xamuel

22 ms·

181.
by xamuel 6y ago
Not directly a quine per se, but suppose you want to write a computer program which writes computer programs. And you want all these programs (both the one writing them, and the ones written) to be 100% self-contained, no importing from a u
182.
by xamuel 6y ago
You can do this way easier if the language has an "exec" function. Here's a python example: x="""def f(): print("x=" + '"'*3 + x + '"'*3) print("exec(x)&
183.
by xamuel 6y ago
The person receiving early music lessons is often a very young child (4 or 5 years old). Good freakin' luck getting them to follow precise, careful instructions from a Zoom instructor.
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by xamuel 6y ago
This site lists NY, NJ, Massachusetts and California as the four states to issue such orders: https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2020/coronavirus...
185.
by xamuel 6y ago
The high death count in NY/NJ is probably related to the fact that in both states, the governors ordered that nursing homes not be permitted to refuse coronavirus patients.
186.
by xamuel 6y ago
Interestingness is in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, find people very interesting who go "rags to riches". I don't find it all that interesting when people with rich families grow up to be rich. I also find people inter
187.
by xamuel 6y ago
Oh come on. Here's a five-minute-brainstorm of people still living today who are FAR more interesting than Bill Gates. * Linus Torvalds * Bob Dylan * Paul McCartney * Terence Tao * Elon Musk * Saul Kripke * Noam Chomsky And that's
188.
by xamuel 6y ago
>The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis. Then some Pharisees and scribes came
189.
by xamuel 6y ago
Amen. And the weirdest part is it seems like whenever people manipulate the data, it's always to support whatever narrative I oppose. Any time the data supports the narrative I favor, said data is reliable and trustworthy. Has anyone e
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by xamuel 6y ago
makomk posted an interesting comment on another thread here 12 hours ago, which I'll paste below. (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23233097 ) I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want r
191.
by xamuel 6y ago
>basically the only person that is qualified to suggest what was asked to be changed is the person fired What? By this logic, it would be virtually impossible to fire anyone who was willing to lie about what was said behind closed doors.
192.
by xamuel 6y ago
Funny story on this subject. When I was transitioning from academia to industry, I was afraid (having browsed hackernews so much) that I would be harshly judged for reinventing the wheel. So I removed the CSV library I had written from Gith
193.
by xamuel 6y ago
>Ideally, the court would grant a stay on the enforcement of the decision, to give her time to properly promulgate the rule. The ruling explicitly addresses this: the case has been in deliberation for longer than the originally requested
194.
by xamuel 6y ago
The order they struck down was an order issued by a non-elected bureaucrat.
195.
by xamuel 6y ago
There's this boogeyman floating around that "the economy" consists of a bunch of billionaires drawing lines on charts, drinking champagne and laughing at the proles. If any of that is going on and is costing lives, by all mea
196.
by xamuel 6y ago
Wouldn't this kind of reasoning apply to every new virus, including new flu viruses that pop up routinely? A new virus pops up and appears to be just a routine flu, but technically we can't know about its long term side effects un
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by xamuel 6y ago
You're right, the question of where the break even point is is quite complex. Aside from the numbers you posted, it also depends on the economic side effects of "intervention A": better to be one of the 40,000 with long-term
198.
by xamuel 6y ago
As rossdavidh correctly pointed out, if we don't get a vaccine soon (which we probably won't), then herd immunity is virtually the only way out anyway. Even if it turns out there are long term health problems, that doesn't re
199.
by xamuel 6y ago
I admire this library of ordinal notations I wrote, which can be considered as a systematic meditation on the nature of strong AI and more specifically on computer programs that write computer programs: https://github.com/se
200.
by xamuel 6y ago
People seem to implicitly think the world works like in a video game: as if NPCs have unlimited supplies of hardcoded goods available at a fixed price. In an MMO, if you printed enough gold, every single player could buy a whole houseload o
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by xamuel 6y ago
>ever more complex configurations of CA until we find the one that somehow works Just gotta keep adding more epicycles, eventually geocentrism will be vindicated! /s
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by xamuel 6y ago
True, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fallacy where people spout numbers that look large out-of-context and then scream
203.
by xamuel 6y ago
The weight of the world's oceans is about 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, so at 8 million tons per year it would take about 18 million years for that plastic to add up to 1/10000th of the ocean's mass, assuming all that plast
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by xamuel 6y ago
Thanks, I appreciate your well-thought-out response. Re "you can just skip the track", I've found that often a new kind of music will initially not sound good to me, but if I force myself to listen to it a bunch, eventually i
205.
by xamuel 6y ago
Thanks for the interesting comment. Yes, digital music exists, but you haven't convinced me why I should listen to it. I'm sure some of it is awesome, and most of it is junk, just like all music has been through the ages. The diff
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by xamuel 6y ago
I think there's another difference too, which is the intense practice. Long before they became famous, the Beatles were working musicians, performing live many hours a day for years. (And "many hours" was further expanded thr
207.
by xamuel 6y ago
I used to think this way too. "How could the Beatles possibly still be relevant? There's been 50 years of progress since then! You wouldn't buy a PC from the 60s, why listen to music from the 60s?" And then I actually
208.
by xamuel 6y ago
The past few years, I've been doing a lot of side-project type stuff during the train commute. The lockdown has made me realize how valuable it is being forcibly isolated from the internet by a daily train ride. With the internet at my
209.
by xamuel 7y ago
We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually
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by xamuel 7y ago
Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already

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