IgniteTheSun

Are you thinking of the short story "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov.

(A technician discovers how to do simple arithmetical calculations in a world where no remembers arithmetic since its all automated away.)

More information regarding the short story on its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

The short story itself can be found online.

[The title is from the article being linked, as per HN guidelines.]

There seems to be an inexorable push to the Tidyverse in recent years. I remain hopeful, however, that Base-R (and DataTable) will also continue to thrive.

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Edit for clarity: I mean use of Base-R without requiring use of the Tidyverse. Most people seem to learn R through the Tidyverse these days and don't understand its drawbacks. As they supplant the earlier generations of R users, it seems inevitable at times that the Tidyverse will take over entirely - this article brings a little bit of hope that Base-R won't be supplanted by but merely supplemented by the Tidyverse.

> I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is.

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From the article:

> You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!

>The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should.

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These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg).

[Edited for format.]

I have never understood why Markdown has gotten so much attention over the last decade while ReStructured Text - which is a similar format but actually standardized and more developed than Markdown - gets so little.

Tools like DocUtils and Sphinx allow one to do quite a lot with ReStructured Text, and I believe Pandoc can convert it to Markdown without any issues.

If you aren't familiar with it, a good hard look at ReStructured Text may be worth your time.

"People who claim to be Moorish sovereign citizens believe they are bound mainly by maritime law, not the law of the places where they live ..."

In that case, wouldn't this be an act of piracy?

> and not only in this life, it's for eternity.

Kind of hard to make that argument and simultaneously argue that the soul transfers to a new body at death and is confined to Earth (or worse) until the soul reaches a stage of enlightenment sufficient to move to heaven. Its arguable whether caste applies even in this life - and definitely does not between lifetimes as even the highest type of body on this planet (human) is not assured.

I'm also very troubled by the misuse of the term dharmic in this thread.

Westerners misusing Indian terms to suit their own desires should be pushed back on. It sometimes seems like a deliberate strategy to confuse and therefore hide the philosophy conveyed by those terms even though much of that philosophy is universal and nonsecular.

Also, in reading threads on this forum over the years, it is quite clear that many fall into the classic trap of confusing ethnicity with religion. Leaders that call for extremist measures are usually promoting the interests of some subset of their community - not promoting the ideals called for by their religion - but many of their followers don't understand religion well enough to realize that. This is just as applicable to the west as it is to other places.

I suggest learning more about what the word dharmic actually means. It seems clear to me that you are using some non-standard interpretation of its meaning.

> Ugh, I can't select text on the page. I do it to read more easily.

If you are on firefox, try this: View -> Page Style -> No Style and scroll down. Hit <cntl>+ to enlarge if needed.

I do this on many sites nowadays - wish there was a way to make this a default setting for all sites. (Other browsers probably have a similar feature but I don't have one in front of me to give the step-by-step instructions.)

I'm curious why the parent comment was downvoted.

I found active bookmarks in Firefox to meet my needs before they removed that feature. I don't remember Google Reader all that well and I'm wondering how it was different than other RSS readers. For example, Akregator is commonly available today. (I remember that Google Reader could aggregate more than just RSS feeds, but I don't remember exactly what.)

Since many still use RSS and since this post on Seth's Blog is so popular, thought I would point out that the blog has an RSS feed: https://seths.blog/rss

The paying audience for blockbusters is now global - and many movies earn more outside the U.S. than in it. As such, movie makers are probably now paying more attention to what is considered appropriate versus obscene elsewhere.

I both looked for and searched for a way to do so without a Microsoft account about a month ago - could not upgrade to Windows 10 Home without it and could not remove 10S without upgrading it first. I had downloaded a copy of Windows directly from Microsoft but could not use it because the Windows 10S was preinstalled by the OEM and did not come with a windows key code.

"So it had to download ~3gb to update the OS, just to wipe itself."

Similarly, if one wants to replace Windows 10S with Linux, have to either have or create a Microsoft account and then have to upgrade to Windows Home via a large download ...

Thank you for replying to posts on this topic and for all your work on Spyder.

The following is simply an FYI, not a complaint - I am very thankful for all that the open source community does on projects like Spyder.

I've used Spyder for quick tasks for many years but only use it rarely now due to the string formatting in the console.

Just this morning I copied a lot of text from the supplementary data of a paper, pasted it into Spyder, processed it, and output it to a nice tab separated table in the console. In other IDEs, I can copy that output and put it straight into my file and it works perfectly but Spyder now replaces all the tabs with spaces. That might be OK if the output were all numbers but the output has descriptions and then numbers in different columns so I end up having to output to a file instead of the console to get something usable. A minor issue, but it negates the value of a lightweight IDE.

In the past I had a lot of issues with unicode in Spyder where the exact same code worked well in command line python and in other IDEs.

Because of these types of issues I find that I'm better off just going to my heavyweight IDE instead of Spyder even for simple tasks if I don't want to do them from the command line.

Regarding your description of blocked toilet (i.e., where a plunger is needed every time): I used to have the same problem but then I realized that air bubbles came up every time I started using the plunger. That led me to realize that the toilet paper I was using trapped and carried a lot of excess air into the piping. I found another brand that is just as soft and strong but that does not do this - upon switching, the number of instances where a plunger was needed fell dramatically.

Testing out of a course used to generally be available for freshman level courses but rarely for anything more advanced than that. (The exception might be that one could generally test out of up to a year of calculus since some people don't consider calculus a freshman course - e.g., business majors, etc.) It was a cheaper option at some universities than the AP exams were for students that had taken AP courses, although AP courses were not required to test out of a course. The testing out option enabled high school students that had taken advanced courses to start university more in-line with their backgrounds rather than having to repeat courses for no reason.

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Edit: that was decades ago - don't forgo an AP exam thinking you can test out unless you already have admission and have verified the availability and costs of testing out of a course.

Considering the resource requirements for this AI approach mentioned in the article, its unlikely that its been tested on more than a few tens to hundreds of proteins. This may only work on a subset of the proteome so I would think it worth it to continue playing if you find it to be a fun past-time.

Considering that this system "uses approximately 128 TPUv3 cores (roughly equivalent to ~100-200 GPUs) run over a few weeks" to determine a single protein structure, making predictions for all proteins encoded in a human genome seems impractical at this stage. With luck, this advance will help lead to discovery and definition of new folding rules and optimizations that will make protein folding predictions for the whole human genome more tractable.

Maybe this explains why its become frustratingly difficult for me to quickly close the app on Android.

Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also. It now has so many ads that it is almost unwatchable at times.

One wonders how much further YouTube can take this - it appears they are approaching the optimal point for extracting revenue from videos, so where is their future revenue growth going to come from?

I miss the YouTube of old rather than this commercialized version. To me, Tik Tok seems like more like the original YouTube than YouTube does.

I for one have become so annoyed with the level of ads that I have reduced my consumption of YouTube. To me, it seems like there is a much higher rate of advertising on a per-content-minute basis on YouTube than there is on TV.

I strongly agree with the parent post that having a simple list of books somewhere on the site is a necessity to enable browsing. If I have to search by interest, it is quite unlikely I would search here no matter how much I like the work that you do.

I wish more people complied with ISO 8601.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Even better, wish everyone would standardize on:

* YYYYMMDD for dates

* YYYY-MM for months

* YYYYMMDDTHHMM for time where T is the capital letter T. Two additional digits can be added for seconds and then as many additional digits as needed for precision.

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[Edited for format]

These are called ductless air conditioners in the U.S.

"We just should to stop tolerating conventional things using Internet connection."

Given IoT and 5G how can you stop this?

"I've had issues editing email addresses in clients with multiple mails per line."

This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.

We had thousands of years of technology before computational devices came along.

For example, there was a whole range of technology encompassed in the transition from rubbing 2 sticks together to start a fire to pocket size lighters.

The terms "developing new technologies" can be heard in the seminars in fields having nothing to do with computers, programming, or the internet. One would need a good background in calculus, partial differential equations, etc. to understand many of the talks.

---- edit: typo - replaced "we" with "with"