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    1. I'm gonna start as an algorithms monitor at my college, looking for tips on how to better help the students

      I don't know what is the correct word in English, but I'll be one of those guys who will teach a "class" consisting on answering questions and guiding them through the exercises. The content is...

      I don't know what is the correct word in English, but I'll be one of those guys who will teach a "class" consisting on answering questions and guiding them through the exercises.

      The content is very basic algorithms in C, so things like functions, pointers, and structs are off the scope. Here is the repo I made with the solutions for last semester. I'm starting in the second semester, so I have everything fresh in my memory.

      I welcome anything you can give but I'm not necessarily seeking technical advice since the teachers have that covered. What I'd really like to know is what you consider to be some good examples, attitudes, and approaches for this particular position. Thanks.

      7 votes
    2. Suggestion: ~wikipedia

      There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf:...

      There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

      This curated discovery of some obscure facets of humanity. Picking random articles from that list, for example, on the game Nomic; the Pineapple Express term in meteorology; or the British plan to build an aircraft carrier out of pykrete, which in case you didn't know is a mixture of paper and ice.

      I was planning to try to help kickstart this here by posting articles with a special tag but I'd actually like to get people's thoughts on this, and if it's something others are interested in, suggest adding a ~wikipedia tildes to encourage this here more officially.

      15 votes
    3. On Thorium Power (and the 'hype' thereof)

      I've noticed, particularly on reddit but also elsewhere on the english-speaking internet, that thorium nuclear (MSR/LFTR) power is being hyped. And I can't help but feel suspicious. It seems too...

      I've noticed, particularly on reddit but also elsewhere on the english-speaking internet, that thorium nuclear (MSR/LFTR) power is being hyped. And I can't help but feel suspicious. It seems too good to be true. "burns our nuclear waste", "infinite fuel", "Absolutely safe", "Proliferation is not an issue". Stuff like that. Not gonna provide much evidence for those claims existing here, but I'll say that you can usually find them in any big thread involving energy sources and there's a few TED talks too. Coal, conventional nuclear, renewables, any of those is apparently strictly inferior and we're complete morons for not switching already. Coal apparently causes more damage through radiation than nuclear, nuclear is dirty and renewables need something... anything.. to keep them company in case we can't get enough wind/sun. (Also, batteries and hydroelectric storage don't exist.)

      German wikipedia has this to say about thorium hype: "Der MSR/LFTR als Teil einer Thoriumnutzung erhält etwa seit dem Jahr 2010 insbesondere im angelsächsischen Raum starke Unterstützung verschiedener Organisationen, während Nuklear- und Energieexperten eher zurückhaltend sind. Einige dieser Befürworter halten den LFTR sogar für die Lösung fast aller Energieprobleme.[2][3][4][5] Kritiker sprechen aus unterschiedlicher Motivation heraus vom MSR- oder Thorium-Hype[6] oder sogar von Astroturfing[7]." - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCssigsalzreaktor - paraphrased: MSR/LFTR received strong support in english-speaking areas by various orgs, while nuclear- and energy experts are mostly silent. Some supporters regard LFTR as solution to all energy problems. For various reasons, critics call thorium hyped or even astroturfed. [citations are mostly english, for the curious]

      Meanwhile, there's major problems regarding practicality, we can't estimate just how secure it is (keep in mind modern reactor concepts are all "theoretically safe" as long as you keep the human out of the loop and maintain the facility properly.) Proliferation risks of thorium fueled reactors are immense due to U233 (232-contamination doesn't make the weapon less dangerous when used, just more dangerous to handle.). Also, no serious evidence for the capability to burn nuclear waste. And decommissioning a thorium plant seems, as of now, to be just as much of a shit job as a conventional nuclear plant - if not worse.

      My main question with this is: How do you view thorium power / did you notice the same trends as I did? I'm just trying to form a conclusion between the hype and a maybe cynical pessimism.

      18 votes
    4. fuck you.

      God put me at ease deliver me to peace. if you're above deliver me to love. there's not a sign you're months without a call. i begin to think you never cared at all. in winter breezes hang me from...

      God

      put me at ease

      deliver me to peace.

      if you're above

      deliver me to love.

      there's not a sign

      you're months without a call.

      i begin to think

      you never cared at all.

      in winter breezes

      hang me from the trees.

      god i'm sick of

      never feeling enough.

      make me crease and

      break me at my knees.

      tarot prophet guide me

      with your crystal ball.

      .

      read the names i've

      written in my skin.

      banish me to walk

      alone in cold.

      hit my face and tell me

      this is it.

      kill me, say you

      never cared at all

      .

      screaming in your car

      you said you'd call the cops

      if i don't take my seatbelt off

      on our way home and walk.

      .

      screaming in our home

      you'd always slam the doors

      and leave the silence ringing

      in the halls

      .

      alone in dark i wailed

      you didn't care.

      as you sat there on your phone

      and talked and talked.

      .

      always acting like

      i wasn't there.

      even asked me to pretend

      that we were not.

      .

      remember back in college

      when you made some friends

      and tried to make me hide,

      not show me off?

      .

      tried to tell them

      i was just a friend.

      and when i protested

      god you told me off.

      .

      but when i made you mad

      how mad you went.

      and appeared inside my room

      without consent.

      .

      i walked in and found you there

      sat at my desk.

      it should've ended there

      but i regressed.

      .

      i said we would grow past it

      never did.

      always made me second guess

      the life i live.

      .

      it's not my fault

      that you stayed home alone.

      why do i slash and cry and pray

      that you'll pick up the phone.

      .

      tell me why i love you

      when it's wrong.

      .

      .

      .

      tell me why i want you

      when you're gone.

      .

      .

      .

      i want you to ignore me,

      miss my calls.

      .

      .

      .

      if at least you'll speak

      to me at all.

      fuck you.

      i'm sorry.

      i love you.

      fuck you.

      fuck you too.

      12 votes
    5. So what's up with Voat?

      hey all! i think this is my first ~talk post, 👀 nice place ye got here! so, i got to thinking about social media sites a few days ago (whilst trying to brainstorm a sideproject that isn't a social...

      hey all!

      i think this is my first ~talk post, 👀 nice place ye got here!

      so, i got to thinking about social media sites a few days ago (whilst trying to brainstorm a sideproject that isn't a social media site) and i got to thinking about Voat.

      it seemed like an interesting idea at first, a nearly literal copy-paste of old reddit meant a system that i was already used to, but i'd also be early enough to get whatever username i want, and they even have a cute little goat!

      and then uhh

      reddit got rid of a lot of hate-communities

      and they all went to voat.

      now - i guess that's fine. if they want to all exile themselves into their own corner of the internet, i can't stop em

      but my question is like - what about the people behind Voat? obviously there's people running the site, there's investment money involved, and they have to know that their site is the front-yard above-ground pool with green water of the internet, right?

      i tried looking for some interviews of the founder - but i couldn't find anything.

      any of you lot know what's goin' on with voat? what are your thoughts on the site itself? its longevity?

      30 votes
    6. Ian Lance Taylor: “Go intentionally has a weak type system, (…)”

      Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language: (…) Go...

      Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language:

      (…) Go intentionally has a weak type system, and there are many restrictions that can be expressed in other languages but cannot be expressed in Go. Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types. (…)

      I found this distinction, writing code vs. writing types, very insightful. In my experience, in a language like Rust or (modern fancy) C++ the programmer is constantly forced to think about types, while when I program in Go or C, I almost never think about them. Types are, in fact, almost always obvious. It is also interesting that languages like Haskell and Idris explicitly expect the programmer to program with types.

      What do you think?

      9 votes
    7. Filtering specific users

      Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a...

      Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a sub-tilde group, but for one reason or another, not a specific user's content in that group. Is this a bad idea?

      16 votes
    8. Your own "main" user page (both topics and comments) is now paginated - this will be extended to everyone soon, so last warning to do any history cleanup

      Things have been really quiet for the past few weeks. I've been pretty deep into server-admin-type work trying to get the site ready to be publicly visible, and while I have a decent understanding...

      Things have been really quiet for the past few weeks. I've been pretty deep into server-admin-type work trying to get the site ready to be publicly visible, and while I have a decent understanding of that side of things I'm definitely not an expert, so I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting that hasn't really looked like much happening from the outside.

      I'm pretty happy with the state of everything now though, and I'm intending to make the site publicly visible (but still requiring an invite to register/participate) sometime next week. Part of that will be making some changes that have been overdue for a while, and catching up on merge requests and other things that have been getting backlogged while I've been in server-admin mode (and I apologize to all the people that have submitted those that I've been neglecting).

      So this change is one that I've said is coming for a long time: your "main" user page is now paginated, and you no longer need to select "Topics" or "Comments" to be able to look back through older posts. For the moment, this is still restricted to only your own page, but on Monday, I will be enabling pagination on all user pages. So this is the final warning that if there's anything in your history you'd like to edit or delete before people can easily look back through your history, you should do it in the next few days.

      I'm still considering whether to add any options for restricting the visibility of your user history, but I think it's really important to stress that anything like that will always be a false sense of privacy. I know for a fact that at least one person has already fully scraped all the comment threads on the site, and probably already has the ability to look through everyone's posting history if they want to (and they could easily make that data available to others). Once the site is publicly visible, scraping everything will be even more common, and it simply can't be prevented. If you post things, it will always be possible for someone to find them.

      That being said, one thing that I am considering is making it so that logged-out users won't have access to pagination on user pages (similar to how it is for everyone else's user pages right now). It's still a false sense of privacy, but it at least lowers the convenience a little and means that someone will have to get an invite to be able to dig through anyone's history easily (though there's still the possibility that someone scrapes all the data and makes it browseable/searchable on an external site). Anyone have any opinions on whether it's worth doing that, or should I just let everyone look through user pages, whether they're logged in or out?

      And since I haven't done it in a while, I've topped everyone up to 10 invites again, so please feel free to invite anyone else you want before we get into the public-visibility phase.

      Thanks - please let me know if you have any thoughts about user histories or if you notice any issues with paginating through your "mixed" history (since it was a bit weird to implement and I'm not 100% sure it's correct).

      80 votes
    9. Any advice on getting rid of intrusive thoughts?

      Sometimes when I am thinking, these bad thoughts come into my mind, specifically images. I would rather elaborate not elaborate what the images are but they are all connected by a single object. I...

      Sometimes when I am thinking, these bad thoughts come into my mind, specifically images. I would rather elaborate not elaborate what the images are but they are all connected by a single object.

      I have tried meditation, and while I feel at peace for a few hours after meditating, the thoughts haven't really left long-term or gone down in frequency. Maybe I am meditating wrong. I am blindsided every time the thoughts appear.

      Anyone have any experience with this?

      30 votes
    10. What have you been listening to this week?

      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as...

      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

      Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

      You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

      http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

      Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

      15 votes
    11. A woman showed me her tattoo tonight

      So I was at a concert this evening and when it was over and people were leaving the concert hall, I went up to a guy and said that I thought the tattoo he had on his neck of the band's logo was...

      So I was at a concert this evening and when it was over and people were leaving the concert hall, I went up to a guy and said that I thought the tattoo he had on his neck of the band's logo was really cool and showed dedication. He simply nodded and said thanks, and then his mother (or girlfriend, I have no idea) poked my shoulder and showed me an identical one. It was in sort of between her breasts, but also underneath them. So she had to pull down her top and show a not insignificant amount of cleavage to show it to me. All I could say was "wow, very nice" with a stupid smile on my face. She just laughed and walked away, and it made my night!

      Was a pretty good concert too by the way. Behemoth are an amazing band! :)

      14 votes
    12. Inside the great Italian-Australian Prosecco debate

      Inside The Great Italian-Australian Prosecco Debate The EU and Australia fight over prosecco and parmesan naming rights In Vino Veritas? The Dubious Legality of the EU’s Claims to Exclusive Use of...
      6 votes