a_lieb · HackerTrans

4 lata temudiscuss

To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."

a_lieb

4 lata temudiscuss

Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)

The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.

a_lieb

4 lata temudiscuss

> There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?

I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.

CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).

A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.

[1] https://cirr.org/

[2] https://www.coursereport.com/

a_lieb

4 lata temudiscuss

To Chalmers' credit, he's been writing about this stuff at least back to 2003, when he had a paper called "The Matrix as Metaphysics" defending the idea that the claim that we're living in a simulation is not a skeptical hypothesis, and that such a world would be just as real, just one layer "in." (Probably not as wild of an idea now as it was back then.) Also a couple of other papers on VR since then and many on AI going back to 1990 [1].

[1] http://consc.net/ai-and-computation/

a_lieb

5 lat temudiscuss

"Rightsizing" is a weird one, because it's occasionally used for benign stuff like reducing the rate of hiring. Much like "enhanced interrogation techniques," the broader meaning provides shelter for what it's really used for most of the time.

a_lieb

5 lat temudiscuss

Here's a business model for successful open-source projects—one that's already in use, but I think is rarely seen as a business model per se. I'd be interested to see if there's a blog post or the like about this already.

If you're the head of a successful OSS project and you believe it's helping your career in the way of industry notoriety, good demo work to show potential employers, etc.—then give a cut to cover the project's expenses, or even hire folks for freelance work.

There might be stretches when you're not going to make any extra money from the project; say you've reached the point where the project isn't a top line-item in your resume and is probably not responsible for your next salary bump. You can still honor what you've gotten from the project by voluntarily investing back a portion of the money. It has a "benefit corporation" flavor.

If this sounds like too much generosity to expect of people, consider people like Thibault. He's very, very deep into the "generous" side, in that pretty clearly he could work on the project _far_ less and still get a dream job. What I'm describing is a way to make an overall profit and still feel like you're giving back to the world by nurturing the project you've built.

Obviously, this is an overwhelmingly common thing in practice already, whether it's someone who made an OSS project to get a good job and then continued to work in their spare time to maintain it, or language BDFLs who maintain the project on a volunteer basis, but as a result of founding the language they have amazing and well-paying day jobs. But so far I've never seen it described as an actual business model, where you can feel great about helping to keep up your project, but still come out ahead overall.

a_lieb

5 lat temudiscuss

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no

There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1].

Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats.

It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc.

At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning.

[1] http://musicnotation.org/

a_lieb

5 lat temudiscuss

For me it's simply a matter of convenience of searching; even pages with great and comprehensive docs can be hard to search. And the average is so poor that I often don't even bother to check if a particular project actually has a good search feature. If my search takes me to the actual doc page, (and it's good) then all the better!

a_lieb

6 lat temudiscuss

The easiest way to think about Tcl is simply, "it's a Lisp, but with strings instead of lists."

It turns out that when you make a language like that, you end up something where your code looks and feels like a list of commands (much like a shell script) but is also capable of doing "real" programming stuff where needed without much pain.

The test suite for SQLite is (still!) written in Tcl, I think partly for this reason. You probably wouldn't want to write a test suite in bash, but you don't quite get that feeling of "it's just a list of commands."

a_lieb

6 lat temudiscuss

I've found that one a lot more common than the "Hello" thing, but I'm sure it varies by the team.

a_lieb

6 lat temudiscuss

This is glorious. The only way I could tell with any confidence it wasn't real was the clean, modern HTML and CSS (get with the program folks, this should be non-validating XHTML 1.1!)

Nice easter egg from the source code:

  <!-- <audio autoplay="autoplay" controls="controls"><source src="topgun.mid" type="audio/mpeg"></audio> -->

a_lieb

6 lat temudiscuss

Are there any online stores where we have good evidence that they have good practices around COVID-19? Despite the crushing demand, Costco seems like one employer that might try extra hard to see after the safety of its workers.

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

Huh, maybe his intro-level materials are far different, then. I'm not going to die on the hill that there's any connection; I don't even know whether he claims there is. But it at least seems that this specific stuff (at least in the early chapters I've read) is both more fundamental and more grounded in math (very basic math in this case) than the other intro theory stuff I've seen.

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

All good points. I don't know much about his actual higher-level mathematical stuff (I'm pretty bush-league about theory overall, really!) But I've heard that a lot of people in the music theory world say it's awfully close to regular Neo-Riemannian theory.

That said, in the Princeton lecture notes, he does seem to start a given topic on fundamental/"why" questions and then build out, more than any other intro music material that I've seen. A far as I can tell, his own theories are in there, but more as a framework to help explain things, rather than demanding you think that way.

For example, in the first pages, he describes a bunch of well-known fundamentals in music theory/psychoacoustics, but in a very "Tymoszco-esque" way. He lays out five principles common to a huge range of music styles: some combinations of notes are considered more pleasant than others, you don't want to have melodies that jump around too much, etc. (These all go for the Western musical tradition, but also many others.)

Then he says that our scales are essentially "solutions" to how you can chop up the octave into steps and meet all of the five requirements. It turns out there are a relatively small number of ways to do that, we've found just about all of them, and those are pretty much exactly the list of scales that we're using. But then he quickly builds it out to common scales that you can play on a keyboard written out in normal notation, and goes from there.

This is extremely satisfying to my hacker brain, like picking a handful of criteria and doing a search to find all the possible lists of numbers that meet those criteria.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if you can explain music theory from fundamentals just as well using traditional Neo-Riemannian theory, or even something totally different. I just haven't ran into any intro-level materials like that.

(Also: it could even be that his list of requirements isn't really true, but it's hard to see which ones you would want to deny for Western music.)

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

For this, I would highly recommend the music theorist/composer Dimitri Tymoczko. His career project is to rebuild the basics of harmony from the ground up from (mostly simple) rules, closely based on how people hear. A catchphrase he uses a lot is "why does music sound good?"

He teaches a set of 2 comprehensive introductory music theory classes at Princeton, and he makes the lecture notes public: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/teaching.html. These are a really underrated resource and have now grown to be as complete as a full intro theory textbook.

There is a serious lack of stuff that teaches music theory from the ground up (how a lot of us hackers like to learn). So much of the confusion around music theory just comes from most theorists using using old, incredibly crufty "data structures" to describe music, when the actual material isn't so hard. Tymoczko is one of the few researchers pushing back on that. He is best known for his higher-level, mathy research (he wrote the first music theory article ever published in Science), but those lecture notes are a great way to get started for anyone who gets frustrated with learning theory the traditional way—which is pretty much everyone.

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

Due to exactly this issue, an increasing number of languages have an operator just for "if exists and not null": the null coalescing operator[0].

What "exists" means depends on the language; it can be as loose as checking if the variable has ever been set (PHP), but generally has nothing to do with truthiness/falsiness status.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

I also worry about the increase in security surface area. A ton of additional C-level operations exposed to JS in all browsers. What could go wrong?

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

Ah, interesting—thanks for pointing that out. That is practically the same thing. I only wonder if the fact that it's two dots tends to discourage it from general use for things like arithmetic, compared to a single character.

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

Good question--just stack them up on the left on the same order as they appear in the expression, I guess.

a_lieb

7 lat temudiscuss

I've always wondered if a good way to do infix would be to simply have the ability to mark an item with a character that means "move this to the front of the expression." Let's say the char is ":". Then this:

  (1 :+ 2)

Would be converted to this:

  (+ 1 2)

It would also allow for arbitrary placement, so you can do goofy stuff like pretend to be Forth without writing custom macros for the situation:

  (1 2 3 4 5 :+)

Whether or not that part is an advantage is another story ;)

This doesn't solve the "too many parens" problem, because you still have parens, but it does solve the "prefix math looks weird" problem. It's quite a bit simpler than what Dylan does, in that there's no special concept of "binary operators" and it's obvious at a glance how everything converts to sexps.

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