rmunn

3 ms·

1.
by rmunn 5d ago
But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
2.
by rmunn 5d ago
It had so many strategic choices, giving it a depth that would surprise most modern gamers seeing it for the first time. Starting with the race design, where your choices can make or break your game. Choose wisely! Then there's ship de
3.
by rmunn 8d ago
"... but this margin is not large enough to contain it." Sound familiar? Now, it's possible that Fermat thought he had a proof of his theorem, but that it would have turned out to be wrong. That happens sometimes. But he did
4.
by rmunn 8d ago
It's funny, but I had the same thing happen to me once. One day, overnight, my computer decided it was 2006. It happened twenty years ago... ;-)
5.
by rmunn 9d ago
The filter keeps the tea... it's just that you then lift the filter out of the cup, carrying the tea with it. Flip your brain around to see it from that direction and it might help you with the mnemonics.
6.
by rmunn 12d ago
I suspect the name alone will help drive adoption, especially from non-technical people. Heck, I'm reasonably technical myself (but not expert in image formats) and my first instinct on encountering AVIF was to say "AVIF? Does tha
7.
by rmunn 12d ago
HDR is something many photography enthusiasts are interested in, and the ability to losslessly transcode from JPEG to JPEG XL (and back again if you have to) is actually IMHO the "killer app" for the format. Many people have years
8.
by rmunn 12d ago
I would argue that even if JPEG XL isn't the best choice for Web images, if browsers don't support it then that will widely hinder its adoption for its non-Web use cases. Would you agree? The scenario I'm thinking of is sendi
9.
by rmunn 12d ago
Ah, didn't know that. Then the main reason to use DDG would be if their "we don't track your searches" claim is honest. (Which I think it probably is; certainly I've seen no evidence that DDG is lying about not trac
10.
by rmunn 14d ago
Don't worry, I didn't spend much time digging through comment history. Thanks for the links; I'm about to have to leave my computer and do something else for several hours, so I can't look at them right now. But since yo
11.
by rmunn 14d ago
I'd also recommend `:degree <= 0` as the check, rather than `= 0`, just in case someone passes `5.01` to the function (which would cause an infinite loop as you'd never hit exactly 0). But yes, if that was just coded into the c
12.
by rmunn 14d ago
Where the heck did the sudden vitriol come from? I went through the HN comments of the person you're replying to and found nothing like the kind of thing you're replying to in the first several pages. If he said something months a
13.
by rmunn 14d ago
That's more true in some locations than in others. There are places where the reported quality of life is quite a bit higher than others. I see comments like yours a lot on HN, and I'm starting to suspect that the average HN comme
14.
by rmunn 14d ago
DuckDuckGo is owned by Microsoft? Are you sure? You're not confusing them with Bing, by any chance?
15.
by rmunn 14d ago
Good example, which is why both you and the other commenter gave it. And if that's as far as it went it wouldn't have bothered me so much; it was when conservative people I know were getting different results from liberal people f
16.
by rmunn 14d ago
Glad to know the team is growing, it makes me slightly less worried about the project's bus factor.
17.
by rmunn 14d ago
There's a limit to how long the name can be, even in Snap! — not an enforced limit as far as I know, but a practical one. You don't want the block you're dragging around to be thousands of pixels wide, it's very inconv
18.
by rmunn 14d ago
Oh yeah, forgot about those! (I didn't teach them to beginners for obvious reasons). Those make it a Scheme rather than a Lisp. And thank you for all your work not just on Snap!, but on Logo before that. You have done a lot for codin
19.
by rmunn 14d ago
If you mean the tables in the https://eddie.codes/posts/pandas-should-go-extinct/#i-have-b... section, it looks like those came straight from the Amazon paper, in which case __eddie__ shouldn't fix them, on g
20.
by rmunn 14d ago
The tables in the https://eddie.codes/posts/pandas-should-go-extinct/#i-have-b... section.
21.
by rmunn 14d ago
Cute title; I thought I was about to read a contrarian ecologist saying "a species that is so very specialized in its diet and finicky in its reproductive behavior doesn't deserve, evolutionarily speaking, to survive". (Ser
22.
by rmunn 14d ago
I wouldn't mind that one. That a man in the US and a woman in Japan would get different results for a search for "sushi restaurant" is perfectly reasonable (even if the woman in Japan was searching in English). It's when
23.
by rmunn 14d ago
It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying
24.
by rmunn 14d ago
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: t
25.
by rmunn 14d ago
Not true in this case; the original intent for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) was as an extension to Scratch. When the Scratch team decided not to merge it, the BYOB folks decided to build it into Snap! instead of abandoning the perfectly-fun
26.
by rmunn 14d ago
In Snap! version 12 they have added the ability to create tutorials, which are projects that load up with a limited set of blocks (you choose what set is available when creating the tutorial). This fixes the intimidation problem: you can ev
27.
by rmunn 14d ago
> I think Snap! could take advantage of its equivalency with Scheme, and you could just parse Scheme into Snap! blocks, and the other way around. And ChatGPT knows scheme pretty well, though it's not as ubiquitous and standard as Ja
28.
by rmunn 14d ago
If you're thinking that LLMs will be doing all the coding, well, in my experience I get far better results from the model when I say "Write me a function that does X. It should take parameters Y and Z, and its validation step sh
29.
by rmunn 14d ago
It did as of six months ago when I evaluated Scratch and chose Snap! instead for teaching the beginning-coding class I had signed up to teach. Scratch had lists, but they were only allowed to contain text or numbers, not other lists. To m
30.
by rmunn 14d ago
When I looked at Scratch six months ago, its lists were deliberately handicapped in function. They could only contain text or numbers; they could not contain other lists. Nor could they be passed as parameters to functions (!!), which rea

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