lcuff

8 ms·

31.
by lcuff 3y ago
I like the idea of TCP as a leaky abstraction because it points out the difficulty of engineering the abstraction we really want. It would be wonderful for TCP to be a guaranteed connection abstraction, but it turns out in today's wor
32.
by lcuff 3y ago
Phlogiston theory, formulated in 1667 - 1703 and being used 80-100 years later for its explanatory power, was a complete misconception of burning, heat and oxidation, is one example. Phlogiston theory is post-Baconian. To me, Bacon was the
33.
by lcuff 3y ago
I agree that my dismissal was shallow. Oops, my bad. In contrast, your comments were clear and concise. I think my inclination towards criticism sprang out of the flowery and obscure prose the author used to make his points. I would wish
34.
by lcuff 3y ago
"We don't know what we don't know", comes to mind as an answer. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity explain a Whole Lot, but since they haven't yet been "meshed", there's more to come. The Jame
35.
by lcuff 3y ago
I know of someone who was paralyzed after a lumbar puncture. Eek times 10. Something to avoid if at all possible.
36.
by lcuff 3y ago
You're right. Brain burp/misread on my part. That's a figure for individual cars. Union Pacific site: Union Pacific (main freight carrier in Southern California) gives 286,000 lbs, ~ 140 tons https://www.up.com&
37.
by lcuff 3y ago
The comment I responded to did say 'carry'. 'Just dig a trench and fill it with seawater'. Starts to sound an awful lot like a canal to me ... and ... why do you need a train to pull this?
38.
by lcuff 3y ago
Gulp: A fully loaded neo-Panamax ship is rated to carry 120,000 tons DWT (which excludes the weight of the ship itself). A train composed of heavy-axle rail cars has an upper limit of about 160 tons. Building bridges and a rail bed to ca
39.
by lcuff 3y ago
Oh for 9999999999999999 pennies! I wouldn't care if I got one less that I was supposed to! :-)
40.
by lcuff 3y ago
Interesting to contrast this with https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/goldenrules.html which is currently on Hacker News front page.
41.
by lcuff 3y ago
The contrast between this Nielsen-Norman (NN) page and the OP page is marked. The NN page is much easier to absorb the information. More succinct, way better page layout. Both articles have information/direction worth heeding, but the
42.
by lcuff 3y ago
Not only that, but the article describes a system that is in a remote data center, not something I can have in my laptop. Although if it fit in my laptop for the same price as a hard drive. I could probably 'struggle along' with
43.
by lcuff 3y ago
Totally agree. Insipid. No real insights, nuances or ideas.
44.
Ask HN: Tutorial on LLM / already grasp neural nets
32 points by lcuff 3y ago|7 comments
45.
by lcuff 3y ago
I agree. As a nuance, (and I'm not an Othello player, but a chess player) in many positions in chess, there are many moves that, while not the best, are just slightly worse. Finding the 'refutation' for a weaker move is the
46.
by lcuff 3y ago
Curious: Did you "take the tour"? I doubt I would have had the patience to figure it out on my own, but after taking the tour, I had no problems.
47.
by lcuff 3y ago
I bought this book years ago, and found the information interesting and useful. But it's also a shill for their products. Annoyingly, I found the home jig for knives and chisels extremely fiddly. You have to adjust 4 separate set scre
48.
by lcuff 3y ago
LOL. Yup. And I've been in a company that had a product like that. One man, one file, one function. Scads of GOTOs. It was a state machine, managing ports on a terminal-to-ethernet box circa 1987. Oh my.
49.
by lcuff 3y ago
<Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the assessments of the programmers on the team. > Maybe ... Productivity itself is difficult to define. Different people will value aspects of the work differently At
50.
by lcuff 3y ago
True enough. But in some companies, there's so much push that the wrong abstraction gets left in place as refactoring and rewriting get pushed down the priority stack and never happens. The way to circumvent this is to not declare the
51.
by lcuff 3y ago
In about 1990 I got tasked with building an installation and configuration system for the hardware and software package my company built. It was an Ethernet card and a TCP/IP suite being added to the PCs of the era (that had an AT&#x2F
52.
by lcuff 3y ago
Mostly, talk therapy. As you say, struggling with a hard problem for an extended period of time and feeling dumb is part of the process. For me, the shame was excruciating, so I'd turn my attention to anything else to stop feeling sha
53.
by lcuff 3y ago
I agree. It makes me feel weird, too. Google famously says "Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." I can cynically add "So they can monetize it." However ideal
54.
by lcuff 3y ago
On a totally orthogonal axis: My biggest problem with tackling math problems early in life was psychological. My inner critic would say nasty things to me when I didn't get the answer right away, making it impossible to stick with expl
55.
by lcuff 3y ago
> The counterpoint is essentially that if people engaged in social outward-looking collective action, as opposed to solitary inward-looking meditation, then you can change the world -- as has been demonstrated countless times. Yes, it ha
56.
by lcuff 3y ago
> I can't help but feel the recent societal interest in meditation and psychedelics is wrongheaded in that it's treating a symptom rather than a cause. I agree, but the question emerges "what is treatable?" Many of t
57.
by lcuff 3y ago
I sweat where the mask contacts my face, so that's one issue. As others have said, it can be noisy. I find the noise highly variable based on how it sits on my face and if there are things (a pillow, a sheet, my hand) in front of the d
58.
by lcuff 3y ago
Two thoughts: (1) ChatGPT answers questions immediately (I'm paying for premium service so I don't get shut out), which is a big win over Stack Overflow where I recently waited for two or three days before getting a partially-cor
59.
by lcuff 3y ago
Overall, good on you. Because I know very few countries in Oceania, it's very frustrating. Wake Island, eek!. If there were a 'show me' button that appears after a wrong answer, that would be a good addition. The result mes
60.
by lcuff 3y ago
I feel quite sorry for this person, however ... even the most well-vetted treatments can have powerfully negative effects on some people. Allergies to penicillin come to mind. I had a manic episode comparatively quite late in life (46). It

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