bshimmin · HackerTrans

4 months agodiscuss

Honestly, you just need cron (and Ruby/Python/bash/whatever) on an EC2. It's not very fashionable, but it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything.

bshimmin

10 months agodiscuss

Not to worry, though: his grandson, Louis, is in charge of Palantir in the UK. Definitely nothing concerning about that!

bshimmin

3 years agodiscuss

So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism.

(For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)

bshimmin

3 years agodiscuss

Here's the charity responsible for this bridge and several others in London: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/history Founded in 1122, which is quite something!

bshimmin

3 years agodiscuss

Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus

Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

bshimmin

6 years agodiscuss

I have the DT 770 Pro, which I'm not sure they still make anymore, and it has been a ten year love affair. I am reliably informed that you can, as the grandparent says, replace most parts of them, but I have never needed to - they are very, very robust. Mine do look a little dog-eared but honestly nothing most people would worry about. And, obviously, they sound great.

bshimmin

7 years agodiscuss

I once worked at a company in London who called an emergency plumber out who charged £5 per minute. It cost ten quid just to get him in through the front door and up the lift.

bshimmin

9 years agodiscuss

For your second example, your JavaScript is wrong. Let's compare the ES2015 JavaScript:

  ((a, b) => a * b)(6, 4);

...against the Clojure:

  ((fn [a b] (* a b)) 6 4)

Not a lot in it, really, is there?

bshimmin

9 years agodiscuss

JWB as in John Wilkes Booth, the guy who assassinated Lincoln? I can't really imagine him having a resurgence in popularity, but I've never fully understood the American psyche, I will admit.

bshimmin

11 years agodiscuss

The fact I completely forgot about it is probably quite telling!

bshimmin

11 years agodiscuss

I've been a Twitter user since 2006 and mostly just use it to post sarcastic and pretentious remarks for my own enjoyment; the social aspect of it is almost meaningless to me. Many of my friends in tech do have Twitter accounts, of which they make varying degrees of use (though I'm not sure how many of them would regard it as essential - probably not many).

Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"

I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).

A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.

bshimmin

11 years agodiscuss

I wasn't complaining that this was particularly onerous (in fact, I am always pleased how easily PostScript files open on Macs)!

bshimmin

11 years agodiscuss

One click to download, two double-clicks (one for the gzip, one for the PS) to open on my Mac.

bshimmin

11 years agodiscuss

Or use refinements.

bshimmin

12 years agodiscuss

HipChat is significantly cheaper and purports to offer video chat (didn't work for us the one time we tried it).

I too generally find Slack to be a more appealing user experience, though along with others I find the advantages over, say, Skype plus email to be fairly nugatory.

Because I work on a bunch of different teams for different organisations, I currently have open Slack, HipChat, Skype, and Apple's Messages, and I have to use Google Hangouts (which periodically completely kills Chrome for me) for a daily standup. I sort of miss those happy days when you could just use Adium for everything.

bshimmin

13 years agodiscuss

The pardon does not imply the law (the Labouchere Amendment, 1885) was wrong, but the Sexual Offences Act 1967 which repealed it certainly does (or did).