tygorius · HackerTrans

tygorius

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10년 전discuss

I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can take those people's votes for granted." Former President Bill Clinton thought that strategy was insane but his concerns were dismissed. Sic transit gloria pooheads.

Realistically, Clinton was always going to carry California. If she had made fewer fundraising trips to the west coast and more campaign visits to the Rust Belt states (without calling people there "deplorables") she might have won convincingly. Instead we got an electoral college message from the Rust Belt telling CA, MA, & NY that despite their population advantage they don't get to dictate for the rest of the country. That's pretty much the way it's supposed to work.

10년 전discuss

The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution -- arguably a moot issue given that by the time New York voted 9 other states had already settled the issue.

Casting the arguments as propaganda in favor of slavery seems a reach.

10년 전discuss

The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers.

A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.

10년 전discuss

It's funny, we expect "undo" features in our applications these days, why shouldn't the OS and indeed the entire machine's state be treated the same way?

I used to think that virtualized Windows guests would eliminate the need for wine. I have XP and Windows 7 VMs around precisely for games or the few applications I use that aren't wine-friendly. Over time my usage of wine has dropped to the occasional Play on Linux game.

But part of what makes those VMs so robust is that 1) they're normally disconnected from the internet, and 2) I have developed a habit of saving my work to a shared folder so that I can reset a machine's state to a few days previous at the slightest sign of trouble. For applications that require access to the internet, however, wine may be our last, best hope of opting out of the Cortana Empire.

Historical aside: Before VM usage took off Robert Shingledecker and friends followed that reset logic to an extreme with the Tiny Core Linux project -- every time you start your machine you load a known-good kernel and apps into RAM, use the machine, and then let anything other than your data derez at the end of the session. You can get pretty good performance with that approach on older hardware that can't support virtualization. The downside is that your application choices are limited and dated when compared to mainstream Linux distributions.

10년 전discuss

I too stopped using 'jj' because of the short delay. FWIW I've found ';l' to work well as a replacement. (For a trial period I had them both mapped to <esc> in my vimrc file.) ';l' seems a natural, but distinctive, rolling motion for me and I've never had it conflict with real-world text entry.

10년 전discuss

As I mentioned in another reply here, I'd suggest you ignore the siren call of "most recent" and just pretend it's five years ago. Use the Squeak by Example book with it's associated version of Squeak to get a basic understanding of the environment and the object system's resources.

If you prefer, there's nothing wrong with trying Pharo or one of the commercial Smalltalks available with free, non-commercial licenses. Indeed, the only variety I'd warn against is GNU Smalltalk, which treats Smalltalk as just another file-oriented member of the GNU toolchain. That approach totally misses what made Smalltalk so revolutionary for its time: a rich environment for interacting with and exploring an object system.

10년 전discuss

Some of the cool kids at Smalltalk High forked Squeak to create Pharo back in 2008 and that's where a lot of the recent developer energy has gone. But rapid development has its costs: Pharo 5.0 has just come out while the site offers the "latest" Pharo by Example [1] with a 2009 copyright date. It also offers a link to a Pharo 1.x image you can download so the programming environment and book text will match up. (In fairness, there is also an online group effort to update the text to match the 5.0 release [2], but how successful that is you'll have to judge for yourself.)

I'm slightly biased toward the original Squeak group, but there the situation is at least as bad. Even though Squeak 5.1 is the most recent software, the Squeak by Example book (same author) is another case where you're best served by downloading an older version that matches the book.

That said, using a book with an older version isn't a bad choice. I used to have several wine bottles on my linux box for different vintages of Squeak. Among other things, this allowed me to immediately contrast two Squeak environments to see what, if anything, had changed in the last few years for a particular aspect of the systems.

Personally, I'd suggest people first start by pretending it's five years ago and trying the Squeak by Example [3] book and corresponding Squeak image. Once you understand the basics of that material, load the latest Squeak and start exploring. You'll be able to find the occasional enlightening video on specific Smalltalk topics by searching YouTube for Lawson English and jarober videos, but I'd strongly suggest the old school approach of skimming/reading the material of the Squeak Beginner's mailing list [4] and subscribing to it. I still get the digests in my mailbox and it was interesting to read the progress over the last few months of one beginner's project to manipulate imported spreadsheet information. Some of the answers provided clues to environment resources that even some of the pros had forgotten about.

[1] http://files.pharo.org/books/pharo-by-example/

[2] https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExa...

[3] http://squeakbyexample.org/

[4] http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Beginners-f107673.html

10년 전discuss

Well, it's restricted to educational uses, so I don't anticipate a lot of pressure from Indian textbook authors on this one. The specific case seems to stem from professors suggesting students read various sections of different texts and the copying service preparing collections of those reading assignments for various courses.

It's a broader interpretation than the US version of Fair Use, obviously, but it seems to me the High Court judge had a good point that copyright must serve the public's interests as well as the publisher's.

10년 전discuss

One point worth noting on this new release: there's finally an up-to-date official Windows package.

11년 전discuss

  No other text editor has as many developers working on
  plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in
  another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some 
  very popular, very supported, very documented plugin 
  you can use.

And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? I'm a Steve Litt fan, but Vim Outliner isn't even in the same league as org mode.

As a Vim user of many years I still believe it to be superior to emacs when it comes to editing text. That said, emacs is a vastly superior programming environment. And like many people I find org mode to be indispensible.

Happily, these things aren't either/or situations. I still use Vim for quick text editing tasks, but for other matters evil+org mode lets me have the best of both worlds.

Edit: typos

11년 전discuss

This is one of those historic artifacts, like the Mother of All Demos, that really brings home the sense of possibilities that people had for computers a couple of generations back.

Back in 1995 MIT had a symposium with computing luminaries talking about the impact his essay had on them. When I realized that people like Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Alan Kay gave talks, I realized this was someone that I should have known about. Videos of the presentations are still up at the Internet Archive and Engelbart's site has a list of the relevant links: http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....

Engelbart's site also has a PDF of his marked up copy of the essay from his SRI days.

11년 전discuss

In chess below the master level tactics will dominate. How do you get really good at tactics? Not just by playing lots of chess, but by consistently devoting effort to studying tactics via printed collections of positions and/or tactics training software.

As to becoming great, after years of running chess camps for young players IM Greg Shahade formed his somewhat famous hypothesis:

   There is one very reliable sign to how much potential and how strong a young chess 
   player is or is going to be, and it’s probably not what most people would think. 

   It’s not how quickly a student solves tactics or sees combinations (although 
   these two things always seem to be correlated with the main point of this article).
   It’s not the student’s positional understanding. It’s not even how much they 
   claim to study chess.

   Instead it is “How likely is this student to recognize a famous game/position
   and know the players involved?” [1]

As one data point illustrating Shadade's point, the current world champion seems to be a whiz at what ordinary people would consider chess trivia. [2] Carlsen's comment:

   "I like chess, I like chess books. You'd be surprised – I do read 
   as much chess as I can."

[1] http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12551/745 [2] http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12985/806/

Editing for formating: how do block quotes work here?

11년 전discuss

Harvey is really a force for good when it comes to making programming and computer science topics accessible to more people. In addition to SICP and SNAP work, he was also a force behind UCB Logo and wound up writing a three volume introduction to computer science for high schoolers. People can read them online at https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

12년 전discuss

Well, by that logic the record studios were proxies for musicians. Sorry, not buying that argument.

If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I were obligated by contract to stay with a publisher on the outs with Amazon. But arguing that Amazon's endgame is to put him out of business seems a stretch. We're still in the early stages of the ebook publishing disruption and I suspect that as with music, direct commercial channels between producers and consumers is the future.

12년 전discuss

I was nodding in agreement right up until the point he showed charts of 17 "first-world" nations and started torturing data:

In terms of pretty much any metric you'd care to name — I'm showing you homicide and infant mortality rates, but the same pattern holds for incarceration rates, life expectancy, STDs, teen pregnancy — a whole slew of variables I don't have time to show you — the US is consistently the worst of the lot.

First, 17 countries? WTF? Why is he deliberately limiting the sample to predominantly caucasian countries? The US certainly has its faults, but it comes in at #3 on the UN's Human Development Index. Why not show data from the top 20 nations on that list? Is there really a problem with finding "religiosity" data for Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore? (Ireland comes in at #7 in the latest ranking while the UK is #27, behind Slovenia, Spain, and Italy.) It appears he's citing a 2009 Gregory Paul paper that argues the US is a more secular nation than a 2008 Baylor study indicated, which has me scratching my head.

His text refers to infant mortality while showing a chart of child mortality. Not a mistake I'd expect from a biologist, but even Homer nods on occasion. Alas, immediately after stating the US is the worst of the lot in measurements including life expectancy in some manner because of its popular religiosity, he makes the case that religiosity is a social survival trait and shows a chart indicating that religious communes last longer than secular ones. At which point I found myself wondering exactly what point he was trying to make. Atheism is the way forward even though religious nations are more likely to survive? Which is a pity, because I quite agree with his larger points on government intrusions on our privacy.

(Edited for clarity.)

12년 전discuss

The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with black's side of it.) Understanding which types of positions you prefer takes experience, and while you're gaining that experience at the lower levels tactical skill can dominate. So it can seem like knowing the "book" moves for a bunch of openings is important when in fact the problem is that your opponent has better tactical skills than you or perhaps you have trouble judging a position and developing a plan. That's why specializing in a few openings can be helpful -- you get lots of practice with similar middlegame positions at the same time you limit the number of lines you have to deal with.

Now if you like open games such as the King's or Evans Gambits (i.e., fashions of 100+ years ago) things will get tactically bloody pretty quickly and so gaining a knowledge of where the booby traps are will be prudent. But if your taste runs to semi-open games, say, you can limit your opening study to a relatively small number. I happen to like the Dutch Stonewall formation as black for example, and the precise move order for getting into a position I'm comfortable with doesn't require a lot of memorization.

Happily we live in a time when computers can not only entertain us in chess but also help us with learning chess. You can improve your tactical skills by studying a tactical positions card deck in Anki for example. Or you can work on a particular opening by setting the computer to always start games from a particular position. You can use that same starting position trick to train yourself in endgame play. The important thing is to find ways to keep the game fun while you improve your play.

12년 전discuss

1) Android is a Linux, it's just not marketed as such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#...

2) If you're someone like me who drops in to distrowatch.com occasionally, you might think a tweaked version of Puppy or Tiny Core would be more appropriate for older computers. And you'd be right in terms of hardware requirements, but...

3) Android is supported by Skynet, er, Google with massive resources. The installed base in the US is north of 80M and it has support for 47 languages.

So it's really the answer to that classic question, "what's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" If I were in the project manager's shoes Android would be at the top of my list as well.

12년 전discuss

As has been pointed out, you've got the sequence reversed. Raskin was on the original Macintosh team first. His ideas for the project included keeping the cost down. Things like using an 8-bit CPU (the 6809?) rather than the still-pricey 68000, a character-based display rather than bit-mapped, etc. He later created his own company and used those ideas in what became the Canon Cat product -- something that looked like a shrunken ADM-3A terminal. It kept all your documents on a floppy disk eschewing normal filesystem in favor of a Forth-based image system (not too unlike Smalltalk images).

Unfortunately he was convinced his ideas for interfaces should be protected by patents, virtually guaranteeing that things like his "leap" keys would never be adopted.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was a tremendous sense of possibility for what computers could do for us on the personal level. I think Nelson, like Alan Kay, is worth revisiting on that basis: reminding us of possibilities, not so much who was right and wrong or who was first to think of X.

13년 전discuss

>> Dave's writing was all about him. > So what? > ... not everybody saw what he wrote as particularly negative towards Marissa, and many (most) of us got that the real point he was making was contained at the very end of the original post, and were quite content to argue that point.

I disagree. I worked as a magazine editor for many years and I was a little shocked at the end, because the "real point" seemed like a sudden left turn out of nowhere. In my opinion his piece would have been more compelling if he'd left out the Marissa Mayer grievance bit and simply used the other story, the one of his post-acquisition realization that his contract naming him the Mac Strategy Guy didn't actually mean anyone would listen to him.

As written the "real point" was obscured. And I see the same pattern in his response post: Relating some story about being misunderstood and unappreciated followed by a face-saving rationale about a larger point. The intellectual points aren't about him, but the illustrative examples all scream "Can you believe these fools wouldn't listen to me?"

In the case of Mayer in particular it seemed a case of exhuming the horse skeleton to give it the proper public thrashing it deserved. I mean, he had one phone-conference with her a decade back and he can now see into her soul and know "At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think"? Seriously?

13년 전discuss

The adverse effects of frictionless computing are all around us. Email is the first example that comes to mind. It is simply too easy to send email messages, so we all send too many (I am famously guilty of this) and receive too many. It is also too easy to add recipients.

My first thought: 'Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

Then at the end I discovered the author is the editor-in-chief of CACM. <Sigh>