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metaxy2

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metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I don't know if there's a name for this genre of photography (it's not exactly "abstract" since clearly things are being represented), but another example is the cover of Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News [0], which looks like a digital drawing or composite but was physically built and photographed by bandleader Isaac Brock.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_for_People_Who_Love_...
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
To flesh this out, the root notes of C and A minor are not that close in the circle of fifths, but the chords sound similar because they share 2 notes (C is spelled C, E, G, and A minor is spelled A, C, E). A common device in major keys is to take a part played over the "1" chord (C in this case) and play it again, or some close variation, over the chord 2 steps down (A minor in this case) to get a "kind of the same, but sadder" version of the same part.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Hey, the original Myst was made in HyperCard!
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Well, in principle you could have the node objects be created with an object literal in an outside builder function, and the manipulation also be done by outside functions. That's how it's done in languages without OOP. The question is how far are you willing to go to avoid doing anything that looks like OOP.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
They're using objects, including arrays [1], so I think they would have been more precise to say that they're using objects and arrays as simple data structures rather than using OO features like inheritance and mutation.

[1] https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/chord/in...
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too, it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online conversation than in speech.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor in British English).
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Maybe "endangerment" is more fair, given that it's still massively popular compared to, say, the interrobang.

Also note that two of the three authors cited are known for their bare-bones, economical prose styles; not exactly a cross-section of the literary world. (Poe is debatable--he was probably economical for a 19th century romantic, but not in absolute terms.)
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together.

That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I don't think Oxide is trying to say no one's done this before, more that they're the best and most comprehensive offering to buy an onsite setup for this fully set up from a third party.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Right or wrong, I think the notion of "the cloud" that Oxide is selling is the "elastic" part--the ability to request resources by quantity instead of having to think about the exact servers responsible for serving your request. So physical servers become an implementation detail rather than a developer concern. That's a concept that can apply to how you provision two on-site servers (or even one, really) as much as a whole multi-data-center cloud computing service.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
> In my experience, it is rare for a network to correctly generate Time Exceeded messages for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Doesn't that make it more one of those situations where the non-documented behavior has become the de facto standard, rather than "wrong" exactly? (I guess it depends on whether that decision is being made consciously by the implementors or just for lack of knowledge of the standards.)
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Chrome is also very big on macOS even though it's not preinstalled, although yeah, that also has to do with the marketing. It seems hard to find good stats on this but it's definitely in the web developer zeitgeist. On mobile, though, people do pretty much just use whatever comes installed.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Practically no one would ever be talking about Australian Rules Football (outside of the handful of countries where that's popular, of course), although presumably outside of the US they'd often be talking about soccer.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
It really highlights the amazing security level of one time pads, that they can be comfortably doing secret announcements on a public radio channel with provably perfect security. (Assuming an adequate PRNG--for such small messages they could easily be using a hardware PRNG; I wonder.) Only issue is that you have to have all of your recipients keep track (and not leak) a pad that is at least as long as the data you intend to send.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I actually did make a quick search to see if I was blowing hot air, and found this blog post that shows a bunch of benchmarks over time with a fairly typical Raku/Perl flavored text processing task, and it was taking 0.23s for the July 2022 release vs. 0.59s in Jan 2016 [1].

So that's a pretty impressive improvement--3x over 6 years--but I remember Raku being numbers like 4x or 5x slower than Python on benchmarks from the last few years, so by my very sloppy math it's still got to speed up by at least 2x or 3x to go to match Python.

It's also possible that there has been a ton of speedup in the last year-and-a-half since that benchmark, or it's not representative, but that's where I got the idea from.

[1] https://blogs.perl.org/users/sylvain_colinet/2023/01/benchma...
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
Raku has metaprogramming and an almost unprecedented amount of syntax... and an insanely slow implementation. Although they're chipping away at the speed thing.
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I remember it taking a few years between DHTML becoming a buzzword and XHR becoming popular. XHR was slept on for a while even though it was available in all major browsers by the early 2000's. Back when we were calling things "DHTML," updates originating from the server typically would happen by refreshing the whole page, or sometimes an IFRAME if you wanted to get fancy [1]. Once XHR finally started to get popular is when people started talking about "Web 2.0" in the mid 2000s.

I heard that someone did a talk on why it took so long for the Web 2.0 phenomenon to happen even though the technologies were available for several years before. Can't remember who.

A little known fact is that even streaming updates (e.g. for live chat) were actually not that hard to implement on the front end going back to the original days of XHR, via "long polling" (basically starting a new XHR request that you held open until the next piece of info comes in) though it took until well into the Web 2.0 era for that to be common. The problem was actually on the server side; to cope with long polling, the server would have to keep a long-running thread (and in the case of CGI, a whole process!) for each of those open requests and the servers would get overloaded. Nowadays of course servers have much better hardware, and we have technologies like nginx that can handle huge amounts of connections in one thread.

In principle you could build almost everything in the modern day front page of Facebook or Google results page with the tools we had in 2001, front-end wise, but the servers couldn't handle long polling for the streaming updated needed for things like the Facebook chat. Also the pages are so complex that it would be easy to get yourself tied in knots without modern conveniences like CSS frameworks (or even resets!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
metaxy2
·hace 2 años·discuss
I think the joke about it being "the only way to vertically center elements" is just referring to the fact that it's still kind of hard to do vertical centering and there's still no definitive, easy solution after 27 years of CSS. (It's now doable with Flexbox or CSS Grid as well as more obscure hacks, but it's still more fiddly than it should be.) Could be wrong, though.

Edit: I think thejohnconway has the answer [1]: the post was written before the Flexbox stuff for vertical centering was widely supported.

There were still less nasty options than 1x1 GIFs available, like "display: table-cell", so it's still very likely a joke.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127936