Well said. I have the sharp-eyed HN mods to thank for introducing me to Knowable Magazine: the link I posted was to the article as syndicated in The Atlantic [1]; I'd not spotted the credit at the bottom of the page (usually I'd change to that, as long as the original wasn't paywalled).
I noticed about 10 mins after posting that the originating site in HN's list had changed from The Atlantic to Knowable, so I've been exploring its content, and like it.
Thanks to whichever mod is responsible for swapping the link. Also, the credit in The Atlantic was merely a link to Knowable's home page (which seems odd, really), so kudos to HN for thoroughness.
My SO had that problem with word limits at school. She would write 5 pages for a 300 word assignment, it was almost like a brain dump.
At college I helped her with her assignments after she was done writing. I didn't know her topic but just reordering sentences, deleting redundant ones and shortening others.
I started doing this after she failed an assignment and she asked for help. After we were done "post-processing" it, she got a B on it. We hadn't touched any of her technical points, just improved the language.
I now help my sister through something similar. She has the opposite. She'll write 300 words for a 1000 word assignment. Again I know nothing of her subject, but I'll do a similar post-processing. In the process I'll notice there are some gaps in her arguments perhaps, or things that aren't as fleshed out.
So I ask her about it and almost always she can tell me lots about the subject from the books and articles she's read as part of the curriculum. So I tell her to write it down, and after going through the assignment we're suddenly in the position where we have to trim some stuff.
I used to think word limits were somewhat silly, but now I see how they can help focus the unfocused or help tease out the knowledge. Both my SO and my sister improved over time, requiring much less help after a while.
Of course left to their own devices, it would likely be very difficult for them. So there's that.
Incidentally, language was never my favorite subject and I didn't do particularly well. However studying math helped me a lot with writing non-fiction, where things like consistent logical arguments matter.
The ability to tell an engaging and concise story without gaps is a difficult skill. I imagine it can be required through practice and attention. I have noticed a certain deficit in this regard with my own family and I would love to hear what techniques or exercises might help.
Do you think there is any problem with teachers setting word limits appropriately?
I could imagine novice teachers who haven't attempted the exercise themselves being off considerably -- over or under -- on the number of words needed to complete an assignment.
So far I haven't seen much of that. There has been a few times were I told them to ask the teacher about clarification of the word count, like how bad would it be if we had 1300 instead of 1000. Sometimes the teacher would say OK if it was relevant stuff.
I can't recall any instance where either of them got a low grade for not fulfilling the assignment due to very limited word count. If you have 200 words it's impossible to go into deep details, that's just how it is.
Of course in those cases we often would have to do multiple passes to cut fluff, focus the arguments by cutting out details, find a word which might replace three others etc. We'd typically start with maybe 4-600 the words and work our way down to 200.
Of course as a teacher, if you just failed your entire class, maybe you need to look at yourself and the assignment you gave rather than the students.
I had one instance of that at high school. When handing back the assignments he loudly proclaimed "Well done, you did by far the best in class" as he handed me my assignment. I looked down and saw a D- on the paper.
The following class the teacher explained what he was looking for, and we would explain what we had learned earlier and he then filled in the gaps.
> I blame schools for teaching kids to reach word limits, instead of how to express themselves concisely.
I thought the same in the past. But I think it's a good idea to enforce word limits to make them think more about the subject and to practice writing longer and complex texts.
The problem is that the teachers just impose a limit without explaining and then it just looks like some bullshit metric.
I think modern journalism is more about SEO and getting attention, not word limits imposed when we were in school (if you hate word limits, then you probably dind't continue writing longer texts)
Wish we could use one of those “social highlighting/annotation” apps so people identify key highlights to make it easier for others to find the key points.
It's a streaming-based data platform which means "data stream" is a fundamental first-class citizen similar to how the table is on the relational database. The key benefit is that data can be move without doing polling (or writing job scheduler) with is how done in the traditional batch-based ETL. Compared with the legacy streaming platforms, Fluvio fits better in a cloud-native environment, with less resource required in terms of memory and CPU load usages which means it is significantly cheaper. With our WASM inline programmable engine, you can perform data computation near storage, eliminate unnecessary data movement, reduce network transmission costs and delays, and eliminate security risks. We will start to publish our performance and other stats. Our SPU (Streaming Processing Unit) runs in 1/10 of memory as a Kafka broker (which requires a min of 1G memory) on a simple benchmark.
What makes Ruby so irreplaceable? Why struggle to make it something it's not when you could pick an existing statically typed language and build your system?
Also how is Ruby a safe language for financial transactions when an engineer can hijack a running process and change memory without leaving a trace
No but, Ruby makes it trivial. No decompilations, no assembly, no debuggers necessary. Drop into an irb in a running process, change stuff and get out in seconds
Compilation is not a security control. Also if you're handling transactions at a significant rate, PCI (with all its problems) makes sure there's a trace.
I'm not so sure. You can certainly attach a debugger to any running process. But that's not what parent was suggesting. He was saying anyone could attach a REPL. That's a totally different animal.
It's your own dumb fault if you expose the web-console or similar on production.
F# Is a good choice for cloud orchestration. MBrace was doing something similar to this atleast about 5yrs ago.
I've written a ml pipeline entirely in F# with deployment.
My 2p re: Dark
Rather than creating a completely new language, Dark could just provide an API or a framework and use F# as the deployment scripting lang.
F# is succinct and easy to learn and work with for the customers (DevOps). Beats yaml anyday.
Writing a new language that is production ready is no small task.. takes years to get the syntax, stdlibs, and tooling right. By that time cloud computing may evolve into something else entirely..
I'm really enjoying the trend in the F# community these days of using computation expressions for configuration. Means you can get great IDE support and type checking with configs. Some examples:
