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gnubison

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I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.

    cond1 ? res1 :
    cond2 ? res2 :
    cond3 ? res3 :
    or_else_res
If they are truly nested, then that is confusing. But if you have an if-else chain, then it can be quite readable.

As programmers in programming culture, we have a distinction between hacker and, potentially, cracker that no ordinary person has. ESR’s prescriptivism is pretty much worthless in this respect: words mean what people think they mean and what people use them for, and programmers do not have a monopoly on how people use the term.

OED has the “computer intruder” sense first cited in 1963, and the “enthusiastic programmer” sense first in 1969 (“now much less common than sense 3a”). Cracker first appears in 1968.

Besides, it is easy to disambiguate which meaning people mean. “Hacker attack” can only refer to the common usage of the term, not programming-culture usage.

If you want ‘git diff | pager’ to work like that, you’re out of luck. There is no way for the pager to communicate with git or the shell to rerun the command; the pager doesn’t even know what program is on the writing side of its stdin pipe. You would need something like ‘pager --command "git diff"’, where the pager invokes a command producing output. I do agree that it would be nice.

iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.

The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.

It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.

Strang does include that. I just checked the fourth edition, like you say you did. Scrolling down two pages to get to the first page of the table of contents, I see the heading “cosines and projections onto lines”. I navigate to that section and it explains all the logic, proof, and intuition behind the connection between angles and dot products. Please don’t spread misinformation…

It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect?

France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).

the solution of any one of which would change not only the career of the person who solved the problem, but possibly life on Earth. Many have stood like mountains in the distance, rising above the clouds, for generations.

Whether or not this is AI, this comment is not true. An axiomatic derivation of a formula doesn’t change how it’s used. We knew the formulas were experimentally correct, it’s just that now mathematicians can rest easy about whether they were theoretically correct. Although it’s interesting, it doesn’t change or create any new applications.

The article specifically points out WaniKani as an example of a very bad implementation of spaced repetition (see the "FSRS in practice" heading, under the paragraph "for Japanese language learning specifically...").

As a senior in high school, I devoured this game in elementary school and got way better at math than my peers. Now taking differential equations and multivariable calculus through our college in the high school (CHS) program. When I looked for it out of curiosity I was sad to see it transformed into a subscription service.

Explanation for other confused people: the pronunciations of these words and letters, expressed in IPA (or perhaps an orthography like Spanish’s) begin with odd other sounds: Universal /ˌjunɪˈvɝsl̩/, y /ˈwaɪ/, w /ˈdʌbl̩.juː/, j /dʒeɪ/

The maintainers are conservative about breaking changes. Almost all features are hidden behind “use” statements: for example, “use feature "bitwise"” splits the questionable & operators into & for numbers and &. for bitstrings. But old code will work exactly the same.

There are a few deprecations and things which have been removed from the language…like idioms that relied on interpreter bugs and have been obsolete for 20 years.

But if you run a Perl script without use strict, use warnings, or new command line flags, you’ll get a Perl experience largely unchanged since the turn of the century.

That’s my understanding anyways…

There is a way, of course, of getting the correct hyphen-minus, and that’s by using ‘\-’. Almost all manual pages do this, including manual page generators, because the “problem” (which is just troff syntax) is well known and well documented.