I enjoyed the part about factoring in unpredictability. One of my peeves with weather apps had been that they do switch the forecast on the fly if it is inaccurate, and I have joked before that what we need is a derivative weather app accountability app that tells you how often a weather app corrects itself. So I'm excited to see if Acme makes a meaningful difference!
a textbook example of an algorithm that works very well with union-find is the kruskal's algorithm to find the minimum weight spanning tree given a graph. Using union-find improves the time complexity of the algorithm from O(V²) to O(ElogV).
This happens because kruskal's algorithm essentially selects the cheapest edge not already included in our spanning tree that won't cause a cycle. So union-find is able to speed up this potential cycle check which would otherwise be naively quadratic.
Yeah, but the fabric of my shirt seemed noticeably worse at cleaning my glasses, so I stopped using that completely. Having a microfiber on hand at all times is very helpful for that
My opticians have always given me a microfiber whenever I got a set of glasses made, and last time I went I asked for a spare as well. Now I have the habit of having one in my pocket at all times so I don't have to devolve back to using the bottom of my tshirt.
I swear by Paste as well, since coming from Windows, it mimics the Windows clipboard ui and hence was easy to get used to. I do wish that macOS at some point makes a native clipboard manager.
this, I wanted to make a little utility for getting lyrics for whatever song is currently playing on spotify[1] and ran into the issue for getting the song name without using the API since that's just inconvenient for the end user. The most popular such project does go that way though.[2]
I ended up writing a small library that does that locally cross-platform by using the metadata from the app.[3] The approach is probably not as robust as the API, but much faster and works well.
one thing that caught my eye was the convert comments to code feature. If you can use your voice to dictate comments then combined with copilot it might just be possible to write code without touching the keyboard at all!
of course I guess copilot won't be perfectly accurate right now or even maybe for a long time but it is interesting to imagine a future where the programmer can think and get code written without lifting a finger.
Another nice resource for understanding zk snarks that I found easily digestible was this paper that was shared on hn a few months ago[0]. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07221
Incidentally, it's weird to me how we lack internet laws in a lot of aspects yet have strong IT laws when it comes to blocking and censoring websites when needed (eg. porn¹)
As an aside, I love the vim keybinds with IntelliJ combo, vim makes it so easy to navigate and perform operations, eg. the one I use most being dt<some char> to delete until a char.
Never can seem to get vim selections and deletions right though, because it deletes the character after the cursor as well so the mouse comes clutch there.
So I attend Vanderbilt, who invited everyone to attend in person in the Fall and now will do the same in Spring.
The university is doing 1), as well as 2) to an extent by cancelling spring break.
Interestingly, they haven't opted to do pre-arrival testing giving the following justification:
> Based on the lessons we learned last fall, we expect students’ highest risk activities prior to returning to campus are likely to be traveling to campus and engaging in social activities before classes begin, so efforts will focus on arrival testing and a shelter in place protocol.
We will however have biweekly covid testing throughout the sem, which should be quite effective I think. For Fall, it was only weekly, which meant someone who got infected right after their test would not know until a week later.
> We’re still investigating the ongoing connectivity issues with Slack. There's no additional information to share just yet, but we’ll follow up in 30 minutes. Thanks for bearing with us.