mega_dean · HackerTrans

12 dni temudiscuss

> I remember a story about people who stutter not stuttering while singing.

“Everybody's sayin' that the Scatman stutters

But doesn't ever stutter when he sings

But what you don't know, I'm gonna tell you right now

That the stutter and the scat is the same thing”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_John

mega_dean

30 dni temudiscuss

If it was really an “HN themed puzzle”, all the letters would be A or I and the minimum word length would be 2.

I’m kidding of course - great game!

mega_dean

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

> bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

mega_dean

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

Lazygit for a standalone program, or magit for an emacs package (some people use a different editor and just treat emacs+magit as a dedicated git frontend).

mega_dean

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

There is a setting (at Settings > Playback > Autoplay) that you can disable those songs after your playlist ends.

mega_dean

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc.

But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mega_dean

2 miesiące temudiscuss

I was in a similar place ~6 years ago, so not AI-based but still depressed. I tried therapy for 2-3 years and personally didn’t find it helpful. My problem is overthinking and dwelling on things, so I think it was counterproductive to spend dedicated time every week talking about why I was depressed. However, I’d still recommend trying it since it’s obviously helpful for a lot of people. Just don’t get too discouraged if it doesn’t work for you.

I tried improving diet/exercise/sleep like the other commenters suggest, but of course the depression makes that nearly impossible. The only thing that actually helped me was burning all the way out, quitting my job, and going back to blue collar work. I don’t work from home anymore and I make less than half of what I made as a dev, so it was a big lifestyle change, but I wish I had done it years earlier.

Anyway, I hope you figure out what works for you. I wasted a lot of my life being depressed and I hate to see others going through it.

mega_dean

2 miesiące temudiscuss

That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3].

I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly.

I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.

mega_dean

2 miesiące temudiscuss

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

mega_dean

2 miesiące temudiscuss

> I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

mega_dean

2 miesiące temudiscuss

I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.

mega_dean

3 miesiące temudiscuss

Reminds me of this page with an example for understanding how many permutations there are for a shuffled deck of cards: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

> So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way. Shall we play a game?

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

mega_dean

3 miesiące temudiscuss

I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).

mega_dean

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

> Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv

But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.

mega_dean

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

The youtube channel Summoning Salt made a great video that covers the history of Tetris world records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOJlg8g8_yw

mega_dean

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

> I'm curious how this can be applied with the inevitable combinatorial exhaustion that will happen with musical aspects such as melody, chord progression, and rhythm.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

They did this in 2020. The article points out that "Whether this tactic actually works in court remains to be seen" and I haven't been following along with the story, so I don't know the current status.

mega_dean

2 lata temudiscuss

> still being as faithful to the original as it could be

Wow, you weren't kidding - it's basically a note-for-note cover of the whole album. Thanks for sharing the link!

mega_dean

2 lata temudiscuss

> Although it has been on my mind for a long time, I haven’t been able to read a comprehensive book based on these studies

Deep Work by Cal Newport focuses on these ideas pretty heavily, and he cites plenty of studies to back up his arguments. Like the author of the blogpost says, "There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you", but I found my productivity increased noticeably after I applied some of the advice from the book.

mega_dean

2 lata temudiscuss

I released a game using OCaml bindings to the Raylib library. I had never written OCaml before and I didn't spend very much time refactoring, so the code is pretty messy and maybe isn't the best example of the language. But some of it turned out pretty nice - the first ~90 lines of this file detect collisions between two shapes using the Separating Axis theorem: https://github.com/mega-dean/hallowdale/blob/main/src/collis...

mega_dean

2 lata temudiscuss

In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says:

> As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive.

But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial.

EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.

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