Viewing profile — alexhill

More than the header image I reckon. I’m still not at the point where I jump to “AI” when encountering writing like this and spend way too long waiting for the facts and research t…

Posting here on behalf of a friend who is the director of a community choir. For better or worse, the choir uses (not exclusively) Facebook to communicate internally, and Facebook …

> They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know. You're right. If the questions were being asked of someone who was genuinely motivated to an…

I love it. Something I always wish for with linters is an easy way to run them only for the lines changed in a particular diff, to allow a codebase to gradually converge on consist…

It would be available day and night and not as susceptible to weather fluctuations.

This video is great. It's made me really interested in the new camera, and the relative lack of actual information presented about it, in contrast to what's presented in that video…

AFAIK there isn't a widely-used, solid JS compressor written in Python, so you're adding a dependency either way. You either need a Java runtime for the Closure Compiler, or you ne…

> that journal peer review is non-existent This isn't about peer review, because the paper was knowingly submitted only to journals known not to conduct peer review. Quoting from t…

There are certainly solutions to deal with it by designing for leaks as an expected maintenance problem, though preventing them would obviously be preferable. There are numerous op…

96% of fissile material converted to non-fissile material, and that energy is then converted to electricity at normal steam turbine efficiency, 30% or something. This as opposed to…

I don't think the author would disagree with much of your post. I did not understand the point to be that wine critics are frauds – it's that they're playing a game that someone la…

Interesting. > The assertion that the world must be internally consistent is quintessential rationalism, not materialism or empiricism at all. Science's core value is empiricism, N…

> most self-proclaimed materialists, if asked to describe their beliefs, will describe them inline with the classic Newtonian or Cartesian formulation of matter. I suspect many sel…

I'm not the parent but I'll stop considering myself a "materialist" then. I'm not wedded to the term. What should I call myself? A physicalist? I'll try to describe the position th…

Can you articulate what you mean by Python 3's "accountant-like seriousness"? Is there more to it than print-as-a-function? I code in both every day and just don't see what the fus…

I agree with the spirit of your post, but using the right HTTP verbs can have real, actual consequences because of how some caches and clients behave. You're more likely to acciden…

Text-search ranking is customisable[0] and results vary wildly based on the ranking behaviours selected and the weights assigned to different labels. It takes a bit of fine tuning …

If you want to preprocess your document, or aggregate different parts of it with different labels and weights, it can be helpful to store it in a separate column. Of course you can…

Yeah, this error is made consistently throughout the article and the author should fix it. It serves to inflate the project's performance by as much as two-thirds, and some people …

I expect that's why the current convention was adopted, and another reason I'm happy to do it that way. I don't ever actually format my code like my example - but if I'd learned Py…

My understanding was that he wrote an effective program and wasn't allowed to use it for homework and tests.

Colour schemes aren't part of the text itself. However, if your IDE could automatically display your code formatted as you like while keeping the underlying text file aligned with …

This is just speculation, but since as you rightly point out the space is optional in many programming languages, I suspect the existence of the no-space convention simply reflects…

I think it's slightly easier for both humans and computers to parse a function call when there's no space. I find your question interesting - why SHOULD programming language syntax…

Not built-in, but there are plenty of third-party JSON fields around. However, the author of contrib.postgres opened this PR yesterday, so you can certainly expect them in the next…