Thanks, that evaded me. The discontinuous {please, don't} seems to catch a bit more, though that wasn't my direct intention. It's just that if a mod's comment has both words, it's probably expressing the same thing.
This is the correct answer. If you're curious about what other sorts of things are disallowed by common law, look at dang and tomhow's comments that say "please don't":
It's not "off" unless you're simply reading it literally. If you do that, then it's a verbose way of saying "I agree". But the connotations are something like "I agree, strongly, and in particular am implying (possibly just for effect) that there are objectively right and wrong answers to this question and the other answers are wrong." The main difference is the statement that there is an objective answer to what people may be treating as a subjective question.
If it helps, you can think of it as saying more about possible disagreeing opinions than about the specific opinion expressed. "This answer is right, and the people who disagree are 'objectively' wrong."
It took me some time to catch on to this. It can certainly be jarring or obnoxious, though sometimes it can be helpful to say "yo people, you're treating this like a subjective opinion, but there are objective reasons to conclude X."
I (the comment writer), agree that it's jarring and a bit obnoxious. There were three factors that led me to write it anyway, which I've mentioned here:
Edit: Rereading the comments, I agree (heheh) with you analysis. I hadn't considered saying "I agree", because I didn't feel I was expressing an opinion, but a fact, like 1+1=2. The comment stated that the mods in fact disallow those comments and provided proof, so I didn't consider it an opinion.
Heh, and rereading my comment, it comes across as more against the usage than I actually feel. It's not my personal style, and sometimes I find it annoying, but 80% of the time I think it's totally fine and expresses a nuance that would take a lot more words otherwise. Your usage here, for example, seems totally appropriate to me.
The reason why I was reticent to use it was not because I was uncomfortable asserting an absolute (the link showed clearly that mods didn't allow these comments, I don't see any controversy there), but more so that on this type of forum, the act of voting itself is the primary method of agreement. Saying "I agree" or "this is true" or "THIS!" is generally redundant and noisy.
I really like this conversation by the way. I'm actively trying to become a better writer (by doing copywork of my favourite writers), and no other forum on Earth has this sort of conversation in such an interesting, nuanced way.
It's the first time I've ever commented that, and I was trying to figure out a way to omit it. I don't like that sort of phrase either, I especially hate comments that just go "This.", but they're rare on HN so I'm in good company.
Ultimately, I put it because:
- It was the most directly informative comment on the thread;
- It had been downvoted (greyed out) to the very bottom of the thread; and
- I wanted to express my support before making a fairly orthogonal comment without whiplashing everyone.
The whiplashing concern is the problem I run into most generally. It can be hard to reply to someone with a somewhat related idea without making it seem like you're contradicting them, particularly if they're being dogpiled on with downvotes or comments. I'd love to hear other ways to go about this, I'm always trying to improve my communication.
These demos remind me of TweetCarts, little PICO-8 (Lua) programs designed to fit inside tweets [1]. A bunch were archived on Mastadon [2], and it appears they live on as "Postcarts" on the forum [3].
Since you had to record and upload the GIFs yourself (which to be fair was easy with PICO-8), I spent a month or so writing a Twitter bot to automatically respond to the Lua programs with a GIF of them running [4]. I was extremely proud of my shoddy little bot (that used Python, bash scripts, and a LXD container inside another LXD container, IIRC). Crazy coincidence: I released it just hours before someone else was to release their Twitter bot that did the same thing [5], despite this niche being unfilled for years and neither of us knowing of each other. His was better architected, and we kept in touch for a while.
I had a repo ingested by some AI-slop "product showcase" tool. The dev behind it emailed me and welcomed me to the platform excitedly. Seeing the page made me feel sick and I told him to take it down. But it's the era we live in I suppose.
The difference between some random dev and Google is enough to make me willing to go to war with them if they want to slop-profit by my hard work while draining value from my community. They can go f**k themselves
Location: Canada, soon Montreal.
Remote: Yes, either or.
Willing to relocate: Maybe.
Technologies: Rust, Python, WASM, Parsing, Text processing, SQL.
Email: gaven@rendello.ca
Hi, I'm a developer who seems to always be doing some sort of text or binary processing. I'm good at writing parsers, not great at writing these posts.
Math Academy is a good option, but I wrote about the issues I had with it here.
Recently, I've been going through Introduction to Graph Theory by Richard J Trudeau. It's from the 70s, and I'm doing all the exercises. It really is an intro, and teaches some set theory and proof stuff. Doing Math Academy at least taught me that doing exercises is incredibly important for mathematics learning.
> Its structure and modularity is exactly what I needed.
Through great effort, I completed Mathematical Foundations I & II. I talked about it a bit here [1][2]. If you read through MathAcademy's methodology and reasoning, it's incredibly strong [3], but in practice I never felt confident in my understanding or execution, everything felt quite discrete and I didn't understand the relationships or purposes of what I was doing. I kept going because I was getting better, and because people online who were quite good at math said not to try too hard to understand things fully at first, since the abstraction level of math is so high.
The weeks before finishing MFII, my motivation was higher than ever. The day I finished, I felt nothing, and in the following weeks I decided that it was time to let it go for now.
I think MA is good. I've never done so many exercises in my life, and although I wasn't super confident, I was far better at math than I'd ever been. But I think MA probably needs a lot more multi-part exercises so you understand what you're doing and where to use things. I feel like I learned "Discrete Math", but in the sense that all the lessons were discrete and I couldn't draw connections between them.
(I'm actually set to complete Mathematical Foundations II next week, after completing Mathematical Foundations I recently.)
Thank you for your comment. I had a very nontraditional path to engineering, even in an era of self-taught programmers, and I feel a lot of pain and despair and bitterness and, uh, a vicarious feeling of disappointment, I guess... so discussing this sort of journey does me some good.
> I feel like I learned "Discrete Math", but in the sense that all the lessons were discrete and I couldn't draw connections between them.
Very reasonable takes. I think you're spot on. I do have a lot of trouble with the abstractness and disjointedness of it. I'm hoping that repetition will improve it. So far I'm still struggling with the same things I struggled with in college - combinatorics, for whatever reason, just seems to slide right out of my brain.
By "modularity" I meant that I could squeeze in 10-15 minutes here or there without having to commit multiple hours to a single concept, and that I could take a day off without destroying anything, but that's probably connected to the "discreteness" you mention, without a holistic, oceanic kind of cohesion or connectedness.
I'm actually working on a project now, an educational site that's kind of along these lines but focused on areas of CS I've always struggled with - Lambda Calculus, Type Theory, Lisp, that sort of thing. I think I have some good ideas. I hope I come up with more, because I definitely want to build a rich mesh of knowledge rather than a catalog of disconnected facts and tools without any underlying meaning.
> "'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"
I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book You Can't Win on recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if they want something and don't care if they lose everything.
A hidden pig? I bet some younger cops covet the cars with this logo.
I was once at a military unit where someone hid a golf club in a crest for the door to the officers mess. It was spotted years later. The officers claimed to "never found out who did it", but they also never took it down.
I started reading this because of your comment. Maybe someday I’ll recommend it in a HN thread and some unsuspecting HN reader will come to read it too!
https://hn.algolia.com/help