hf · HackerTrans

6 years agodiscuss

One particularly mnemonic collection of switches is 'plane':

    perl -plane 'my $script'

which iterates over all files given on the command-line (or stdin) and

  + (p)rints every processed line back out
  + deals with (l)ine endings, in and out
  + (a)utosplits every line into @F

I am aware that -n and -p are mutually exclusive, but as -p overrides -n, it's seems simpler to just keep 'plane' in mind and remove the 'p' if necessary.

6 years agodiscuss

[Late reply -- forgot to hit the button. ;]

Thank you for the pointer and, more so, your contributions.

That screenshot of SICP in Emacs -- running side-by-side with the built-in Guile interpreter -- induces peculiar sensations. An echo of how things could've been and possibly still are in some obscure(d) corners of the Net. An interactive learning environment that at least points in the right direction. It certainly looks elegant and somewhat inspirational to me (though my inner Alan Kay is voicing some profound objections ;).

In any case: you carried that torch for a while, don't be hesitant accepting apparently undue credit -- there's too little, in any case, to warrant worry. ;)

6 years agodiscuss

If you wanted to delve into the original 1984 LISP/Scheme version by Abelson and Sussman, I recommend you take a look at

https://opendocs.github.io/sicp/sicp.pdf

which is based on the MITPress HTML version, released under a permissive CC-by-SA license.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html

(nb. The pdf starts out with a curious little 'texinfo foreword'. Being able to type `info sicp` in one's shell? I wonder ...)

10 years agodiscuss

What? Do the docs on the page really say that[0]?

':back' is mapped to 'H' -- in correspondence to the usual Vi/Vim paradigm to move the cursor with the home-row keys, hjkl. ':open' is naturally mapped to 'o' and drops you into a tab-completable shell. ':tabopen' -> 't' and so on.

The key part, as in Vim, are /not/ the mnemonic, highly effective shortcuts. Rather, it's the modal workflow that Vim and it's spritual descendants bring to the table. I'll leave it at that (sounding like a damn preacher already).

[0] Now that I've looked at it, it becomes clear that they're selling rather directly to Vim-acolytes. Pity, perhaps.

10 years agodiscuss

Neat, thanks. Works identically with the slightly smaller fork called Pentadactyl (http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/).

10 years agodiscuss

FDE: Full Disk Encryption.

10 years agodiscuss

Sure, I'll try to elaborate.

Suppose you're reading a biography of Huygens. You may find yourself inspired to memorize a few of the basic facts therein. Dutifully, you feed his life's dates, his major acquaintances and maybe a few places of importance into the SR system of your choice. You are committed and keep repeating those facts in ever-increasing intervals.

After a few years a random conversation touches upon the very subject. To your delight you discover that you are able to hold forth on Huygens, the man and his time.

To your surprise (and this is my contention [and experience]), you also find yourself able to speak with some level of accuracy about tangential matter -- eg. the theories he worked on -- without ever having either added related facts to the database or dealt with the subject matter in the intervening years.

In other words: recall of a whole web of interconnected pieces of knowledge may be strengthened considerably by spaced repetition of just a few of the central facts.

In my experience there's no specific 'encoding' procedure necessary. I never put any thought into carefully selecting facts for the spaced repetition treatment, yet the effect usually manifested itself. So, yes, I would say it's a 'recall' phenomenon inasmuch as the brain does all the heavy lifting.

10 years agodiscuss

I wrote a program I fancifully called 'Human Unit Tests' to aid me in my studies (learning a diverse set of constants for biophysics). I can very much attest to the effectiveness of spaced repetition.

But, /boy/, do you need to stay on the ball. You can't really afford a cavalier, let's-see attitude with this (given any non-trivial amount of items-to-be-memorized). The review process needs to be as much part of a daily routine as workouts ... Yeah.

On the other hand, there's one reward that doesn't usually get mentioned (as in the fine article re-submitted here[0]): the strengthening of corollary knowledge (or coordinate terms, for the linguistically inclined).

[0] Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809762

10 years agodiscuss

I simply cannot wrap my head around the direction of the Unicode discourse.

We're discussing the appropriate code-point for different smiley faces, obscure electrical symbols[0] or, in the present case, half stars to express film or book ratings, yet we have no complete set of sub- and superscripts!

Am I mistaken in thinking it odd, that there's a complete Klingon alphabet but no representation whatsoever for most Greek or Latin subscripts? Or what if, heaven forbid, I'd want to use a 'b' index/subscript? Tough! Not even the "phonetic extensions", where subscript-i comes from, provides it.

Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... or look for SUBSCRIPT in http://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt

Surely there's the one or two actual scientists on the Unicode consortium? Or even the one odd soul still sporting a notion of consistency who finds it only logical to provide a "subscript b" if there's a "subscript a"?

How am I wrong?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682

11 years agodiscuss

The author states, as regards the interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger diagrams, that

  [i]n two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between
  perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci 
  conception of Dunning-Kruger.

In my corner of the universe, you don't get to cherry-pick which pieces of data (ie "what instances of two sets of random variables") you bestow the golden twig of correlation upon. If I'm not entirely mistaken, correlation is very much a global feature, not a measure of proximity of two points on a chart.

So, yes, Dunning-Kruger (as evinced from the diagrams sported here) indeed seems to make a weaker claim: that there's no correlation between “perceived ability” and “actual ability”. As such, this claim is as far from the "pop-sci conception" of Dunning-Kruger as it is from the author's.

11 years agodiscuss

The word seems entirely appropriate.

As a European, I have not been able to convince family members or friends that aren't intimately acquainted with the US-American situation that there is no universal, legislative framework for paid or unpaid maternity leave.

They usually respond with a variation of "this can't be right; you must be misinformed; it would be horrible if that were the case."

And you (as a populace) aren't even fighting for it! Not visibly, at least. So, honestly, you seem to be the one hurting all sorts of causes with this misdirected attitude of apologism.

11 years agodiscuss

It is astonishing to me, how widespread fisher-wife's-tale-level conceptions about fundamental aspects of our existence are.

I devoutly hope that you are not, upon contemplation, equate a well-versedness in general knowledge with mindless memorization. Is emergent behaviour of neural networks really that alien a concept? Is it possible to believe, in all earnestness, that factoids such as these remain isolated and inactive in your memory until recalled?

These questions aren't there to test your ability to learn atomic facts without rhyme or reason. These questions, pitiful as they may seem, try to probe the breadth of your mental landscape.

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