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Why don't people explain their acronyms? What is a Rust LSP?


People communicate with regards to the audience they expect.

This is why Rust (it’s a systems programming language) and LSP (the language server protocol invented by VS Code) are not explained in the article.

I am hoping I don’t have to define the words I used, but if in doubt, Google or ChatGPT are your friends.


It makes sense to always explain acronyms. I always do to avoid random people reaching out for more explanations


> It makes sense to always explain acronyms.

It does up until a point. Would you say the same about "AI"? What about "LLM"?

On HN (Hacker News), I expect that most would find a definition for AI or LLM to be redundant today. LSP is borderline in my opinion, especially when the context of Rust is already given.


Language Server Protocol, it's what your IDE (like VSCode or other) uses to do linting, syntax checking, and "go to reference" stuff.


LSP is a well known term among programmers these days.


Not if an LLM writes your code. I get thousands of lines of high quality Rust per day without ever stepping into VScode.


Then why not just ask the LLM to explain what LSP stands for?


what's an "LLM"? ;3


How do you know it's high quality?


I made myself an expert at Rust before I started using LLM's, and I review the code.


You made yourself an expert in Rust and have never heard of an LSP?

This seems surprising to me given that Rust was one of the first languages to broadly advertise a toolchain and editor integrations which rely on the technology.


I just put VScode in vim mode and rely on its basic symbol completion. My goal has always been to write as little as possible by thinking out the minimum solution. The simpler the code, the easier it is to reason about and to maintain.


Props to you. I've been writing Rust for around 7 years now and I couldn't QA 1000s of lines per day.


We sample it, and upon finding problems, adjust the system to eliminate that class of problems in the future.


Did you just create a new account so you could keep arguing with people?


Yes. HN is groupthink central, and enforces it through down votes, which marks the account as low quality, which then turns off commenting for that account. It is a classic negative feedback loop that enforces the groupthink. You can tell how many accounts I've created by the account number.


... Right.


> Not if an LLM writes your code. I get thousands of lines of high quality Rust per day without ever stepping into VScode.

LSPs are orthogonal to both LLMs and VSCode. For example, see Metals[0].

0 - https://metals-lsp.org/


So you're not a programmer, and therefore aren't part of the audience for a programming tool.


Very little quality, let alone high-quality, code is written in VSCode.


This is an astonishing assertion. Can you back that up with evidence?


No


You've got to re-evaluate... something if you genuinely believe that. Pretty much the same level of sanity as "very few good films use CGI".


I'd go as far as ask "what is your IDE of choice?" during the interview and rejected candidates that answer VSCode and VSCode clones. Now it doesn't matter because of LLMs though.



Why don't people use Google for such incredibly simple questions instead of asking the comment section?


It wasn't a request for information, since you can obviously look it up. It was a critique on people's inability to imagine their audience, particularly once it scales.


I'm not understanding the issue here, as everyone has different expectations for prose. No matter which LLM I use, I will provide a skill to generate high-quality prose. It is the first thing I add to my repo that I'm working on.


This mentality is exactly why the US is doing this. You've already condemned people without access to any good evidence. Besides, US defense requires the ability to do everything Israel did against Gaza.


> You've already condemned people without access to any good evidence.

And the live-streamed genocide that the world has watched over the past 3 years doesn't qualify as evidence? That's odd because I could have sworn the United Nations, The International Association of Genocide Scholars, B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and Human Rights Watch had all labeled Israel's actions against Palestinians as genocide.

America's evidence against that? Israel says so.

> US defense requires the ability to do everything Israel did against Gaza

Since when does defence require killing innocent women and children indiscriminately? At what point does that sort of defence reach a level of inhumanity that you're willing to concede that it's genocidal?

As a Jewish man following true Jewish morals, I will stand by the statements of these international bodies that find Israel and its leaders guilty of committing genocide. Never again cannot mean only for jews; it can only be morally just when applied to everyone.


This is exactly what I mean: you take what the news reports as evidence, when the news is hearsay. Courts don't run off of hearsay. I know quite a bit of what actually happened, and it doesn't match what you're saying. You've bypassed epistemology and gone to condemnation.


What are you trying to say? Are you implying there is no good evidence that Netenyahu is committing war crimes in Gaza? Whether or not their actions are justified, war crimes are not.


It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).


I find I get a lot more hacker news from X now than HN.

AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.

X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.


Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)

I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.


Ironically for you, the HN guidelines recommend to not complain about the voting system:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Now read the rest of those guidelines and then other comments in this thread.


Agree totally. X is pretty open. I like reading the stories her more but it's an extreme group think of only one position


What unorthodox thoughts get filtered out by downvotes?


It’s “censorship” when he gets downvoted for extreme right wing commentary, like supporting the complete elimination of USAID for one example.


You like the endless stream of open racism, anti-semitism, and hatred?

There used to be a time when one could be a bubble and never see that shit. But this cunt forced everyone out of the bubble and into the hate firehose every time you open the app.


They want this problem to be solved. So you spend the munitions, forcing the manufacturing problem to get fixed. This works in favor of Anduril, which cares about manufacturing scalability


I've gotten AI to write things that made me teary eyed --- it manipulated me


I made a sandwich yesterday and cried for an hour because it reminded me of the way my mom used to make school lunches. No AI necessary.


If I'm interested in a Jeep or Bronco, I don't go to a car reviewer. They say it is noisy and handles poorly. They act like their use case is what matters for something obviously targeting a different use case.


Gold electrons at inner orbits travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, which is why gold isn't a silver color. That is really neat.


I don’t understand how something that has no clearly defined position like an electron can have a well defined speed. I thought I had understood that at that level, particles are more like clouds, or vibrations in the quantum field, and they had no well defined position until you tried to measure it, causing its cloud to collapse to a smaller region. But if non observed electrons can have a speed that defines the color of a material, that whole understanding seems to be wrong! Where is the error? Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense?? Even if we just capture the spectrum? Or it’s something else??


You are mostly correct.

The idea is that it has not a clearly definite position, but it has a distribution of probability to find it that looks like a "cloud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital

In a more abstract sense, has not a clearly definite speed, but it has a distribution of probability to find it in a speed graphic.

The distribution of position and speed are defined by an equation and you must add a relativistic correction to the classic version. For lighter atoms you can just ignore the correction. For heavy atom (like Bismuth in this case) the correction is important.

Informally, the correction is important only when the "average" speed is fast enough to be somewhat close to the speed of light, like 50%c.

The correction changes the energy of the expected distribution of position and speed, and the energy. When an electron jumps from an orbital to another orbital, the difference of energies is related to the color.

> Are all atoms on a piece of gold being “observed” in the quantum sense??

[Ignoring that "observer" is a very misleading word and causes a lot of confusion, but it's the standard one and we are stick with it...]

The observation is only of the energy level of the orbital electron. We know the energy, but we don't know the position or the speed. When you observe some quantum object you don't get magically all the properties, only one of them, in this case the energy. In other experiments you can get only the position, in others only the speed. [And there are a lot of weird cases and technical details.]


(Newbie here). And then going further, shouldn't there also be acceleration and its distribution? It says classical models could not explain why accelerating electrons were not radiating. If acceleration also shows up in QM, then ... a distribution of radiation?


[Sorry for the delay. I really had to watch that soccer game and kids don't have school on Sunday.]

There is an acceleration distribution, but the acceleration operator is strange. I don't remember the details and a quick google search confirms that it's strange.

It's complicated... let's oversimplify some details...

In QM the electron must jump from one orbital to another, and the difference in energy is emitted as radiation as a photon. If the electron jumps from A to B, then B must be empty. So if A is the orbital with less energy then it can't emit. Also if B is full, it can't emit.

For a big enough system, there are plenty of options for B and you get a very good approximation that is the classic rule that says that accelerating electrons emit photons.

There are weird cases, like in a neutron star, there are too many electrons trapped by gravity so all possible B are full, and you have electrons that can't emit.

It you want a tabletop experiment, the keyword is "fermion gas" that are gas of fermions (like electrons) that are very cold and very dense and they have a strange repulsion that is not explained classically. It is caused because there are jumps that are forbidden because the destination is full. (If you heat them or give them more room to be diluted, this strange repulsion almost disappears and you can aproximarte them as a classical gas.)

> a distribution of radiation?

If you measure the radiation far away, you have a distribution of possible colors/energy of the photon, because the electron may choose to jump form A to B1, B2, B3, ... This is like the lines color of gas lamps.

If you measure close enough, you have to draw Feynman diagrams and the photons may have a slightly different value of color/energy. But it's complicated and I'm not sure of the details. I guess it's related to the acceleration distribution, but I'm not sure of the details again.

---

The easy answer is that "acceleration -> radiation" is only a useful approximation when the system is big enough to ignore the quantum effect.

The hard answer is probably that you have to study like 10 years of physics to be sure and explain me the details. :)


Thanks a lot for sharing. This is insightful for me ... I now know better on how to think and what to look for as I dwell deeper.


"High speed" here can be taken in terms like this: the phase of the wave function changes rapidly with position and time. (Changing with position -> a superposition that's heavy on short wavelengths, high momentum; with time -> high frequency, high energy.)

Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two weakly coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.

(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)


The uncertainty principle says that the less well-defined the position, the more well-defined the velocity, and vice versa.


Acute heat exposure, like 45 minutes where sweat is starting to accumulate on your skin, causes capillary growth and other adaptations some weeks later. If you don't have those adaptations already when exposed to heat, and you're weak, you're going to be in trouble.


Are we distinguishing eustress and distress?


I guess this explains how I could play tennis for two hours in the sun in 35 degree heat (35 C in shade). I guess I'd better not try it again now that I haven't done it for a while.


Couple sessions in the schvitz first perhaps


It's performance for social standing. They don't actually care.


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