Nemerie
Nemerie on Hacker News
Does it make it type-safe though? In dynamic languages type errors also result in exceptions.
It would have a negative impact. The Russian government would be very glad to ban platforms like Google even though Google cooperates with them because it would help to control the population even more. Google discloses emails after request? A local social network will monitor every message for them. Youtube removes a video when it's already viral? A local video platform will ban the channel before it gets views.
> and it's not like getting gmail address is particularly difficult
Last time I checked I couldn't create a new gmail account without a new phone number.
If you mean discussions at HN then that may be because folks here are mostly Americans who are interested in and aware of things in their country like any other nation. As a Russian (concluded from your post history), don't you see the same thing in Russian communities?
A small problem with using Stockfish is that cheaters may use other programs in order to not play like a top engine. For example, Stockfish would laugh at some old versions of Houdini, but Houdini still outplays any human easily.
> Most men can train their entire lives and will never have the skill at chess José Capablanca had when he was six, simply from watching others play the game.
This is a massive exaggeration. There's no way it's true.
> Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.
I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo. And 8-year-old ones play significantly worse. (Also with the Internet these kids have access to all the knowledge in the world and typically have top coaches which Capablanca hadn't.) Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?
[1] https://info64.org/world-cadets-chess-championships-2018-u10...
Also, it's worth to mention that several people who expressed the interest to this place were thereafter persecuted by the police, including Suren Gazaryan who had to eventually leave the country and four activists that were sentenced to 8 - 13 years imprisonment.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-dacha-activists/2506655...
I guess the GP meant queen, not knight.
As for the first one, I think the reason was that Navalny called him after the investigation and clearly showed at the beginning of the conversation that he knew a lot of secret things, including the surnames of the other agents, facts on when and where they were, etc. Probably, the FSB guy just couldn't believe that there was a chance that a person who doesn't work for the government could be so aware of the details of the operation.
By the way, if the goal is to get better at chess and not just have some fun, a huge waste of time is playing blitz and not analyzing your games. There are so many people who played thousands of blitz games online with no improvement whatsoever.
I guess it also depends on what openings you play as black. For Caro-Kann or French defense you probably only need to know some good spots for the pieces and some typical plans, but if your reply for 1.e4 is e5 (which seems to be the most popular response among beginners), then you'd better be prepared for King's and Danish gambit, Italian or Two knights defense and so on, because in all of these openings it's easy to get mated in 20 moves while making only seemingly logical moves or get into a situation when you have to find the only defensive moves, while your opponent just throws pieces at you and keep making new threats.
> Should they map roughly to your in-game rating?
For a typical player, the chess.com puzzles rating is at least 500 points higher than the blitz rating on this site.
I think tactics shouldn't be on focus only for very strong players, such as FMs or IMs, but you definitely don't need to choose one instead of another. It's fine to learn some tactics, then some strategy, then some endgames, isn't it?
I think bishop+knight endgame could be much more common if players actually tried to get them when defending after exchanges of queens and rooks. So, exchange as many pawns as possible and maybe sacrifice a piece for a couple of last pawns and here your opponent goes.
Also, if memory servers me I've seen two grandmaster games only during this week, where this endgame could happen, but the players didn't want their opponents to show the technique. One of these games was yesterday:
https://www.chessbomb.com/arena/2020-russian-championship-su...
But indeed, rook endgames are way much more important from a practical point of view.
Though it's not true quicksort, it's possible to explain the idea of this algorithm with code like this in just a few minutes while the truest implementation in C with Hoare partition looks really confusing