nicklaf

28 ms·

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by nicklaf 9y ago
I guess it just comes down to what news is interesting to 'hackers': human life, or personal connection. Sort of shines a light on the false empathy people display in times like these: people care about Tom Petty because of their
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Without trivializing the grief surrounding the victims here, it really is as simple as that. Tragic, but apparently as American as apple pie. And honestly, that's the bigger (moral) tragedy here, which is depressing enough that I don&#
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by nicklaf 9y ago
For better or worse, it's not hacker news. (Like usual, though, I knew how to get here via search, since I knew the discussion would exist despite being flagged off the home page.)
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by nicklaf 9y ago
No mention of Ted Nelson or Xanadu?
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by nicklaf 9y ago
And here is a more detailed expository summary, from the PR people at one of the author's institutions: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2017-09-05-zika-...
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by nicklaf 9y ago
The article (very briefly) summarizes a scientific paper published last week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, but does not cite it. Here is the original article, DOI: 10.1084/jem.20171093 http://jem.rupress.org/
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by nicklaf 9y ago
It's true that we ought to be comfortable experimenting without fear of embarrassment, as well as to learn to tolerate more serious failure on occasion, and certainly unexpected failures can serve to draw attention to symptoms of deepe
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by nicklaf 9y ago
I will certainly concede to preferring liberal publications. To your second point, though, I don't feel too manipulated by them precisely because I don't seek them out to confirm my own bias, but instead because of the high qualit
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Don't parents sometimes tattle on other parents they deem to be irresponsible, according to their own standards of just what children ought to be able to do by themselves? I seem to remember reading some anecdotes here the last time th
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Both The Guardian and The New York Times are quite intelligent and useful publications. In fact I don't see what is gained by reading NPR, BBC, or Reuters instead. On the other hand, while The New York Times gets chastised here as libe
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Any countries out there where this kind of helicopter parenting isn't endemic in the culture?
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Yes but Davis is fun for taking walks at midnight when it gets like that. Safe and warm with a subtle cool night time breeze mixed in.
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by nicklaf 9y ago
After living in Davis for university, coming back to the Bay Area feels like a walk in the park. I used to be bothered a lot more by the heat than I am now. On the other hand, I can't stand, say, Atlanta. I guess they say you should li
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Naive question: is the exponential increase in performance talked about in this article unique to neural nets? Or are there other techniques for writing classifiers that yield the same performance increase, given advances in hardware?
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by nicklaf 9y ago
That is actually exactly what I want (why didn't I think of it...)! Thank you. In fact, wkhtmltoimage supports svg and does a great job of rendering, say, GitHub or techmeme. It falls over on formatting mathoverflow.net, but I think th
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by nicklaf 9y ago
That's useful to know, thank you. Perhaps the solution isn't so complicated.
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by nicklaf 9y ago
The article mentions screenshots. I am interested in running the browser as a rendering tool, but ouputing not just a bitmap, but something closer to PDF. The goal here would be to crawl a bunch of pages and spin up the CPU to run all the n
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Richard Stallman was largely motivated to start project GNU because he took issue with the appropriation of source code by corporations and other proprietors, which he saw as replacing the communal way of writing and consuming software at t
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by nicklaf 9y ago
This is a very interesting idea. I do like the strategy of separating connectivity along the boundary of phone and workstation, and with the phone face down / muted to create space for yourself. As for having to connect your workstatio
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by nicklaf 9y ago
The funny thing is, smartphones are all but useless for many tasks the minute you go into airplane mode. There are exceptions, but you're basically holding a client to a distributed operating system which has appropriated many of the p
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Some people still care! Chuck Moore's colorForth has this inplementation of an IDE driver in just five lines of code: bsy 1f7 p@ 80 and if bsy ; then ; rdy 1f7 p@ 8 and if 1f0 a! 256 ; then rdy ; sector 1f3 a! swap p!+ &#x2F
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by nicklaf 9y ago
I will defer to others to write a general apology for mathematics. Here I will simply mention the reason Michael Spivak has given for writing books: namely, to learn the subject himself . Because of this, I would suggest that anything wr
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by nicklaf 9y ago
...there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication. No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teacher, leave them kids alone Hey!
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by nicklaf 9y ago
I recently came across an improvement to a Frank Zappa quote that Butler Lampson included in slide from a 2014 presentation titled "Hints and Principles for Computer System Design".[1] "[Data is not information, ] Informatio
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by nicklaf 9y ago
This book makes for a nice example of embedding applets and hyperlinked definitions within the prose of the text. (Didn't look too carefully at the content, but it looks good too.)
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by nicklaf 9y ago
“Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”
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by nicklaf 9y ago
It is interesting to think that there have been those¹ who thought about the converse proposition, and saw early on the potential for the debugging of programs to become a widespread activity which would promote general habits of introspe
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by nicklaf 9y ago
Perhaps: having tacitly written a 'compiler' for a natural language, he had aquired a subconscious appreciation for a field for which the artificial language compiler is in part the foundation. :-P
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by nicklaf 10y ago
I am quite interested to hear if anybody has any thoughts on the work of Valentin Turchin, the author of Refal. In an interview [1] conducted by Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay traced some of the key ideas of Erlang and Smalltalk to early papers by
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by nicklaf 10y ago
As an opposing view, I offer you the following analogy, by mathematician Charles C. Pugh, which he draws between conceptions of metaphor as understood in natural versus mathematical language: From "Real Mathematical Analysis" 1st

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