I've seen an interesting phenomenon where people watch videos on their phone even when sitting in a room with a TV.
I sometimes do it and I've met others who do it.
I think it's a partly habit. You pull out your phone in lots of environments which don't have a larger screen.
miniblog.
"smartphone sales have peaked, and seem to be levelling off at around 1.4bn units a year"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/01/12/the-maturing-of-the-smartphone-industry-is-cause-for-celebration
The JavaScript ecosystem, dependencies, and reflecting on best practices for tooling:
https://increment.com/development/the-melting-pot-of-javascript/
There are so many topics where you can do online tutoring on Skype anywhere!
E.g. chess: https://lichess.org/coach foreign languages: https://www.verbling.com/find-teachers or programming: https://www.codementor.io/python-experts
It's amazing to have a teacher on the other side of the world.
On the design of programming languages, a great introduction to the constraints in choosing keywords, and a proposal for new keywords in Java: https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2019-January/000945.html
Do you ever find yourself doing something manually, even if the computer could do it with a bit of programming?
Even Ken Thompson has done this at times!
From
Over the last 15 years, ~50% of improvement in chess engines is due to smarter programming, not better hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/76cwz4/15_years_of_chess_engine_development/
What other domains are like this? Lossy audio/image compression is definitely better today. There must be others situations.
One fascinating property of chess engine design is that a deeper tree search can be more valuable than a smarter board value metric.
If a metric is more accurate but more computationally expensive, it might not be worthwhile! It's a precision/brute force tradeoff.
Rust's model of references confused me when I started out. I'd read that they were faster, so I tried to use them everywhere. You can't return a reference to a new vector though!
Now I see them as primarily useful for signalling 'this parameter is not modified' rather than perf.
@cstanhope A friend also pointed out hotels dot com :). I do think they're rare though.
Reflecting on the dot com hype, there are actually very few sectors where genericnoun dot com has become one of the biggest websites. Seeing https://chess.com/ today made me think how rare it is.
Are the other big examples?
In addition to appliance manufacturers exploring smart/wifi-enabled devices, there are now products that allow you to trigger physical switches wirelessly! https://microbot.is/push/
Reviews are very mixed, but with hindsight this class of device was inevitable.
Activity trackers now exist for animals too! Whistle is a Fitbit-style exercise monitor plus GPS tracker for dogs: https://www.wired.com/review/review-whistle-3-pet-tracker/
Ambient computing is becoming progressively more common.
The Turing Test focuses on distinguishing between humans and computers in a text chat.
There are lots of other domains where it's interesting to compare styles. Do we make different mistakes in speech recognition? How easy is it to spot a chess AI masquerading as human?
Rust's for loop is much less ceremony than a traditional C loop, or even a Python for loop: https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.1.0/book/for-loops.html
Simple abstractions having simple syntax really helps teaching.
Building AI to teach users games versus just play it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829713
The efficiency of wasm is really impressive. An optimised build of Stockfish with POPCNT evaluates positions at ~1500kn/s on a single core of machine. By contrast, the wasm build on https://lichess.org/analysis/r4rk1/p5b1/2p2n2/1p2p3/4P2q/P1N1B3/1PP1B1Q1/2KR3n_w#0 can compute ~42kn/s in the browser for the same position!
GitHub will allow you star repo topics, not just individual repos: https://blog.github.com/2019-01-08-topic-starring/
Topics can be useful as a kind of hashtag to say what your project is about. I've not found them very useful for discovery so far. This could change usage patterns and improve matters!
Immutable documentation at Etsy: https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-immutable-documentation/
Basically a list of notes on a topic, collaboratively written on Slack. Notes aren't edited, you just append new ones.
Could work very well, depending on your team's dynamic. Super low friction, and similar to fsbot.
Fabulous article demonstrating how to write a chess AI, including several interactive demos!
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/simple-chess-ai-step-by-step-1d55a9266977
It also shows the importance of a big ecosystem. There are already JS libraries for computing legal moves and showing a chess UI, so you can focus on the AI!
Showing 701-720 of 736 posts