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Re:The brain isn’t supposed to change this much on Thursday June 10, 2021 @12:21PM (#27462446)
Not necessarily.

According to philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen, Bohm's suggestion of the quantum mind "leads naturally to the assumption that the physical correlate of the logical thinking process is at the classically describable level of the brain, while the basic thinking process is at the quantum-theoretically describable level". [1]

Factoring integers is a logic operation (thus not performed at the quantum level). But an operation like identifying an object or a smell (as it is what the article here is about) could be performed at a more deep level using quantum mechanics.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/PYLCQA.1.pdf

Re:The brain isn’t supposed to change this much on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:54AM (#27458498)
There are theories [1] that part of the brain's function might work at the quantum level. If true, we probably won't be able to really understand what happens by measuring it this way...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

> I just don't understand why so many trillions of dollars around the world are being spent on military power that just sits by and watches dictatorships kidnap protestors from other countries and execute them.

We make wars to control energy sources, trade routes, etc. The west as happily puts a dictator in place of a democratic government when it's in their interest (or the best interest of the men in power and their supports).

Re:Why Lichess will always be free on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:50AM (#26912894)
> So why are there ads on websites? There is only one purpose they serve: to make money.

If there are things that could make Lichess way better but require resource they don't have, they should weight the pros and cons.

The cost is a worst user experience. The benefit is money.

For a non-profit, money is a mean and not an end. Resource will be used to achieve a purpose. Maybe in some cases the benefit can outweigth the cost.

Re:Why Lichess will always be free on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:38AM (#26912827)
A friend of mine, from Romania, has fond memories of his youth under the communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, being always reminded how great the leader was and how he admired him as a kid.

He discovered later he was only manipulated into that, but still classified this as good memories.

It's a little bit like those old adverts, it doesn't mean it is a good thing to perpetuate.

On a mac I can't live without "Magnet" [1]. It lets you do organize your windows in half/thirds of screens with simple keystrokes. That should be part of the OS.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

Re:Don’t use environment variables for configuration on Thursday April 01, 2021 @03:00AM (#26657398)
After years of struggling with config file in heterogenous production environments, I'll argue the opposite: environment variables are the BEST option to manage your configuration.
Nocebo effect is proven for vaccines. Even if we inject salted water: many will develop fevers, arm pain, headaches, nausea, ... (because they expect such symptoms). In some cases, as many as 90% of observed side effects are nocebo. i.e. if 100 people get the real vaccine and 100 people get salted water, 10 will get side effects on the first group, 9 will get the same side effects on the control group.
Re:Migrating a JavaScript Library from JavaScript to WebAssembly on Thursday February 11, 2021 @08:48AM (#26101453)
Great achievement. One remark though, it sounds like the author does a lot of assumptions that something is better without actually benchmarking before and after. On those kind of projects, one should measure the impact of each step. Maybe the new version is only faster because it uses WebGL, maybe the WASM code is actually slower... Or is it the opposite?

In my youth, I did a lot of x86 assembly programming. It's very easy to end up with a code slower that compiled high level languages. Here's an example: aligning memory buffers made a piece of code 50% faster (the bottleneck was memory bandwidth). That's a sort of optimization a compiler might (or might not) do for you. With ASM languages you have the control, so you're responsible for doing it.

Michael Abrash's Black Book is a bible in term of approach to software optimization. It's old but a nice read. Out of print, a free ebook is maintained here: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

Re:Plain Text Accounting on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:45PM (#25754290)
I never run it manually.

I plug this tool in my scripts that import transactions from banks (and stripe).

The scripts extract transaction details (amount, payee, currency), then they use `ledger-guesser` to create ledger entries and add them to the journal.

The generated entries are "uncleared". Then I manually "clear" the entries. Review. Commit. (You can also use a tag for reviewed transactions if you already use ledger's "cleared" indicator for something else).

For the best results, I have 1 journal per bank account. So I have different training data for each bank account.

There's no confidence threshold. When there is a new type of transaction is encountered, the guesser will chose the account with the highest probability.

The guesses are made based on the words found in the payee (and date). Unknown transaction have generally a few known tokens. Example: "INCOMING TRANSFER FROM NEW_CLIENT"... The classifier will probably classify that entry as "Incomes:OurLargestClient". In that case I have just to fix that entry to change the client, all the rest is good, it still saves a good amount of typing.

Re:Plain Text Accounting on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:52AM (#25747624)
I use ledger-cli + ledger-guesser [1], which uses use machine learning (brain.js) to classify entries automatically.

I've been relying on this for the last 3 years, it works very well.

[1] https://github.com/j3k0/ledger-guesser

Funny how "lottery" is the word that comes out the most when we talk about making games for a living.

Big studios solve this by publishing games by the hundreds.

Game publishing is a numbers game. Most games go unnoticed, very few will break even, only "lottery winners" will make real money. The stores are full of well executed games with original ideas that you/we never heard about and never will. Games in page 1 of each category will make money, then there is those from page 2 to 10000.

We've spend a year and a half building a game that made us just over $1000. You increase your odds by having a name in the industry: known game designer, known franchise, known publisher, something that will put you in the front page of gaming websites for a few hours, but even that is just a push, no guarantees. You can also go for a quantitative strategy: build lot of small simple games. This last strategy worked better for us.

Make sure you take this decision knowing that failing is by far the most likely outcome. That's the hard truth about the game industry.

Sorry if those are not the encouraging words you hoped.

"vim only provides basic text editing functionality by default"

It looks like someone has never read the vim manual.

Re:Read Me on Sunday September 13, 2020 @02:58AM (#24458970)
Some bits of text are missing (because of badly written CSS I assume), stuff floating in front of the text... I definitely stopped reading before the average 40% of content: annoying layout.
Re:Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:07AM (#24398535)
A manager gave him the "senior" title. Where I am, "senior" means "experienced". When you need a senior developer in a team, means you need someone that went through many projects and know the errors and mistakes a team can make.

Building mental models is great, but you need to have used a few times in different context, to really appreciate when and how they were the most appropriate.

The experience of handling multi-years projects (and getting back to them after a few years too) has no equivalent.

You can read as much as you like, nothing beats experience, which you will get after years and years in the job.

Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots on Saturday April 04, 2020 @03:46AM (#22776875)
Thanks, those log-scale plots are way more interesting than linear one.

Small mistake: Israel isn't in Europe but in Eastern Mediterranean.

Re:Verlan: French slang that inverses words on Sunday February 02, 2020 @05:47AM (#22216331)
You'll also hear frequently "rabza" for "les arabes".

The liaison between the "s" and "a", prononced "za", is incorporated in into the next word before it is inverted.

Re:Verlan: French slang that inverses words on Sunday February 02, 2020 @05:37AM (#22216291)
I'm French. My grand father used this form of slang with friends when he was young so they didn't get understood by others.

I've leaved in many parts of France and never heard anyone use it, probably long dead?

Re:Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince' on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @03:20AM (#22115659)
AFAIK, Telegram's private conversations are encrypted with private keys stored on device _only_ (not on the server). At least it's what they claim. If true, government requests for data stored on servers are probably not enough.
There's one privately owned generator in the neighborhood with cables running to each buildings.

https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&ra...

The owner sells a fixed monthly fee per 5 amp, so there are individual breakers for each apartment.

https://www.alamy.com/detail-from-a-wall-electric-cables-and...

Notice the "green light" in the picture. This is to inform people in the neighborhood that it's "generator's electricity", so they cannot use washing mashing and water heaters.

The cable from the generator reaches the house after the meter, there's an automatic switch to take current from the generator only when there's no electricity from the government.

Re:Lazydocker: a terminal GUI for Docker on Sunday June 30, 2019 @01:21AM (#20316498)
I tried that in a different context... The problem if you're managing many servers is that you'll have to setup a different local port for each server. When I needed it, I had to go check the .ssh/config each time to figure out which port was bound for this server. Did not save any time.
Re:Lazydocker: a terminal GUI for Docker on Sunday June 30, 2019 @12:46AM (#20316406)
They're more practical: ssh into the server. start the tool. [do your stuff]... close the tool. close ssh session.

With a web UI: ssh into the server. find out you want to check your containers statuses. ssh again while binding some local port to a remote port. start the web UI service. open a browser window. enter the URL. [do your stuff]... close the browser window. go back to the terminal. close the web service. close ssh session.

Re:Vim/Neovim Arbitrary Code Execution via Modelines on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:43AM (#20101788)
Unix has this built-in tool called "su" that allows you to "sandbox" different parts of the filesystem. Pretty handy.

"su - project1"

Adding to the list of ideas:

* A flat probability distribution for "will take between X and Y" is probably wrong, a bell curve would be more accurate (where X and Y are the 95% percentile).

Another question: is it open-source? I'm sure a few people around here would be glad to hack into the code ;-)

I used a similar software for quite a while: https://www.getguesstimate.com/

It's a spreadsheet where each cell is a probability distribution, quite well done and easy to use.

Note: I'm not related to this service in any ways.

Apple Developer Program License Agreement:

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded.

3.3.3 Without Apple’s prior written approval or as permitted under Section 3.3.23 (In-App Purchase API), an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the App Store or VPP/B2B Program Site.

App Store Review Guideline

2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the Application completely viewable and editable by the user.

Re:Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:06AM (#18004256)
Those thing are not mutually exclusive. You can be both Charismatic and Rude.

Many people are happily following Linus' directions. Sometime he enforces those directions rudely, which drives some people away. It also prevents crappy patches from stubborn contributors from going through.

Great job putting all this together! Brings back memories.

Out of curiosity I downloaded a .mid file to compare it with my local timidity install. The quality of the later is way better (I installed it from brew)... It sounds like it either use a better SoundFont or midi effects (like reverb) are not working properly on the site?

Is it just me? Not complaining, just mentioning it.

Re:How true hackers write JavaScript on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @04:33AM (#17916086)
The authors is quite lazy or cannot type fast enough, so he has to create all those cryptic abbreviations: `rks` for `ranks`, `unv` for `unvote`, etc. Which makes it really hard to read.

But it's especially the inconsistent use of camelcase in function names than makes me think it's pretty amateurish.

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