS without compilation. I feel like the current JS compilation toolchain is still well in "uncanny valley" territory, where it can still be tricky to set up and the final product often still doesn't work quite right with browsers' dev tools. (I still find myself in situations where source maps aren't working for no apparent reason.)