News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

amp108

Re:Museum of Bad Art – art too bad to be ignored on Monday November 18, 2024 @12:22PM (#42174584)
Everyone wants it to be bigger, but we just have to work with what's there.
Re:Title drops in movies on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @01:33PM (#42067008)
> It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same.

Certainly not true in the case of a work adapted from another source like a novel. The words "The Fellowship of the Ring" are never uttered in The Fellowship of the Ring, and Peter Jackson's ham-fisted insert there was obvious even to people who hadn't read it, but especially to those of us who have.

And, by that token, if the dialogue suddenly seems awkward and stunted for no other reason than to insert the title, most people would probably conclude that the title came first.

Re:Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today on Thursday September 26, 2024 @04:40PM (#41663106)
To be fair, 10 years ago the programmer said "I'll need a research team and five years".
Re:Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today on Friday January 26, 2024 @09:32AM (#39143009)
xp for gold means you get less for killing a monster than you do for robbing it, and encourages a more careful exploratory approach. Modern D&D is much more of a tactical combat game than the original, where encounter design is "balanced" based on the assumption that players will be able to kill what they run into.
Re:Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope on Friday October 20, 2023 @03:41PM (#37960600)
Dancing is arguably the best (some might say the only authentic) way to cure quadriplegia.
Re:The past is not true on Thursday July 20, 2023 @01:25PM (#36803741)
I don't know what's inside Mark Wahlberg's heart, but let's suppose it's someone whom, for the sake of argument, we know truly regrets their actions: what are they supposed to do if another person doesn't forgive them?
Re:Failing to draw lines between 'script' and 'program' on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @12:53PM (#36406900)
This may be a definition with several edge cases, but I always thought of a program as something that was compiled and run, whereas a script was information you fed into a running program.
Re:Draculas, Ranked on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @08:01PM (#35622303)
There is no universe in which Klaus Kinski is better than either Max Schreck or Christopher Lee.

There is a universe where Lugosi is better than Lee; just not this one.

Re:Astronomer responds to Bard launch ad on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @03:56PM (#34699485)
Apparently someone missed the word "experimental" in the announcement.
Re:Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit (By Dan Harmon) on Monday January 30, 2023 @12:08PM (#34582837)
But nobody claims that ABABCB is the only song structure.
Re:Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @04:07PM (#33724539)
If you're wondering why your comment is so lowly rated, I suggest you actually read the linked article before commenting on it. Or rather, before commenting on a scenario that has nothing to do with it.
Re:Valid Reasons to Hate on Art on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @12:18PM (#33721906)
> It's better in general not to go around judging people's morality, and if you can't manage that, try to keep your moral judgments to yourself.

You do realize that this is, itself, a moralizing statement, don't you?

I also suspect nobody really adheres to it, either. People simply say "don't judge other people's morality" because they don't want themselves or others to be judged by the default/most common cultural standards. But as soon as you tell other people to judge or not to judge, well, you're judging.

Re:Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @11:45AM (#33721503)
I think you're mixing efficiency with effectiveness. It may be more efficient to store your valuables in a breadbasket, but more effective to store them in a safety deposit box, if you measure effectiveness by "keeping everything in one place, free from the view of strangers". In this case, the extra effort aids (so it is claimed, I believe it but am no expert) on later retrieval, not in efficient intake.
Re:Jean-Luc Godard has died on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @01:31PM (#32827514)
It isn't that movies like The Deer Hunter are slow, necessarily. It's that the scenes are doing things other than advancing "the plot". Things like revealing a hidden character trait or depicting the quality of the protagonist's world. I remember someone telling me that The Zero Effect (1997) was "too slow", when I thought it was moving along at a fast clip; I finally realized it was the difference in what we were getting out of (or looking to get out of) the movie that accounted for our differing perceptions.

Not that that can't be done poorly, either. But The Deer Hunter never struck me as slow, and I'm a kid who grew up with Star Wars as my template. But I got really into what we might call (erroneously) "character-driven" movies in the '80s.

(Dammit, I liked Chariots of Fire, but there was no way it should have taken Best Picture over Reds. Same with Ordinary People and Raging Bull.)

Re:Designing for Improvisation (2010) on Friday August 26, 2022 @04:25PM (#32612342)
I was really confused, and thought I'd missed out on a big chunk of music theory, when I read this. Glad to see it wasn't my understanding, but the author's.
> Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:

1. Use rif is fun for Reddit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....), or other third-party apps.

The only place the Socratic Method works is in the fictional dialogues of Plato, where Crito or Meno or Phaedrus or whomever are set up as obvious straw men, answering "yes" or "no" as Plato chooses, to questions most modern readers (and probably more than a few of his contemporaries) would answer differently.
This seems like a weird, and possibly untrustworthy, hack. Does Python not have the equivalent of Ruby's `x` modifier?
Re:License to Use JSLint for Evil on Thursday April 14, 2022 @01:11PM (#31029932)
Pretty sure most licenses have a clause stating that, if one clause is deemed invalid, that fact doesn't render the entire thing null and void. Check with your lawyer when in doubt.
Re:Are film critics losing sync with audiences? on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @06:36PM (#31009068)
I think at least part of it has to do with the fact that, if you're a critic, you see probably 500+ movies a year. You are likely to get bored with things that the casual viewer doesn't, and it might even be hard to tell it's happening to you. So you'll recommend something that's more "challenging" just because it's different, even if the rewards are thin for the average moviegoer.
Re:Singleton Is a Bad Idea on Sunday April 10, 2022 @03:10PM (#30980594)
> Your ChessBoard class should only be concerned with chess-board-ness. A separate second idea is that your program only needs one board. That’s not a fact intrinsic to chess boards, so it shouldn’t be coded into your ChessBoard class.

This is a remarkably bad example, because either (a) a program might need more than one board (e.g., a server for multiple games), in which case the example is irrelevant, or (b) singularity really is a fact intrinsic to chess boards, and is therefore a perfect example of a Singleton.

Re:What makes a great opening line? on Thursday March 10, 2022 @07:31PM (#30634616)
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again." -- Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Re:A regular expression to check for prime numbers (2007) on Saturday March 05, 2022 @02:49AM (#30565385)
Interesting, I wrote a quick script to use this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

def is_prime(n)

  ("1" \* n.to_i)!~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
end

num = ARGV.shift

$stdout.puts is_prime(num)

... then decided to test it on a button-mashed number:

$ruby ~/prime.rb 767423

... and it hung.

Thought it was the length of the number, so I tried something smaller (101). Quick "true". Then I tried progressively more digits. I got to `ruby ~/prime.rb 7673121` (false) and it took less than a second.

But it doesn't like something about the number 767423.

There is a major character named "Piggy" in the book. They kill him in the end. The probability is zero that those events are thematically unrelated.
Re:Bash patterns I use weekly on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:09AM (#29327101)
You could just `grep "something" file.
Do I really have to contextualize my statements that much? Has reading comprehension on YC sunk that low? Obviously, I'm saying this in the context of things that might work; if there are, say, 12 remedies that have been shown to work for some people, and you don't know which one will for you, then narrowing down the range is not harm. We're talking about opportunity costs, not whether shooting yourself in the head is a bad thing or not.
Re:CBT Harmed Me: The Interview That the New York Times Erased on Saturday November 13, 2021 @08:13PM (#29214684)
> (the opportunity cost of a failed therapy, which generally takes months, is huge)

To say that someone is harmed by finding out what doesn't work is a bit of a stretch. You can only talk about opportunity costs meaningfully if the costs of each opportunity (those taken and those not taken) are known beforehand. To say the opportunity cost of a failed therapy is part of an intrinsic dilemma is to say that not knowing what will work is an intrinsic flaw to all decision making. While it may be true, it is neither meaningful to point out, nor exclusive to therapy.

Many people go through several different programs before they find one that works for them. The fact that you might have to narrow down which one works for you is not "harm".

Re:Clojure by Example (2015) on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @11:04PM (#27285721)
> I don't like reading thick O'Reilly books when I start learning new programming languages. Rather, I like starting by writing small and dirty code.

Virtually every O'Reilly book starts out with small (and sometimes dirty) code examples.

Re:Berners-Lee 'Sorry' for Slashes (2009) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @06:38PM (#24003611)
You elide the parenthesis. They are as unnecessary when speaking Lisp code aloud as saying "comma", "period", or "question mark" are in everyday conversation.

Older »