bstpierre

I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing.

Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?

The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!

Some varieties of European and Asian pines have this innate resistance because they evolved alongside the fungus. However, American trees met this threat too late to develop a workable defense.

This is a cool project. I'm learning French and am always on the lookout for sources of books -- and especially audio -- at the right level.

To others questioning the need for rewriting: language changes over the course of a century! It's no problem for me, as a native English speaker, to read English from around the turn of the 20th Century. However, it increases the degree of difficulty for me to try to read French or Spanish from the same time period. Also, to get through an old book I have to learn a bunch of useless words that have fallen into disuse; it's much more effective for me to learn the version of the language that is relevant in today's world.

It looks like the French TTS isn't working properly yet? At least on the couple of titles I tried. The selection of titles you have listed looks great.

Two main things I use it for:

1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.

2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".

Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).

I accidentally built a kind-of compiler last year.

It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was easy.

But then there were complications, and I needed to make slightly more sophisticated substitutions. So the sed commands moved into an awk script, run by the makefile. This was better than maintaining a handful of little commands that were growing on a weekly basis. Life was good.

The transformations I needed kept growing a bunch of little variations, and the awk script became hard to maintain, so I rewrote it in go, with proper parsing and output. (And even unit tests, after the 2nd time I broke some output.) Designing it as almost-a-proper-compiler was 10x better than maintaining an ad hoc script. Life was great, even with the overhead of maintaining a separate processing tool.

Not sure about the person you replied to, but here in northeast US if you don’t mow to keep trees down you can quickly end up with a very thick growth of trees. It’s also easy to end up with a lot of undesirable (invasive) species crowding out the native/desirable plants.

It may be the case that a small amount of trees is beneficial overall for pollinators but if you’re managing an area as described then it takes a bit more work to plan for trees and mow around them.

Maybe it happens a lot and nobody has mentioned it here yet, but I find live, out-of-band reviews are often very effective. By this I mean looking at a patch and asking questions or raising issues with the author. I do this fairly regularly for PRs at work where the “live” aspect is just slack (I work remotely).

A dozen or so years ago I worked at a startup using svn and all reviews were like this: generate a diff, post a link to the diff on jabber, someone will comment/question. There’s room for immediate back and forth as needed. Revise, approve, done. Very lightweight, yet effective. However we were all colocated and all of the team members were high functioning so I’m not sure if it generalizes. (Also, being colocated meant that occasionally the jabber conversation could move to f2f with whiteboards if things got complicated.)

TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".

In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was kind of slow to start, especially when there were 20+ users logged in. Helpfully, our TA taught us how to ctrl-z to suspend the interpreter, then edit our program in vi, and then "fg" to get back into the interpreter.

Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)

See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like what you're suggesting. You rank movies from 0-100, which is different from rating them. Your percentile ranking scores are compared to other users' rankings, and then it can suggest movies that it thinks you will rank highly.

IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.

I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.

Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the two, with a thousand little variations on terms. I believe I ran into an employee-owned company once that had gone through some version of the loan scenario.

Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driving a mower around and around and around — not really intense physical labor, just a rote mechanical job that doesn’t consume much mental capacity.

I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!

If the ticket is a direct conduit to the customer, I think you could argue that ticket management in the form of asking clarifying questions so that you build the right thing (or fix the right bug) is creating value?

I worked at a shop with P0, and then there were too many P0 tickets, and then you just worked on whatever the CTO told you was the _actual_ highest priority ticket when he stopped by your cubicle for a chat.

I once got USPS mail addressed to:

My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State

no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.

It’s not always driven by a desire for novelty. In my experience it’s just as often driven by some amount of reflection and desire to improve on what came before. I think there’s a lot of middle ground between chasing shiny new things and change that corrects systemic shortcomings of previous approaches.

light-hearted fun is not necessary

It might not be necessary, but I think it’s sorely needed

Being serious all the time is unhealthy

It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well.

Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.

I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.)

I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.

For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.

I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.

But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.

What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.

I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.

Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)

Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)

I’ve only played around with lisp a little bit, what about it makes it a solo programmer tool?

I think my last round of it was second hand from myself on a pair of boots. Must have walked somewhere by it and gotten it on the laces, but didn’t actually get it on my skin, or washed well enough.

Then on a day where I couldn’t possibly have gone near any ivy I ended up with a couple of spots on my fingers. And then again a week later before I realized it was probably on the boots. Fortunately just a minor inconvenience, but it’s crazy how the oil sticks around.

I guess it depends a lot on where you are. My real estate tax bill has separate rates and line items for town, school district, county, and state. Some places have separate assessments on each district within a municipality. Some cities have their own sales and/or income tax. And then there can be local use fees, vehicle registration, and all sorts of other state/local taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

The mice have a solution for the murderous cat: simply put a bell on the cat’s collar and then they will know when it’s coming.

But… who’s going to “bell the cat”? i.e. who is going to perform this unpleasant and possibly fatal job?

Another perspective is that interviews can also be about avoiding anyone that might be a bad developer. If you have a large pool of applicants, it's "safe" to basically reject by default and only proceed with a select few who seem like the best (along whatever axis is important). You might miss out on a really good employee, but you're also less likely to be saddled with someone terrible. The downside risk is worse than the upside risk.

Nice resource. I especially like the mental model section because this kind of execution monitoring is impossible if you don’t have a solid understanding of what you’re actually looking at.

As an intern in the mid 90s I babysat a similar mix. We also had some older SunOS boxes and some Irix, but mostly Solaris. I remember the HP as being the worst to work with of the bunch - for whatever reason if one of the tests was going to be broken it was on the HP.

I think that what you’re talking about might even be the killer feature that is often ignored: the forced simplicity. It’s a simple enough language that you can drop into a codebase and read without having to look up much syntax, assuming you have some familiarity with c-family languages. Yes, there are some weird bits that you have to learn, but the learning curve is very short compared to a lot of other languages.

Mostly I think it was that the market moved and they didn't have the capital to make the leap. Combined with a not-so-great product/market fit to begin with, this is fatal for a capital-intensive startup.

In your first example you’re just using newlines as delimiters, the second is allowing either newline or comma.

Even with the high end machine it still takes 27 minutes. If I have a 27 minute build I am absolutely going to context switch. If it’s more than about 3 minutes I am probably going to context switch.

An interesting experiment would be to find the switch-time threshold for a wide range of developers.

Typically I don’t rely on a full build for getting things accomplished, and not CI if I can help it. Local, incremental, and minimal path to feedback is what I aim for.